[D66] [JD: 16] KLARA AND THE SUN

[R.O.]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/books/review/klara-and-the-sun-kazuo-ishiguro.html

fiction


  A Humanoid Who Cares For Humans, From the Mind of Kazuo Ishiguro

Credit...Thomas Danthony

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By Radhika Jones

  * Published Feb. 23, 2021Updated March 1, 2021

*KLARA AND THE SUN*
By Kazuo Ishiguro

About halfway through “Klara and the Sun,” a woman meeting Klara for the 
first time blurts out the kind of quiet-part-out-loud line we rely on to 
get our bearings in a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. “One never knows how to 
greet a guest like you,” she says. “After all, are you a guest at all? 
Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?”

This is Ishiguro’s eighth novel, and Klara, who narrates it, is an 
Artificial Friend, a humanoid machine — short dark hair; kind eyes; 
distinguished by her powers of observation — who has come to act as 
companion for 14-year-old Josie. Like that childhood stalwart Corduroy, 
she’d been sitting in a store, hoping to be chosen by the right child. 
AFs aren’t tutors. They’re not babysitters (though they’re sometimes 
chaperones), nor servants (though they’re expected to take commands). 
They’re nominally friends, but not equals. “You said you’d never get an 
AF,” Josie’s friend Rick says, accusingly — which makes Klara the mark 
of some rite of passage they didn’t want to accede to. Her ostensible 
purpose is to help get Josie through the lonely and difficult years 
until college. They are lonely because in Josie’s world, most kids don’t 
go to school but study at home using “oblongs.” They are difficult 
because Josie suffers from an unspecified illness, about which her 
mother projects unspecified guilt.


ImageKazuo Ishiguro, in 2015. For decades, memory and the accounting of 
memory, its burdens and its reconciliation, have been his subjects. With 
“Klara and the Sun,” he has mastered the adjacent theme of obsolescence. 
What is it like to inhabit a world whose mores and ideas have passed you by?
Kazuo Ishiguro, in 2015. For decades, memory and the accounting of 
memory, its burdens and its reconciliation, have been his subjects. With 
“Klara and the Sun,” he has mastered the adjacent theme of obsolescence. 
What is it like to inhabit a world whose mores and ideas have passed you 
by?Credit...Andrew Testa

“Klara and the Sun” takes place in the uncomfortably near future, and 
banal language is redeployed with sinister portent. Elite workers have 
been “substituted,” their labor now performed by A.I. Clothing and 
houses are described as “high-rank.” Privileged children are “lifted,” a 
process meant to optimize them for success. Readers of Ishiguro’s 2005 
novel “Never Let Me Go” will viscerally recall the sense of foreboding 
all this awakens. If I am being cagey about it, it’s to preserve that 
effect. But for the inhabitants of the novel, the older generation of 
whom remember the way things were, these conditions have been 
normalized, to use the banal language of our own era. Here is Josie’s 
father, a former engineer: “Honestly? I think the substitutions were the 
best thing that happened to me. … I really believe they helped me to 
distinguish what’s important from what isn’t. And where I live now, 
there are many fine people who feel exactly the same way.” Through 
Klara, we pick up bits of overheard conversation: a mention of 
“fascistic leanings” here; a reference to Josie’s mysteriously departed 
sister there; the woman outside the playhouse who protests Klara’s 
presence: “First they take the jobs. Now they take the seats at the 
theater?”

/[ “Klara and the Sun” was one of our most anticipated books of March. 
//See the full list/ 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/books/march-2021-books.html>/. ]/

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. With “Klara and the Sun,” I began to see how he 
has mastered the adjacent theme of obsolescence. What is it like to 
inhabit a world whose mores and ideas have passed you by? What happens 
to the people who must be cast aside in order for others to move 
forward? The climax of “The Remains of the Day” (1989), Ishiguro’s 
perfect, Booker Prize-winning novel, pivots on a butler’s realization 
that his whole life has been wasted in service of a Nazi sympathizer. 
(“I gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to 
give and now — well — I find I do not have a great deal more left to 
give.”) A subplot in Ishiguro’s first novel, “A Pale View of Hills” 
(1982), involves an older teacher in postwar Nagasaki whose former 
student renounces his way of thinking. “I don’t doubt you were sincere 
and hard working,” the former student tells him. “I’ve never questioned 
that for one moment. But it just so happens that your energies were 
spent in a misguided direction, an evil direction.” In “Never Let Me 
Go,” clones “complete” after fulfilling their biological purpose. In 
“Klara and the Sun,” obsolescence reaches its mass conclusion: Whole 
classes of workers have been replaced by machines, which themselves are 
subject to replacement. It nearly happens to Klara. In the story’s first 
section, a new, improved model of AF arrives and bumps her to the back 
of the store.

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/[ //Read the Magazine’s profile of Ishiguro/ 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/magazine/kazuo-ishiguro-klara.html>/. ]/

“Klara and the Sun” lands in a pandemic world, in which vaccines hold 
the promise of salvation but the reality of thousands of deaths a day 
persists, and a substantial portion of the American population deludes 
itself into thinking it isn’t happening. Our own children have been 
learning on oblongs and in isolation. The crisis of this novel revolves 
around whether Josie, with Klara’s help, will recover from her illness — 
and whether, if Josie doesn’t recover, her mother, with Klara’s help, 
will survive the loss. It turns out that to “lift” her daughter, to 
ensure Josie will thrive amid her world’s “savage meritocracies” (I’m 
quoting from Ishiguro’s 2017 Nobel lecture 
<https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2017/ishiguro/25124-kazuo-ishiguro-nobel-lecture-2017/>, 
an enlightening document as to his state of mind), her mother has 
knowingly risked Josie’s health, her happiness, her very life — a 
calculation that sounds terrible on paper until one realizes how common 
it already is.


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Image

Considering the place of “Klara and the Sun” in Ishiguro’s collected 
works — which cohere astoundingly well, even “The Unconsoled” (1995), 
powered as it is by the dreamlike absorption and reconciliation of 
unfamiliar circumstances — I found myself thinking of Thomas Hardy, the 
way Hardy’s novels, at the end of the 19th century, captured the growing 
schism between the natural world and the industrialized one, the unclean 
break that technology makes with the past. Tess Durbeyfield earns her 
living as a dairymaid before agricultural mechanization, but she 
channels early strains of what Hardy presciently calls “the ache of 
modernism.” She represents a mode of being human in nature before 
machinery got in the way.

Klara is a man-made marvel. She lacks the fluidity of human mobility 
such that to negotiate a gravel driveway is a project of careful 
intention. But like the great outdoors, she runs on solar power, and she 
ventures deliberately into the natural world at critical points in the 
story, communing with the sun to try to help Josie with matters bigger 
than either one can comprehend. Klara’s perception, too, is at once 
mechanical and deeply subjective. Fields of vision appear in squares and 
panels, so that you can imagine (through her eyes) pictures processed 
and bitmapped, resolving themselves the way a high-definition image 
resolves on a screen, but with a shifting focus that seems tied to her 
interpretation of the events and environment around her. Seeing the 
world from Klara’s point of view is to be reminded constantly of what it 
looks like when mediated through technology. That might have felt 
foreign a century ago, but not anymore.

Klara is likable enough — as she was manufactured to be — but it’s hard 
to empathize with her on the page, which is maybe the point. The stilted 
affect that so often characterizes Ishiguro’s prose and dialogue — an 
incantatory flatness that belies its revelatory ability — serves its 
literal function. Klara’s machine-ness never recedes. Unlike most of 
Ishiguro’s first-person narrators, however, she seems incapable of 
deluding herself. Her technological essence presents some childlike 
limitations of expression, but are they more pronounced than the limits 
born of the human desire to repress, or wallow, or come across better 
than we are? “I believe I have many feelings,” Klara says. “The more I 
observe, the more feelings become available to me.” This statement had 
the peculiar effect, on me anyway, not of persuading me of her humanness 
but of causing me to consider whether humans acquire nameable feelings 
all that differently from her description. Which is maybe also the point.

In an interview with The Paris Review in 2008, Ishiguro said he thought 
of “Never Let Me Go” as his cheerful novel 
<https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5829/the-art-of-fiction-no-196-kazuo-ishiguro>. 
Never mind that it centers on a trio of clones bred specifically to have 
their organs harvested. “I wanted to show three people who were 
essentially decent,” he said. Klara carries that quietly heroic mantle. 
Look at the characters Ishiguro gives voice to: not the human, but the 
clone; not the lord, but the servant. “Klara and the Sun” complements 
his brilliant vision, though it doesn’t reach the artistic heights of 
his past achievements. No moment here touches my heart the way Stevens 
does, reflecting on his losses in “The Remains of the Day.” Still, when 
Klara says, “I have my memories to go through and place in the right 
order,” it strikes the quintessential Ishiguro chord. So what if a 
machine says it? There’s no narrative instinct more essential, or more 
human.

Radhika Jones is the editor in chief of Vanity Fair and holds a 
doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia University.

*KLARA AND THE SUN
*By Kazuo Ishiguro
303 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.

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