Klara and the Sun

Hardcover, 303 pages

English language

Published July 18, 2021 by Faber & Faber.

ISBN:
978-0-571-36487-9
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4 stars (6 reviews)

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

15 editions

Surprisingly underwhelming

3 stars

  • I listened to this as an audiobook, my first checked out from Libby.
  • I liked the narrator's voice and felt it was generally quite well to meet the range of voices for the characters.
  • The book took too long to build up and the ending was too abstract and fell apart.
  • I also generally didn't like or understand why the characters were selected with the traits they had.
  • Some of the dialogue felt well played, while others felt jarring
  • In the end, my favorite part is Klara's relationship with the sun, which goes for the most part unexplored with other characters. This book has vague environmentalist themes.
  • many of the tropes that show up in this book I feel, have been better expressed in other works I've read.
  • I think this book would be fine for a middle schooler as it goes generally without much complexity with its readability. Though …

Ishiguro is a modern master

5 stars

I love everything I've ever read by Kazuo Ishiguro. His prose isn't filled with vocab words and doesn't ever even feel anything but mundane, and yet somehow, every single line is poetry. This book did not disappoint. Lovely, loving, heart-rending... and also exploring the very real potential futures of artificial intelligence, machine learning, friendship, and disposability.

Subjects

  • Fiction
  • Robots
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Dystopian
  • Science Fiction
  • Chronic Illness
  • Disability