Yet l ittle has fundamentally changed or improved.

There are robots who can perform almost as well as we can. In Klara, humans have created a miserable and direly antisocial future. Its prescience has been realized right on cue, and Ishiguro’s damning look at human exceptionalism seems less damning today, with the pandemic bringing such pessimism into sharp relief. What’s most striking about this premise is that aspects are no longer as implausible as they might have seemed just last March. Technology, recklessly embraced, made for a future where society is so dysfunctional that it ha d nowhere to turn but to more technology. Yet her existence attests to a society less of technological wonders, but more of horrors. She handily demonstrates the attributes we self- congratulatorily assign ourselves: curiosity, capacity for learning, empathy, and even hope fulness. Predominantly, however, Klara still seems to blur the line s of humanity and authenticity. He only alludes to how fundamentally differe nt from us she is in her times of stress, where her vision seems to disintegrate into “boxes” think object detection software like Tesla’s “Autopilot” and modern surveillance equipment. For example, describing the sound of crying as, “ her voice loud… as if it had been folded over onto itself, so that two version s of her were being sounded together, pitched fractionally apart. H owever, h er grasping to make sense leads to unexpectedly poetic interpretations of humanity. Her exceptional astuteness runs up against her not-quite-understanding of human emotions and irrationality. Ishiguro balances Klara’s novelty carefully. While nonhuman narrator s are not so exceptional in fiction anymore, it i s Klara’s outside perspective that truly sets apart the telling of this otherwise rather conventional (but thematically spot-on) story. Klara is a n android, a humanoid robot, intended for one purpose: to prevent a child from growing lonely. The story is told through the eyes of Klara, an AF, or Artificial Friend.

Most notably, Ishiguro excels at bringing in a distinct perspective from a truly unique narrator. Ishiguro is know n for a preoccupation with themes like loneliness an d employing narrators that speak from the background, and Klara is no exception in hi s catalogue – making it unexpectedly relevant.

Klara and the Sun walks the fine line between offering pandemic escapism and unwelcome reali sm. It’s not often that a novel can be described as “unknowingly prescient”, but if that label suits any book, it would be noted author Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest.

Review klara and the sun