Klara and the Sun - Raphus Reads

No cover — Klara and the Sun (Hardcover, 2021, Faber & Faber)

Hardcover, 303 pages

English language

Published Nov. 12, 2021 by Faber & Faber.

ISBN:: 978-0-571-36487-9

(2 reviews)

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, 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, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

16 editions

Noisy Deadlines reviewed Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Missed Opportunities

2 stars

The premise is beautiful, it hints at deep reflections about being human, but it didn't work for me. The dialogues were super weird and unnatural, they really bothered me. I missed more exploration of the technology behind the Artificial Friends (AF) and how they worked. Was Klara all mechanical? Was she an android? I wasn't convinced that AF's would find mystical significance in the Sun. The story hints at several themes but never really goes deep: environmental pollution, empathy, robots taking over human jobs, loneliness, gene editing, social class privilege. The plot is super simple and predictable, and the ending was very bleh. Probably not my thing.

pixouls@bookwyrm.social reviewed Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Surprisingly underwhelming

3 stars

I listened to this as an audiobook, my first checked out from Libby.
I liked the narrator's voice and felt it was generally quite well to meet the range of voices for the characters.
The book took too long to build up and the ending was too abstract and fell apart.
I also generally didn't like or understand why the characters were selected with the traits they had.
Some of the dialogue felt well played, while others felt jarring
In the end, my favorite part is Klara's relationship with the sun, which goes for the most part unexplored with other characters. This book has vague environmentalist themes.
many of the tropes that show up in this book I feel, have been better expressed in other works I've read.
I think this book would be fine for a middle schooler as it goes generally without much complexity with its readability. Though …

I listened to this as an audiobook, my first checked out from Libby.
I liked the narrator's voice and felt it was generally quite well to meet the range of voices for the characters.
The book took too long to build up and the ending was too abstract and fell apart.
I also generally didn't like or understand why the characters were selected with the traits they had.
Some of the dialogue felt well played, while others felt jarring
In the end, my favorite part is Klara's relationship with the sun, which goes for the most part unexplored with other characters. This book has vague environmentalist themes.
many of the tropes that show up in this book I feel, have been better expressed in other works I've read.
I think this book would be fine for a middle schooler as it goes generally without much complexity with its readability. Though I do think it should be followed with journaling or a book discussion. I would be curious how this book could be used to engage youth about AI ethics.

Subjects

Fiction
Robots
Artificial Intelligence
Dystopian
Science Fiction
Chronic Illness
Disability