Review: Klara And The Sun: A Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

 Dear Lit Loves,

Greetings!  Happy Spring!  Happy post Covid!  Hallelujah, I can get back to attending my book club meetings in April.  During the first of March, I decided to begin reading my book club's assigned discussion novel titled Klara And The Sun:  A Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.  If you know me well, this is a book way beyond my tastes in terms of literature.  This is a novel set in the future and told by a robot who is sitting on a showroom floor waiting for someone to buy her so that she can become their "Artificial Friend".   Riiiggghhhttt.  My first thought was, "You've got to be kidding."   

The author, Kazuo Ishiguro, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize so even though the book sounded completely too sci-fi for me, I decided to give it a thorough read.  The book examines how artificial intelligence is used to replicate the human form in mind, body, and spirit.  The robot, Klara, finally meets her "person" in the form of Josie, a fairly young girl who lives with her mom mostly by themselves.  Josie's mom, Mrs. Arthur, has already lost a daughter and evaluates how well robot Klara interacts with her daughter and also how well Klara can mimic her daughter.  Josie's best friend and neighbor, Rick lives next door with his mom who is mostly socially isolated.  Josie's mom wishes for her daughter to be "lifted" into the upper ranks of society so she insists her daughter attend classes via her tablet and attend "Interactive" meetings with other people her age who have parents wishing for them to be "lifted."    The author never really states what it means to be "lifted", but from my reading of the book, I interpreted it to mean people who are intellectually advanced technologically but are seriously lacking in emotional and social intelligence.  Robot Klara appears to have a better ability to read people and their emotions and behaviors than any of the other characters.

When robot Klara learns Josie has some form of chronic illness, she tries to harness the sun's energy to heal Josie because she observed the sun heal a beggar and his dog from her spot on a store's showroom floor.  The problem comes when Klara realizes that Josie's mom actually bought Klara in case she needed a replacement daughter for Josie.  Josie's friend Rick is a loner and essentially self-educated.  He does his own drone research and actually builds model bird drones.  He is not inclined toward being "lifted" until later in the book.  And the book invites you to speculate if he eventually chooses to go to college because his mom asked a favor of someone on the university board or if he decided to attend college of his own free will.  

Robot Klara asks the sun to heal Josie and intuits that the sun does not like all the pollution in this futuristic world.  Klara is inclined to go break a machine that she knows is causing pollution in order to please the sun so that the sun will heal Josie.  Josie's dad assists Klara in this task, but Klara realizes there is more than one machine polluting this future world and she has only been able to break one of the pollution producing machines by sacrificing a part of herself in the process.  

In the end, Josie is healed, robot Klara first winds up in a storage closet, and Rick attends college and he and Josie go their separate ways.  Sadly, Klara eventually finds herself sitting in a junk yard because she has served her original purpose.  And because robot Klara sacrificed a critical part of herself to help heal Josie, she loses much of her abilities.  Klara then becomes a part of the pollution.  The other robot in the store who was staged near Klara has also been discarded in the junk yard.  The book asks you if artificial intelligence is truly worth it?  Can it do what a human can do and do it better?  Will artificial intelligence eventually just be replaced with another tech advancement that leads to more tech devices contributing to world pollution?  Can technology truly replace a human being?  (Personally, this Generation Xer thinks not, but if you ask an individual from Generation Z, you might get an entirely different answer).  

This was a fascinating read so I am glad I took a chance on reading the book.  It does make you think about the future, how much influence technology will play in years to come, if humans can be replaced by artificial intelligence, and how much are we willing to sacrifice for the ones we love?  I think the book also invites the question of in the future will people who are not "lifted" or intellectually gifted be excluded from society?  It is kind of like someone who does not use the internet today.  Are they really missing out on an essential part of life or were we as a society better off without the internet due to its often gross misuse?  Can you really live without the internet and a cell phone?

This is a book that asks you to consider how much technology plays a role in your life and how much good does technology bring to society?  Has technology made us better human beings?  Personally, I don't think the world can ever replace a human being nor do I think it would be wise to do so.  What do you think?

Till my next review,

Grace (Amy)