Book Review – Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

I took a while, but I finally understood what this story was about.

Or at least, I know what I took from this after the final scene. I loved Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go. I read it after falling in love with the movie, and plan to read Remains of the Day at some stage.

Klara and the Sun didn’t hold my interest and I put it down halfway to read another book.

At the heart of this novel is Klara, our narrator.

And she really is the character with most heart, even though she is an android. She is purchased as an AF (artificial friend) for Josie, a sick young girl who is not expected to live to her adult years. Josie has a stern mother, a male best friend and neighbour, and a father who is no longer part of her nuclear family. And she has Klara.

Klara views the world from her own limited experience, believing the sun is an entity because it is her source of power. Or as she says, her nourishment. Klara also believes everyone is ‘nourished’ by the sun. This contributes to the only real plot in this story.

The tale is told in six parts, many very long.

And while Ishiguro’s storytelling style is beautiful, I felt this could have been shortened by twenty-five percent. This is because we are given scenes featuring the other characters which are more about telling us about them, rather than giving us a compelling forward-moving plot.

Which is what, I believe, was the point of this story. Klara is the most loyal and trustworthy character in this novel. And she is the most naive given she is mostly treated as a machine unless the others need her when they have trouble connecting with the human characters.

So, in short, this is about – disconnection.

None of the human characters have developed close loving bonds with each other. Klara believes she has. And there allusions to the newer model of artificial friends who are more human than Klara, but they are treated with suspicion because, as we find in the first part of this novel, they band together and cast judgement on inferior models.

There is a lot to say about sections of society which are disconnecting. And it’s quite believable in a story set in the future that the human characters never learnt how to connect while growing up in a digital age.

And this is the magic of Kazuo Ishiguro.

He explores what it means to be human in his stories. But for me, the absence of a forward moving tale made me feel as aimless as Klara.

Three stars.