Genre Fiction
![Kazuo Ishiguro - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000APSEA8.jpg)
Klara and the Sun: A novel (Vintage International)
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Once in a great while, a book comes along that changes our view of the world. This magnificent novel from the Nobel laureate and author of Never Let Me Go is "an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures ... a poignant meditation on love and loneliness" (The Associated Press). • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick!
Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, 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. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, 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. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
Editorial Reviews
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick • ONE OF PRESIDENT OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • ONE OF BILL GATES'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Time, NPR, Washington Post, Vogue, USA Today, Town & Country, The Guardian, Vulture, and more
"One of the most affecting and profound novels Ishiguro has written….I'll go for broke and call Klara and the Sun a masterpiece that will make you think about life, mortality, the saving grace of love: in short, the all of it."
-Maureen Corrigan, NPR
"A delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope."
-Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"What stays with you in ‘Klara and the Sun' is the haunting narrative voice-a genuinely innocent, egoless perspective on the strange behavior of humans obsessed and wounded by power, status and fear." -Booker Prize committee
"It aspires to enchantment, or to put it another way, reenchantment, the restoration of magic to a disenchanted world. Ishiguro drapes realism like a thin cloth over a primordial cosmos. Every so often, the cloth slips, revealing the old gods, the terrible beasts, the warring forces of light and darkness."
-Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic
"Ishiguro's prose is soft and quiet. It feels like the perfect book to curl up with on a Sunday afternoon. He allows the story to unfold slowly and organically, revealing enough on every page to continue piquing the reader's curiosity. The novel is an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures...a poignant meditation on love and loneliness"
- Maggie Sprayregen, The Associated Press
"For four decades now, Ishiguro has written eloquently about the balancing act of remembering without succumbing irrevocably to the past. Memory and the accounting of memory, its burdens and its reconciliation, have been his subjects… Klara and the Sun complements [Ishiguro's] brilliant vision…There's no narrative instinct more essential, or more human."
-The New York Times Book Review
"A prayer is a postcard asking for a favor, sent upward. Whether our postcards are read by anyone has become the searching doubt of Ishiguro's recent novels, in which this master, so utterly unlike his peers, goes about creating his ordinary, strange, godless allegories."
-Jame...
"One of the most affecting and profound novels Ishiguro has written….I'll go for broke and call Klara and the Sun a masterpiece that will make you think about life, mortality, the saving grace of love: in short, the all of it."
-Maureen Corrigan, NPR
"A delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope."
-Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"What stays with you in ‘Klara and the Sun' is the haunting narrative voice-a genuinely innocent, egoless perspective on the strange behavior of humans obsessed and wounded by power, status and fear." -Booker Prize committee
"It aspires to enchantment, or to put it another way, reenchantment, the restoration of magic to a disenchanted world. Ishiguro drapes realism like a thin cloth over a primordial cosmos. Every so often, the cloth slips, revealing the old gods, the terrible beasts, the warring forces of light and darkness."
-Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic
"Ishiguro's prose is soft and quiet. It feels like the perfect book to curl up with on a Sunday afternoon. He allows the story to unfold slowly and organically, revealing enough on every page to continue piquing the reader's curiosity. The novel is an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures...a poignant meditation on love and loneliness"
- Maggie Sprayregen, The Associated Press
"For four decades now, Ishiguro has written eloquently about the balancing act of remembering without succumbing irrevocably to the past. Memory and the accounting of memory, its burdens and its reconciliation, have been his subjects… Klara and the Sun complements [Ishiguro's] brilliant vision…There's no narrative instinct more essential, or more human."
-The New York Times Book Review
"A prayer is a postcard asking for a favor, sent upward. Whether our postcards are read by anyone has become the searching doubt of Ishiguro's recent novels, in which this master, so utterly unlike his peers, goes about creating his ordinary, strange, godless allegories."
-Jame...
Readers Top Reviews
Marcus
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...
Sarah-Louise JMar
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.
ArchyM.H. Sarah
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.
Anne E. O'NeilN.
preordered this and haven’t read the book because i can’t get over the hideousness of putting the stupid good morning america logo on the cover. sure the book cover design is insanely ugly anyway, like they had some “live laugh love” moron stuck in a yoga commune in 2002, let’s get over that. maybe i could have dealt with that. do american publishers really not trust readers to buy a book without ruining the cover with an ad for a tv book club? i’m all for oprah/reece/good morning america having book clubs and americans reading books by living writers and buying them new so writers can make their meager livings, but do you have to put the stupid logo on the cover so it can’t be removed? people who are still buying hardback books are buying them, particularly Kasuo Ishiguro so that they can return to the words and stories inside, so they can look at their bookshelf and see the spine and recall the journey and the ideas they shared for those pages with the characters and the writer. people are smart enough to be able to find a book without the cover being marred forever with an ad for a treacly tv show. give the people some credit. the UK version is beautiful. i’m having one sent to me. for 3x what i paid amazon, but it’s worth it if it’s going to be on my shelves forever. (and don’t even get me started on the monstrous 9x6 size they think they should print books these days. so ugly and hard to hold. you do know, publishers, that just because you get your copies as arcs and uncorrected proofs that people still need to be able to HOLD the book in order to read it. maybe all publishers have hands the size of Shaquille, but i do not.) (maybe look to mcsweeney’s; now there’s a house that knows how to print a beautiful book)
Short Excerpt Teaser
When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazines table side, and could see through more than half of the window. So we were able to watch the outside – the office workers hurrying by, the taxis, the runners, the tourists, Beggar Man and his dog, the lower part of the RPO Building. Once we were more settled, Manager allowed us to walk up to the front until we were right behind the window display, and then we could see how tall the RPO Building was. And if we were there at just the right time, we would see the Sun on his journey, crossing between the building tops from our side over to the RPO Building side.
When I was lucky enough to see him like that, I'd lean my face forward to take in as much of his nourishment as I could, and if Rosa was with me, I'd tell her to do the same. After a minute or two, we'd have to return to our positions, and when we were new, we used to worry that because we often couldn't see the Sun from mid-store, we'd grow weaker and weaker. Boy AF Rex, who was alongside us then, told us there was nothing to worry about, that the Sun had ways of reaching us wherever we were. He pointed to the floorboards and said, ‘That's the Sun's pattern right there. If you're worried, you can just touch it and get strong again.'
There were no customers when he said this, and Manager was busy arranging something up on the Red Shelves, and I didn't want to disturb her by asking permission. So I gave Rosa a glance, and when she looked back blankly, I took two steps forward, crouched down and reached out both hands to the Sun's pattern on the floor. But as soon as my fingers touched it, the pattern faded, and though I tried all I could – I patted the spot where it had been, and when that didn't work, rubbed my hands over the floorboards – it wouldn't come back. When I stood up again Boy AF Rex said:
‘Klara, that was greedy. You girl AFs are always so greedy.'
Even though I was new then, it occurred to me straight away it might not have been my fault; that the Sun had withdrawn his pattern by chance just when I'd been touching it. But Boy AF Rex's face remained serious.
‘You took all the nourishment for yourself, Klara. Look, it's gone almost dark.'
Sure enough the light inside the store had become very gloomy. Even outside on the sidewalk, the Tow-Away Zone sign on the lamp post looked gray and faint.
‘I'm sorry,' I said to Rex, then turning to Rosa: ‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to take it all myself.'
‘Because of you,' Boy AF Rex said, ‘I'm going to become weak by evening.'
‘You're making a joke,' I said to him. ‘I know you are.'
‘I'm not making a joke. I could get sick right now. And what about those AFs rear-store? There's already something not right with them. They're bound to get worse now. You were greedy, Klara.'
‘I don't believe you,' I said, but I was no longer so sure. I looked at Rosa, but her expression was still blank.
‘I'm feeling sick already,' Boy AF Rex said. And he sagged forward.
‘But you just said yourself. The Sun always has ways to reach us. You're making a joke, I know you are.'
I managed in the end to convince myself Boy AF Rex was teasing me. But what I sensed that day was that I had, without meaning to, made Rex bring up something uncomfortable, something most AFs in the store preferred not to talk about. Then not long afterwards that thing happened to Boy AF Rex, which made me think that even if he had been joking that day, a part of him had been serious too.
It was a bright morning, and Rex was no longer beside us because Manager had moved him to the front alcove. Manager always said that every position was carefully conceived, and that we were as likely to be chosen when standing at one as at another. Even so, we all knew the gaze of a customer entering the store would fall first on the front alcove, and Rex was naturally pleased to get his turn there. We watched him from mid-store, standing with his chin raised, the Sun's pattern all over him, and Rosa leaned over to me once to say, ‘Oh, he does look wonderful! He's bound to find a home soon!'
On Rex's third day in the front alcove, a girl came in with her mother. I wasn't so good then at telling ages, but I remember estimating thirteen and a half for the girl, and I think now that was
correct. The mother was an office worker, and from her shoes and suit we could tell she was high-ranking. The girl went straight to Rex and stood in front of him, while the mother came wandering our way, glanced at us, then went on towards the rear, where two AFs were sitting on the Glass Table, swinging their legs freely as Manager had told them to do. At one poi...
When I was lucky enough to see him like that, I'd lean my face forward to take in as much of his nourishment as I could, and if Rosa was with me, I'd tell her to do the same. After a minute or two, we'd have to return to our positions, and when we were new, we used to worry that because we often couldn't see the Sun from mid-store, we'd grow weaker and weaker. Boy AF Rex, who was alongside us then, told us there was nothing to worry about, that the Sun had ways of reaching us wherever we were. He pointed to the floorboards and said, ‘That's the Sun's pattern right there. If you're worried, you can just touch it and get strong again.'
There were no customers when he said this, and Manager was busy arranging something up on the Red Shelves, and I didn't want to disturb her by asking permission. So I gave Rosa a glance, and when she looked back blankly, I took two steps forward, crouched down and reached out both hands to the Sun's pattern on the floor. But as soon as my fingers touched it, the pattern faded, and though I tried all I could – I patted the spot where it had been, and when that didn't work, rubbed my hands over the floorboards – it wouldn't come back. When I stood up again Boy AF Rex said:
‘Klara, that was greedy. You girl AFs are always so greedy.'
Even though I was new then, it occurred to me straight away it might not have been my fault; that the Sun had withdrawn his pattern by chance just when I'd been touching it. But Boy AF Rex's face remained serious.
‘You took all the nourishment for yourself, Klara. Look, it's gone almost dark.'
Sure enough the light inside the store had become very gloomy. Even outside on the sidewalk, the Tow-Away Zone sign on the lamp post looked gray and faint.
‘I'm sorry,' I said to Rex, then turning to Rosa: ‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to take it all myself.'
‘Because of you,' Boy AF Rex said, ‘I'm going to become weak by evening.'
‘You're making a joke,' I said to him. ‘I know you are.'
‘I'm not making a joke. I could get sick right now. And what about those AFs rear-store? There's already something not right with them. They're bound to get worse now. You were greedy, Klara.'
‘I don't believe you,' I said, but I was no longer so sure. I looked at Rosa, but her expression was still blank.
‘I'm feeling sick already,' Boy AF Rex said. And he sagged forward.
‘But you just said yourself. The Sun always has ways to reach us. You're making a joke, I know you are.'
I managed in the end to convince myself Boy AF Rex was teasing me. But what I sensed that day was that I had, without meaning to, made Rex bring up something uncomfortable, something most AFs in the store preferred not to talk about. Then not long afterwards that thing happened to Boy AF Rex, which made me think that even if he had been joking that day, a part of him had been serious too.
It was a bright morning, and Rex was no longer beside us because Manager had moved him to the front alcove. Manager always said that every position was carefully conceived, and that we were as likely to be chosen when standing at one as at another. Even so, we all knew the gaze of a customer entering the store would fall first on the front alcove, and Rex was naturally pleased to get his turn there. We watched him from mid-store, standing with his chin raised, the Sun's pattern all over him, and Rosa leaned over to me once to say, ‘Oh, he does look wonderful! He's bound to find a home soon!'
On Rex's third day in the front alcove, a girl came in with her mother. I wasn't so good then at telling ages, but I remember estimating thirteen and a half for the girl, and I think now that was
correct. The mother was an office worker, and from her shoes and suit we could tell she was high-ranking. The girl went straight to Rex and stood in front of him, while the mother came wandering our way, glanced at us, then went on towards the rear, where two AFs were sitting on the Glass Table, swinging their legs freely as Manager had told them to do. At one poi...
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