“Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro - review

 “Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro:

Right from the beginning: I did not like the book.

How does it feel to be not-quite human and to see and experience the world all around you? 

Is science able to transcend death?

Is it morally justifiable to substitute one consciousness, one life, by harvesting and using another consciousness?

All these are very good thoughts and concepts worthy to explore, ideas to engage in. Alas, Ishiguro doesn’t seem to be able to generate out of this fascinating material a good, enjoyable while rewarding book. 

Klara is a robot, an AF, an artificial friend which wealthy parents buy for their kids as a companion. These kids are, one learns over the course of the book, genetically enhanced children and this genetical engineering sometimes comes with disastrous side effects which can result in the death of these kids. In the family into which Klara is being bought there is a mother and her daughter for whom Klara is supposed to be the companion. The daughter is weak and ill and is believed to be dying soon. The family already lost another daughter in the past and the mother, thinking that she will not be able to endure and survive another loss, contrives a plan to substitute her daughter, once the daughter has died, with a look-alike robot body and the mind of Klara who is endowed with extraordinary empathetic and mimic abilities. There is a similarity with Ishiguro’s earlier novel “Never Let It Go“ where children are raised in an institution for the sole purpose of being harvested for their organs.

Klara, the robot tells, in a voice mix of intelligence and naivety, of how she experiences her surroundings and so forces us to interpret her impressions and deduct from them what is going on. A nice proper technique and it works -  for a while. At first entertaining, engaging and suspensive it soon outlives its momentum and becomes utterly boring and frustrating. It becomes clear that behind the clever technique there is just: Very Little. And this is not enough. This is a small, pretty tale which would have been much better at home within a short story than a novel. Because that is what it feels like, a nice little idea, blown up to a novel’s dimension. 

There should be emotions involved. There are indeed emotions involved. But one does not feel them. One is being told of them, one is being made to think one should have them, but one does not feel them. This might be due to Klara having no real interiority, of being still a machine in the end, one cannot relate to her and this shuts the door to feeling. Questions of moral, parental love, empathy, loyalty, the value of a mind, of all these one reads, but does not really feel them. All is lost in a fog of childish tale that pretends to be profounder then it really is. And it doesn’t help but confuses and raises a feeling of disbelieve that Klara, being a solar-powered machine without real feeling, just being able to register and analyse emotions, all of a sudden is supposed to have a sort of innate religious feeling which results in worshipping the Sun, her source of life. 

The ideas for this book were definitively good ones. The physical manifestation turned out moderately meager. I was disappointed.

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