The world of the novel differs profoundly from ours in its approach to childhood, education, and human relationships. Although there are some wilderness refuges, the city air is fouled by emissions from the gigantic industrial devices-“Cootings Machines,” Klara calls them-scattered through the streets. But essential systems are run by computers. There are cars and buses, office buildings and parks, center-city apartments and suburban homes. It is set in an unidentified major city, where the fabric of urban life is familiar. This is Ishiguro’s eighth novel and the first since his 2017 Nobel Prize. The story that unfolds in Klara and the Sun is told from beginning to end from inside the mind of a-what shall we say? Robot? Automaton? Artificial person? Animatronic doll? Each is true in a sense, but none does justice to the richness and complexity of Klara’s life. Philosophers and poets have long puzzled over what it is like to experience the world as a dog or a bat or a beetle, but Ishiguro attempts something even riskier and more ambitious. As the novel opens, she is waiting hopefully for someone to choose her from the showroom where she and her AF friends are on display, though she knows she is a generation behind the newest models nearby. (Think of this year’s smartphone compared to a 1970s mobile phone with its bulky battery pack.) Klara is an “Artificial Friend” with a young girl’s body, able to act and speak and think for herself. ![]() The central character of Kazuo Ishiguro’s virtuosic 2021 novel is a robot of quite another sort.
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