Klara and the Sun Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Kazuo Ishiguro (Author), Sura Siu (Narrator), Faber & Faber (Publisher)

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Longlisted for the Booker prize 2021

The sun always has ways to reach us.

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, 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?

Listening Length

10 hours and 16 minutes
Author

Kazuo Ishiguro
Narrator

Sura Siu
Audible release date

2 March 2021
Language

English
Publisher

Faber & Faber
ASIN

B08BPK1R59
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	10 hours and 16 minutes
Author	Kazuo Ishiguro
Narrator	Sura Siu
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com.au Release Date	02 March 2021
Publisher	Faber & Faber
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B08BPK1R59
Best Sellers Rank	1,537 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) 19 in Coming of Age Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) 74 in Literary Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) 154 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)

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Craig Middleton

Clever and Unusual

Reviewed in Australia on 28 April 2021

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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

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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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Danger Mouse

A beautiful and poignant dystopian novel

Reviewed in Australia on 26 July 2021

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Klara and the Sun is the eighth novel of this very accomplished Nobel Prize and Booker Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. Like most of his other novels he conjures the trick of using deceptively simple language to overlay a deeper and richer meaning. Often the little details left out allow the reader speculate beyond what is told.

The novel holds true to the authors belief that he has secretly re-written the same story. In this idea, the novel is arguably most similar to his novel “Never let me go” that also mused upon what it is to be not quite human. However in this novel, genetic clones raised to harvest organs for medical treatments is replaced with artificial intelligence or what the book calls AFs.

Klara, our narrator, is an AF (Artificial Friend) designed to give company to lonely children in an isolated, polluted and angst ridden future. Through Klara’s keen perception the world in the novel gradually reveals itself. Children are “lifted” implying that they are genetically altered to improve their aptitude and chance of success in life. Classes are divided between the genetic haves and have not and even this lifting process is not without potentially fatal consequences.

Although the story is slow paced, the reveals are well worth while and Klara’s endearing and innocent observations of the world create a beautiful and poignant foil, juxtaposed against a grim and sinister reality that lurks just below the surface.

Like “Never let me go” this feels like a YA dystopian sci-fi novel but is so much more. Only a truly impressive author could pull this off.

2 people found this helpful

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Robert Hitchins

Makes you think

Reviewed in Australia on 16 March 2021

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Easy to read, lyrical at times, with a fantasy element. Mr Ishiguro's genius lies in what is left out, between the lines if you prefer, which challenges the reader to think long after he or she has finished reading.
A philosophical sequel in some ways to Never Let Me Go, but unique in it's own right. As always with Mr I, a work to make you think.
The pressure to deliver in his first major work since winning the Nobel Prize and getting knighted for his literary efforts must have been immense. The author rises to the challenge. While probably not his finest work, it’s not far away from it. Klara is one of his most endearing characters.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Different

Reviewed in Australia on 23 May 2021

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From the very start Kazou Ishiguro introduces the reader to unfamiliar ground, concepts of ‘not-human’ intelligence, & even more, feelings……how do you relate to a ‘feeling’ doll/machine/???
Fine job of weaving through relationships, prejudices, fears, attraction, humour, you name it, it’s there, THEN there’s the end, expected, unexpected, inevitable…….you’ll have to read it to find out.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

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

M.H.

An okay read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 March 2021

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I am glad that I read this novel, although I am really not sure what the hype was about. It was okay. I enjoyed the first part of the book and the perspective of Klara (a robot) relaying her sights and impressions of life outside the shop window of a busy high street store. I couldn't emotionally connect to any of the characters and found them lifeless, empty and superficial. This could be intentional, and reflecting the narrative viewpoint of the robot (i.e. the limited ability of a robot to fully connect with humans), but I felt this world, and its inhabitants were flat, devoid of real emotions, so that I was fully detached by the end. I wasn't challenged by the themes, and if I was a 13 year old once more, I may have felt the same way. With saying that, it has now been several days since I have finished the novel and my mind does keep returning to it. I cannot think about the sun in the same way, so I guess it has made an impression on me. I just wanted a bit more: realism, detail, explanation of the dystopian world it was set in; character depth, more explicit moral discussion. I feel somewhat empty. I honestly feel gutted not to love this book like some other readers have done.

69 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Stunning

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 March 2021

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As expected, a profound and beautiful work from one of my favourite authors.I don't think you can read anything of his without feeling changed even in some small way. I can't really do it justice with a long and rambling review and I generally think it's best to go into novels like this without a detailed plot outline. Discover it for yourself, you'll be glad you did.

61 people found this helpful

Marcus

Emotionally gripping and thoughtful -- a masterpiece

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 March 2021

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All of Ishiguro's novels are compelling and emotional, but for some of them the prevalent emotion is frustration or exasperation. Klara and the Sun is a return to Ishiguro's old form -- a book more like The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go.

Reading Klara and the Sun is a troubling experience. The emotional content is strong, while the world seems different from ours but disturbingly familiar. When I finished the book, I was left emotionally drained and it took me a few days to slowly arrange the book's ideas in my head. I really recommend this book.

--------- Spoiler Alert -----------

Klara and the Sun is set in the very near future, in a world that is clearly derived from ours. Technology is a bit more advanced, and inequality is even more pronounced. The novel is not conspicuously political, and the action of the novel is largely set in a distant out-of-town location where social reality barely intrudes. Yet there are half-hidden undertones of a disturbing political reality. Fascism is on the rise; big business continues to pollute the environment; society is divided between an elite class who can afford 'uplifting' for their children, though the process is risky, and an underclass who are effectively barred from higher education and decent jobs; most of society is 'post-employed'. It reminds me of how the social realities behind Jane Austen's novels -- slavery, the French Revolution, the oppression of women -- appear to be ignored in her vision of bucolic tranquillity but actually motivate her novels at a deeper level.

Klara herself is an AF, an 'artificial friend'. Klara has been designed to have a deep intuitive understanding of relationships and a real empathy for the humans she is supposed to befriend. However, Ishiguro goes to some lengths to show that these are really Klara's only skills. She has very little understanding of how the world works. Her mobility is limited and she has no senses of taste or smell. She can visually perceive simple scenes, but when there are too many people, or the setting is new to her, the scene breaks up into boxes that are barely connected. Sometimes she relates objects visually to views from her memory that are irrelevant: a line of coffee cups in the shop with a line of objects in the barn. Patterns of sunlight from a window which a human would ignore, have significance for Klara. Klara's world is different from and much simpler than ours.

Klara's simplicity, and her own dependence on solar power, leads her to a home-made religion of sun worship. Ishiguro's skill as an author makes it very believable that Klara's strong sense of empathy with human beings combined with her lack of knowledge of the real world leads her to the intuitive sense that the sun has human feelings and super-human capabilities.

Klara goes on to potentially sacrifice herself to persuade the sun to cure her human, Josie, from a disease that we eventually find is related to the process of 'uplift' that is to give her a chance of a career in this dystopian society. Klara believes that her sacrifice is what saved Josie. If true, it means that Klara has denied herself the role of 'continuing' Josie, by acting as her -- something that could have won Klara the love of 'the mother' and Ricky, 'the boyfriend'. It is very reminiscent of the butler in The Remains of the Day, who sacrificed his chance of love for a cause that proved to be pointless.

Klara ends up in a scrapyard, only able to move her head around so she can see the sky, and to slowly put her memories in order. It is a heart-breaking end to a story where she has given everything and received nothing in return, but where Klara has no bitterness at all because that ability was not programmed into her.

On one level, this is a story about artificial intelligence and an ethical side that has so far almost been ignored -- if we create beings that are capable of love and empathy, we should then be responsible for how we treat them. Mary Shelley understood this problem when she wrote Frankenstein, but most of the discussion of the ethics of AI today focusses only on the effect on humans.

On another level, this is a story about us now -- about how we use other people and are used by them. Klara and the Sun rings true emotionally because it is talking about exploitative relationships of a kind that we have seen, maybe experienced, ourselves. The political and social backdrop of the novel, so like present-day America where social inequality and individuality is taken to extremes, mirrors the way Klara is exploited. Klara's sacrifice and prayer to a non-existent sun-god likewise show humanity's response to that inequality and soullessness, in religion and sacrifice.

Klara's naivety and intuition lead her to a sacrifice that may be pointless, but show her to be the only real human in the book.

52 people found this helpful

Sarah-Louise J

Beautiful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 March 2021

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This is the most beautiful book. I finished it just moments ago and, though I never usually bother to review things, felt I had to write about the beauty in these pages. Smart, moving and wise, I didn’t know until I reached the final page just how in love with it I had fallen. Or how little I wanted to leave Klara and the world here created by closing the cover.

If this doesn’t win awards and make it onto all of the best of the year lists I will be astonished.

49 people found this helpful

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Klara and the Sun Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

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