Klara and the Sun - Raphus Reads

No cover — Klara and the Sun (2021, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)

320 pages

English language

Published Dec. 13, 2021 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-31818-8

(2 reviews)

"Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, 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.

Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

In its award citation in 2017, the Nobel committee described Ishiguro's books as "novels of great emotional force" and said he has "uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.""

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, science fiction, general
Fiction, dystopian
British and irish fiction (fictional works by one author)