Amazon.com.au:Customer reviews: Klara and the Sun: Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize

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Clever and Unusual

Reviewed in Australia on 28 April 2021

The notion of Artificial Intelligence or the AF (artificial friend) is explored in Ishiguro's latest novel, Klara and the Sun. Through the eyes of Klara (AF), we see the world, her wishes, dreams, and developing relationships with her new owner, family, and friends. This is an unusual novel, in so far as it delves into the questions of what it means to be human and what it means to actually Love.

We begin the tale at the AF shop amongst other AF's on display to be sold. Klara and her fellow AF, Rosie, are standing side by side at the store's back. Occasionally the Manager moves Klara to the front window on a striped couch to gain a better opportunity to be seen and hopefully purchased. It is here we see the outside world through Klara's eyes. The crosswalk where many people cross the road, and the many taxis that fill her vision.

Klara has the innocence of a child though the intelligence or potential intelligence of an adult. What sets Klara apart from the other AF's is her keen observational abilities and her unrelenting curiosity about the behavior and motivations of the human's around her.

Finally one day while Klara and Rosie are positioned in the front window, Klara observes a woman and a little girl get out of a taxi. While the woman speaks to another human, the little girl approaches the window and asks Klara questions through the glass. All Klara can do is smile and nod her head, but a bond is created between them on their first meeting. From that day, Klara wants to be the AF to the little girl who we come to know as Josie. After a few mishaps and challenges, Josie and her mother buy Klara, and she is shipped to their home in the country. It's at this point we discover that the little girl is suffering from a serious illness.

What I found striking about Klara was her deep-seated sensitivity and overall kindness. This AF always thinks about other people's feelings, whether AI or human, above her own. One may argue this AF is programmed that way, but as mentioned, this AF is unique. Although it is her job to be the friend of her owner Josie, Klara takes this friendship to its limits to ensure a positive survival for the child and everyone around her.

As you would expect the Sun is a major character in this tale. Because the AF's are solar-powered, the sun is a source of life for them, and as Klara realizes, the sun is a source of life for all living things. This is a key theme throughout the novel.

The questions of what it means to be human have been explored in many novels in the past. For example, Phillip K. Dick's, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, can loosely fit into this category. But Ishiguro takes this notion a step further by illustrating that true love, sacrifice for another, and the layered depths of the human heart are the things that truly make us human.

Once turning the last page, I didn't know whether to be sad, hopeful or both, yet the images, thoughts, and feelings of the tale remained with me for many days afterward.

7 people found this helpful

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Satisfied Reader

Not my up of tea but can see the allure

Reviewed in Australia on 8 October 2021

Klara and the Sun is a lesson in human emotion. Throughout the book you're seeing the world through Klara's naive eyes. Love, motherhood, childhood, and the hard choices a family makes are all seen and interpreted through Klara's robot mind. Some things are left for the reader to interpret but everything else can be inferred from each experience. The book wraps up nicely and leaves you with a lot of messages. The one I took from it was that change is constant throughout life but you need people beside you to get through it.

I thought the book was well written but the author chose to expand and heavily detail out pointless things. Then when something impact up came along, it just felt rushed. It made reading a little tedious. Luckily it wasn't an overly long book. Definitely not my normal read but a welcome change.

One person found this helpful

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Craig Middleton

Clever and Unusual

Reviewed in Australia on 28 April 2021

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7 people found this helpful

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Nick_Melbourne

A simple tale that needs some realism

Reviewed in Australia on 30 March 2021

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It is a simple tale about Klara, an 'Artificial Friend' - a humanoid robot with consciousness. Due to a lack of knowledge and understanding about people and the world, she subscribes to some endearing primitive beliefs, much like early humans did thousands of years ago. There are some underlying themes about pollution and human behaviour in the book that do not really come through for me. The book is a pleasant read but I would have preferred it to be a little more realistic. For example, we get some intriguing hints about Klara's vision but what the reader and Klara discover about her internal structure at a crucial stage in the book is plain ridiculous.

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R A Rose

A thought provoking tale about how we might use and AI in the future.

Reviewed in Australia on 24 March 2021

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Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favourite novelists. Each of his novels has been so different from the others in setting.
The central character Klara is also the narrator, and we go on her journey with her as she is bought for her first human home and as she observes the humans, and their moral and emotional issues, around her.

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Susan

Beautiful writing, elegant story

Reviewed in Australia on 13 April 2021

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I loved this, elegant and sustaining, a modern fairy tale for troubled times. Beautiful imagery of a post modern environment where business and industry are at odds with human frailty.

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Archy

Sometimes fascinating, sometimes dull

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 March 2021

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Tales of androids / robots / Artificial Friends (in this case) showing empathy and perception towards humans are nothing new. Philip K Dick's We can build you, with its Abraham Lincoln simulacra, was half a century back, for example. Being Ishiguru this is dealt with in far more literary prose, but it still plods along in quite a dull fashion much of the time.

Plotwise, the narrator is Klara, an AF (Artificial Friend) to the teenage Josie, who lives an isolated life, aside from neighbour and potential boyfriend Rick, out in the country. She's is suffering from an illness whose cause is not really made specific. In fact in this dystopian future quite a number of things are not quite clear for much of the book. (What, for example, is the pollution spewing Cooting Machine?) Anyway, Klara's job is to observe and learn about Klara, and this she does, though her observations do become rather tiresome after a while. And I'm afraid the huge error she makes in regard to the Sun is simply, for me, not believable for one so otherwise intelligent. And the anti-climatic ending, while poignant, I found unsatisfying.

I kept going with this because it was Kazuo Ishiguru and does contain some fine passages, but it was a bit disappointing really.

90 people found this helpful

Dr B.

A great disappointment

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 March 2021

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Having read The Remains of the Day, I had high expectations of this book. But I was very much disappointed. It is written through the eyes of the Alpha robot and the language is very simplistic and naive. The theme that runs through the book is the attempted rescue, by the robot, of the robot's teenage companion from a slowly approaching death, supposedly through the agency of the sun, which seems to have some almost mystical significance for the robot. It all seems quite implausible. Perhaps because the robot is narrating the story, there is little character development amongst the main characters. I thought it might be an allegorical tale, but I was left wondering at the end what points the story was trying to make. The impression I was left with was, "Emperor's New Clothes".

23 people found this helpful

Very good writer writes poor work of speculative fiction

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 September 2021

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One of the greatest challenges for any writer must be to persuade the reader to suspend disbelief. For the wrier of speculative fiction, that challenge is even greater, given the fact that his/her starting point is, by definition, fantastical. That, for me, is where Ishiguro falls down as an author. When it comes to realist fiction, he is fully deserving of his Nobel prize. Remains of the Day is an undoubted classic, and I have a particular love for his short story collection, Nocturnes. On the other hand, I just couldn’t buy into the central concept of Never Let Me Go - organs being harvested from cloned humans, and I found Klara and the Sun even less engaging. At least with the earlier book, there is a single big indigestible idea, here there are frequent nudges which took me out of the story

The story is told from the viewpoint of Klara, a solar powered robot designed as a companion for children and adolescents. We first meet her in a department store where she is reaching conclusions about the world by observing it through the shop window. Right from the start there are aspects of the novel which snap the strings suspending credulity. They may be small things, but a staggeringly complex solar powered robot can potentially become dangerous if its charge falls, yet no one thought to insert a mains charger. More pertinently, a solar powered robot sophisticated enough to under stand emotions doesn’t know what the sun is and builds a religion around it. Without that whacking great anomaly, the book wouldn’t exist. As an aside, if you’d like a more engaging tale about robots drawing the wrong conclusions from their observations and consequently developing a religion, i’d recommend Asimov’s short story Reason.

Eventually Klara is chosen by the adolescent Josie and goes to live with her, where she has to deal with a hostile housekeeper, Josie’s mystery illness, the fraught relationship with an estranged father, and a burgeoning relationship with a less privileged boy. The things the second section asks the reader to swallow include a genetic treatment with a significant probability of proving fatal being legally administered to young people with the full consent of their parents, and parents planning the replacement of their children in the event of the therapy going wrong.

So, this didn’t work for me as a work of speculative fiction primarily because I just didn’t find people’s actions credible. I’ve said this before in reviews, a fantastical story can work if it remains true to its own internal logic and people’s reactions to what is happening around them continue to be credible. It is on these points , particularly the latter, that Klara and the Sun fails. I found myself thinking about Animal Farm. Why am I prepared to accept talking farm animals but not the ever-so humble Klara? I think that comes down to the fact that Orwell’s work is so obviously an allegory, a satirical fantasy (Ishiguro’s realistic style works against him here), and because the actions of the animals are credible within their own context.

Does, then, Klara work as an allegory? Well if that is the intention, its a bit thin. The messages seem to be that pushy parents can damage their children, that private education is divisive, and that young love can be profound but transient.

To be fair there were two points where I was ready to give in because they were too preposterous, but where Ishiguro proved to be cleverer than I gave him creit. Firstly, nobody ever asks Klara why she is doing what she does. If they did, they’d tell her she was being ridiculous and whole chunks of the plot would fall apart. Secondly a professional engineer appears to help Klara to commit criminal damage toa piece of civil engineering machinery. Eventually, when seen from a perspective other than Klara’s, the former is result of someone knowingly humouring her, the latter involves someone working to a completely different agenda.

Overall, I didn’t find the plot particularly well put together. Klara is in a store. Klara gets bought. Klara (and the reader) learns a bunch of stuff about her new family and the world they inhabit. There is a stonking great coincidence which resolves the main jeopardy of the book, then everything just Peters out.

A great deal of sound and fury, signifying less than things which Asimov and Philip K Dick said over 50 years ago. This is a not very good book by a very good author.

9 people found this helpful

James Driver

Stunning

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 March 2021

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The best books stay with you forever. Ishiguro gently unwraps his compelling tale in his usual meticulous prose and, little by little, reveals fragments of the world that Josie, Klara and Rick inhabit. As is so often the case with Ishiguro, the frame of the story - although offering an intriguing glimpse into a dystopian future - never overwhelms his intricate and heart-rending examination of love, ambition, anger, fear, faith, forgiveness and hope. The ending is even more moving than the finale of ‘Remains of the Day’, and Klara emerges as one of his richest and most realised characters. Before reading this, the new books I have enjoyed the most over the past few months have been Graham Swift’s ‘Here we are’ and Francis Spufford’s ‘Perpetual Light’. Both were excellent, but this occupies the rarefied higher ground worthy of the winner of a Nobel prize. Faber, too, deserve high praise for producing a hardback that in its design, printing and construction, matches the superb quality of Ishiguro’s writing.

5 people found this helpful

Henry Tegner

Yet another great novel from my favourite author

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 June 2021

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Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of eight novels and one collection of short stories. He has won numerous awards including the Whitbread prize for ‘An Artist of the Floating World’, the Booker prize for ‘The Remains of the Day’ and in 2017 the Nobel Prize in Literature.
I have read all his novels. Ishiguro is without doubt one of my favourite authors. I share the view of the Nobel committee that ‘in novels of great emotional force, [he] has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’. Certainly this ‘illusory sense of connection’ is most prevalent in ‘Klara and the Sun’.
The world that Ishiguro depicts in this novel is seen through the eyes of an ‘Artificial Friend’ (AF), one of many similar androids that have been developed and manufactured as companions for children in what seems to be a dystopic world of the near future. The concept of a world view described and narrated by a creature that is not human may take a little while to grasp fully and I may be a little forward in suggesting that herein lies a problem for many readers: the world as it is drawn is seen to be defective, unreal if you like and not equating at all with the way that we – human beings – perceive it. But Klara’s senses are not human senses. Some human senses, indeed, she does not possess – a sense of smell for example. She sees, but in quite different ways from that which you or I do – images often become ‘partitioned’ into ‘boxes’.
One might be tempted to wonder if what is being described is the real world at all. Or possibly a ‘dream world’ as in another of Ishiguro’s novels ‘The Unconsoled’. But no – this is clearly ‘Earth’ and not some alien planet or this world but in a distant future. There are references to California and England. There are fleeting references to Christianity. The name ‘Jesus’ appears five times – on every occasion as an expletive. There is a single reference to Christmas. Telephone calls seem to be made entirely from hand-held computer devices referred to as ‘oblongs’. The car seems still to be the favoured means of transport. The picture of the world, though, is incomplete – things are hinted at but left unexplained. But this has always been Ishiguro’s tendency and for me, at least, one of the greatest attributes and attractions of his writing. I suspect that Ishiguro does not in fact have the explanation or answers for most of these conundrums, but rather he leaves his readers to make their own projections. There is a sort of simplicity in Klara’s universe. It is full of gaps that we ourselves are left to fill in. For some this may result in a fundamental dissatisfaction while for others – myself included – this represents a great strength of the narrative.
May I divert for a moment: across the road from the room where I am now sitting at my desk there are some workmen - ‘overhaul men’ – occupied with some noisy machinery. I think immediately – ‘Cootings machine?’ So what is this thing, this anathema of the Sun’s? That is for me to speculate upon, not for the author of the tale to tell me. It has to do with pollution – I should say ‘Pollution’ as the first letter of the word is capitalised twenty-one of the twenty three times that it appears. So pollution becomes an entity, almost a person and, hand in hand with the Cootings machine, an antithesis to the Sun itself.
The world we are seeing is Klara’s. Not ours. And a very strange one it is.

One person found this helpful

Peter Hankins

What’s the point?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 April 2021

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What was Ishiguro trying to do with this unconvincing robot tale?

An author can use robots in lots of ways. Too often they are just another monster, the threatening and unnatural beings who excitingly menace the protagonist or the whole of humanity. Very rarely an author explores how the robot mind might work – difficult, because we really have little idea of how a humanoid robot might achieve conscious thought. Often the robot merely thinks like a naïve and/or over-logical human. (It never falls into a trance or comes out with inexplicable nonsense, the way real-life computers sometimes do.) Some of the best stories use the robot as a means of reflecting on the human condition – the film Blade Runner, for example (you might claim Frankenstein was similar in that respect). I really don’t know what Klara, Ishiguro’s companion robot in this near-future story is for. (Spoilers for low.)

She is like a naïve human in many respects. Somehow solar-powered, she thinks of the Sun the way a human might a god, invoking its power and help. Her view of the world, if I understand correctly, is split into frames, though she has a view across the frames, so you’d think a good programmer would easily iron that issue out. Her mind, however, is neither interestingly strange in itself nor an illuminating analogue of the human. Her story, as the companion of Josie, a girl made ill by the genetic improvement therapy now common, is ultimately inconsequential except for what it tells us about human reactions to robots. The trouble is, what it tells us is inconsistent and unconvincing.

Perhaps the least believable thing is the way people go along with Klara. She hatches a mad scheme to help her family based on her weird ideas about the sun. They willingly help her execute this plan, which is partly nutty superstition and partly criminal, without ever demanding to know what she’s up to or being given any explanation. At some points they profess an extraordinary readiness to accept Klara emotionally as an actual family member; but once Josie has gone to college, they deposit her, still fully conscious, in a dump.

I said the story is set in the near future, but some things are odd. Klara is bought from a big, old-fashioned store in the city centre - they still exist? People seem to be using tablets but calling them ‘oblongs’ for some reason. Most of the kids have had their minds enhanced by genetic therapy, but they talk and act like dim-witted normal ones, actually less sophisticated in their speech and behaviour than the one kid who missed out on the therapy. Maybe that is fairly believable after all.

It’s a mildly engaging story with some thought-provoking passages, but I don’t know what we are to take away at the end of it.

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