Klara and the Sun
The titular character in Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel Klara and the Sun is an Artificial Friend (AF), a type of android built for the companionship of genetically-enhanced children. Much like Mr. Ishiguro’s previous novel Never Let Me Go, this story’s unspecified place and time are much like our own, save for light speculative elements. We follow Klara’s journey from the store window where she looked out into the world waiting to be bought, to her home life with Josie, a “lifted” but sickly teenager. It’s a moving and meditative work about friendship, loneliness, and unexpectedly, faith. Mild spoilers follow.
The story is presented from Klara’s point of view, which allows the reader to plumb Klara’s emotions; her character voice is curious and childlike, making the poignant moments in the story land even harder. Mr. Ishiguro is so masterful at writing first-person, and he once again succeeds with this book. Klara comes across as a fully realized being, even though for much of the story she is still someone coming into being.
The most striking parts of the book deal with loneliness and isolation, the pain of being set apart from others by circumstance: Josie, the sickly only child; Chrissie, her divorced mother, still grieving a devastating loss; Rick, Josie’s best friend and neighbor, who is not a “lifted” child. Klara, for her part, rarely shares her inner life with the humans around her, mainly because of her programming, but also because of doubt about her place in the world. She only truly verbalizes what she feels when she talks to the Sun, the source of an AF’s energy and the entity that Klara has begun to view as an all-powerful being.
Overall, I really enjoyed this tender and quiet book; Mr. Ishiguro is one of my favorite authors, and I hesitated to pick up Klara and the Sun right away for fear of disappointment. The fear clearly was unfounded. It has classic science fiction elements that I love—the android learning about connection and the human world, the perils of genetic enhancements, etc.—and asks questions that SF stories are invested in raising, if not answering. Klara and the Sun is SF, and though I don’t think Mr. Ishiguro is considered or considers himself to be an SF author, this work is one of the more emotionally affecting SF stories I’ve read lately.
Industry pros and readers might disagree, placing this book on general fiction shelves and calling it literary fiction, as though that negated the story’s solid strand of SF DNA. Worse, they might do so to denigrate genre. Once in a while the “genre vs. literary” discourse erupts online (seemingly with increasing frequency), and the conversation is both exhausting and empty. This book is one I’ll point to as a recent example among many others, and say: One is not better than the other; a work can be both. Stop this silliness.
Other things I’ve read lately:
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris is a tense exploration of the unbearable antiblackness of publishing, told through the experiences of an editorial assistant at a major New York publishing house. It has a lot of lighter, funnier moments, but also a consistently menacing background hum of “Something is not right with this place” kinda like Get Out.
Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide is a near-future SF tale set in a fictional Chinese island called Silicon Isle, where the world’s electronics waste is dumped. There, a colorful cast of characters collide, including an American seeking to invest in the island, his returning expatriate interpreter, gang lords that control the island, and Mimi, a waste worker on whose hands the fate of the island lies. It reminded me a lot of The Windup Girl, and I devoured it just as much.
Some books are classics for a reason, and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier definitely earns the title. This gothic thriller, told through the POV of the unnamed second wife of a rich Englishman, is about the perils of her moving into the role left behind by the universally beloved first wife, the title character. The writing is so evocative, fitting the location and the twisty plot, and it’s definitely become a new fave.
Image credits: Cover via Penguin Random House/Alfred A. Knopf; android photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash