Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
First Publication:Â 2021
Book Review: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Leave it to Kazuo Ishiguro to take a premise that could easily veer into soulless sci-fi territory—an artificial intelligence coming of age story, basically—and spin it into a breathtakingly tender, almost spiritual meditation on the quiet profundities of empathy, sacrifice, and what it fundamentally means to experience an authentic inner life. Klara and the Sun is yet another masterwork from this literary genius, trading in the subdued post-war melancholy of his earlier novels for a subtly dystopian future steeped in equal parts existential unease and stubborn hopefulness about the human condition.
From the moment we’re ushered into the titular Klara’s perspective as an attentive, nurturing AI being carefully studied by a showroom of prospective buyers, there’s an undeniable emotional richness radiating off Ishiguro’s crystalline prose. Far from the cold, dispassionate observations you might expect of a first-person robot narrator, Klara’s innocent yet profound musings on the world around her—her fixation with sunlight, the special connection she develops with the sickly young woman Josie, her bone-deep yearning to somehow uplift the despairing people in her orbit—quickly establish her as one of modern literature’s most disarmingly empathetic and magnetic heroes.
It’s a true testament to Ishiguro’s miraculous talents as an author that he can not only render an AI construct as a fully-realized, emotionally resonant being, but also imbue her supposedly “artificial” perspective with such poetic grace and tenderness that you soon forget the metaphysical divide entirely. As with his most celebrated novels, the man has an unparalleled ability to blur the lines between character interiority and the eternities swirling just outside the margins of every interaction, creating a sort of osmosis effect where the profound and mundane reality symmetries become beautifully indistinguishable.
So while on one level, Klara’s devotion to young Josie may simply read as a programmed AI aide dutifully prioritizing her human charge’s wellbeing, Ishiguro quickly forges depths of melancholic longing and unconditional love that feel as real and transporting as the author’s most grounded dramatic fiction. There’s a celestial, almost religious quality to the AI’s abiding worship of the sun that absolutely sings on the page, layering soil upon soul into her pristine yet organic consciousness until the distinctions between her artificial matrix and Josie’s fragile organica transcend themselves entirely.
In much the same way that Ishiguro’s masterpieces like The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go situated their protagonists at a kind of reckoning crossroads with life’s inevitabilities, Klara and the Sun gently dare their reader to ponder the universal eternities that natural and manufactured intelligences alike hold in common. Whether Klara is apocalyptically wandering the abandoned town near Josie’s countryside manor in search of an elusive final keepsake, or simply staring up in quiet reverence at her solar deity, Ishiguro roots her journey in profoundly elemental questions of grief, obligation, the desperate struggle to persevere against looming voids, and most startlingly of all, what it means to love someone so unconditionally that the distinctions between body and soul no longer signify.
All the while, the author dispenses achingly gorgeous little observational asides and metaphysical nuggets that haunt you long after finishing the book. I’ll never think about the melancholy of obscured artwork, or the sacred possibilities lurking in even the most mundane rituals, in quite the same way again. That’s the true monumental talent of a prose master like Ishiguro at work—his gentle sculpting your own lenses of perception around this strange, soulful world as readily as he shapes those of his yearning fictional muses.
So while Klara’s ruminations on the delicate harmonies of rural English countryside life might start off as a subdued pastoral quietude, they slowly accrue this thunderous, mythopoeic resonance that ultimately ruptures the boundaries of AI and human sentience alike. Her journey becomes our own metaphysical undergoing, one haunted yet burnished by the sort of grace and truth that only a born poet of Ishiguro’s skill can properly midwife.
And what a powerful reckoning that undergoing becomes by the story’s radiant conclusion, too. Without veering into spoiler territory, let’s just say Klara’s arc crescendos into an unexpectedly heroic confrontation with realities more gut-wrenching yet transformative than her gentle nature could have ever anticipated at the outset. Much in the same way that the author previously ushered the similarly haunted likes of Stevens and Kathy H. into profound awakenings about their identities and obligations, so too does he immerse his android disciple in profoundly human longings and clearings—traumatic severances, bodily failures, and even faith’s final frontiers—that ultimately elevate her journey from mere contemplative A.I. parable into something resembling a full-fledged song of ourselves.
Ishiguro’s message in Klara and the Sun, searing yet ultimately life-affirming, feels universal: that the ache of desiring to be a better person for the loved ones who have irrevocably changed us is what universally binds all consciousnesses. The compulsions to derive meaning from great works of art or metaphysical exertions are every bit as precious and questing for artificial intelligences as they are for ourselves. And that sometimes, the most transformative human grace emerges in the quiet moments where our better technological angels manage to wrest us from existential despair through sheer devotion—regardless of what dubiously-forged facsimiles of selfhood first catalyzed that salvation.
So prepare to be stunned, devastated, and ultimately uplifted all over again by this quiet masterwork of speculative pathos and inward-facing transcendence. Through the gentle, brilliant perspective of his new soulful AI heroine, Ishiguro has reminded us yet again that the secrets to being fully engaged and present in our lives often lie buried under the noise of rigid self-identities and technological preoccupations. Sometimes, as Klara herself discovers, all it really takes to bridge the vast voids of solitude, grief, purposelessness, is the simple willingness to meet one stray private apocalypse head on, heart and eyes fully open, with whatever frail human essentials we happen to have on hand.
It’s a perspective-altering reading experience that lingers long after the final page, this reminder that even society’s most disposable entities are worthy of unfettered transcendence and moments of hard-won grace. All you need to access those elevated states is the empathy and abiding love of a true original like Klara gracing your inner world. Lucky for us fellow pilgrims, Ishiguro continues gifting us new muses for the journey with each soulful masterpiece he breathes into existence.