☀️Gem Bookshelf: Klara And The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

☀️ --> possible spoiler. If you wish to read this then don't peak.

"Who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world", the Swedish Nobel Prize committee, 2017.

Klara and the Sun was published in 2021. It is set in a distant, but not that distant, future. Filled with pollution, somewhere in America because of the words being used (Mom), then changes whenever British people are speaking (Mum).

Klara is an AF: Artificial Friend, and is solar powered: feeds on the Sun's energy and really worships the Sun, like it'd be a God. The Sun has all the power to resurrect and heal. There is the first wth in the novel: a not likely protagonist seeing humans in a robot's perspective.

Klara hates one Cootings machine which pollutes puffs of smoke that block out the Sun, kind of like a chimney in a factory does.

Never have I researched a novel or the author as much as I did for Klara and Ishiguro: a day of reviews and interviews on youtube.

Ishiguro doesn't like genres, he doesn't like to label his books in one genre, because it "restricts an author". But, as for Klara and the Sun is kind of scifi, set in a dystopian world, but also contemporary fiction and happening now.

Ishiguro told he originally was meant to aim this as a children's picture book, that was meant to in a slow pace teach children about subjects like the sun, illness and death. But I think it was his daughter that suggested for Ishiguro not to go with children on this.

You as a reader get an undertone that something else is or has happened that you're not spoon-fed for (learned the idiom from one review and now can't think of a better word).

☀️ Pretty early on, Klara gets purchased by a family to be an AF to probably 13-14 yo girl, Josie. She is 'lifted', meaning that anyone willing, and who comes from wealth, a parent has an option to genetically modify the child's DNA for a brighter future in an ivy league school, but there's a downside to this. The genetically modified kids might turn sick to the point of death, like we learn from the start, has happened to Josie's sister, Sal. And now we enter to the scene where Josie is very ill.

☀️ Rick is introduced as Josie's childhood friend. He is not genetically modified, like Josie is. Rick's mother didn't have the means to even consider it as an option, so given that Josie's mother did, for two kids, herself and Josie's father went through the modification process.

☀️ Not spoiling lots!! What slowly unfolds with the book coming to a close, is that Klara's soon to be purchase is a sinister one. Ishiguro does this well, giving the reader hints of things coming and on things developing behind the scenes.

Klara: Cubism (art). For her - an AI having to understand human emotion, she first breaks it down into cubes in her mind, reassembles them, and gets what was originally conveyed.

This breaking down into rooms of a building is later written for Klara to understand the complexity of a human heart.

☀️☀️ Klara was originally bought to learn Josie's mannerisms and everything about her, to ultimately begin as her, after Josie died. And did she ? At the store in the beginning, Klara was asked to impersonate how Josie walked for her mother, and Klara doing as told pranced the store's hallway like a catwalk.

☀️☀️ Sal's AF might've become her, because she was seen after her death believing Josie's mother was arguing with Sal. Klara walked into a family drama, and was not explained a lot, nor does the reader. Just hints after hints.

☀️☀️ There is a barn where the Sun goes to sleep, thinks Klara. McBain's barn on the neighbour's property. She is obsessed where the Sun goes to rest even at the start in the store, and she sees from Josie's window that it infact goes to sleep in McBain's barn. Josie is ill, so Klara goes inside this barn twice to 'pray' and plead the Sun to heal Josie.

https://youtu.be/rvOJIGJvGOw?si=g65eLhsAxR3fetvT

X Johanna

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