Klara and the Sun

The writing is beautiful, easy to read and follow. The first half was slow it then picked up speed but as I hit the last quarter or so of the book - I kept expecting/hoping for an unexpected turn - and in that lies my rating, more than a story, its the observation of Klara into Josie's life that is the protagonist of the story.

The sci-fi components are just backdrops, as faith and the supernatural is what it end up delivering. Technologies admiring natural entities such as the sun as gods and as a result, faith in the Sun.

This is a 3.5 but I'll give it the 4th star because I know my future self will return one day to this novel with questions still unanswered.

Not usually a fan of AI stories, but Klara is adorable. I really like the way she's used to observe human interactions and to create that contrast/comparison with humans. It's cleverly done.

But I can't tell you what the book is about except “love has many forms”

It wasn't bad, I'm just confused. What was the purpose? What was the point? Was I supposed to have taken more from it? Like I understand the points that it was touching on but it never really went into depth in that discussion, except for what makes a human at the very end. Anywayyysssss.... unsure basically

Too many unanswered questions for me, starting with where are these people? And what happened in their society to screw it up? Aside from that, though, I was not engaged for the first two-thirds of the book, about 200 pages in, when things finally got interesting. A lot of people would have given up long before then. The last third is redeeming, and the ending is great.

Klara is an Artificial Friend (sometimes pejoratively called a “machine” or a “robot” by people in the novel) built to be a companion for a child. She is chosen by Josie, a young girl with fragile health who lives with her mother and a housekeeper in the countryside. The story is told from Klara's perspective, as she learns about Josie's health problems and family life. Klara is focused on helping Josie, so she strives to fit into the household routine and meet the family's expectations for her, but she also acts independently to provide a very different, un-machine-like help to Josie.

Since Klara is the narrator, and she is curious and observant of subtle human emotional responses, she is easy to empathize with. There are aspects of her that make it clear she is a machine (her vision sometimes divides areas into quadrants, or she occasionally sees people as cones and cylinders), but she is a sympathetic machine–I thought of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This premise, that a machine could exhibit human like qualities, is a familiar one. But this novel also highlights an emotionally fraught discussion about whether there's anything in a human life that can't be replicated by a machine, if the subject is observed closely enough and the engineer is skilled enough. One of the adults in Josie's life admits to having a hard, cold center that believes that such a thing is possible. Klara and the Sun is written with such spare elegance and suggests such blurred boundaries that I found it moving rather than trite.

Wel wel wel, dát was nog eens een verschil. Na drie barslechte pulpboeken en drie pulpboeken die nog wel meevielen, achtig, een boek lezen van een Nobelprijswinnaar.

Pas op, 't is niet omdat die mens een grote prijs gewonnen heeft dat ik daarom noodzakelijk zijn boeken goed ga beginnen vinden of zo — het vorige boek dat ik van hem las, The Buried Giant, vond ik zelf helemaal niét goed.

Dit was iets anders. Het speelt zich af in een niet nader gespecificeerde maar redelijk nabije toekomst, met genetische manipulatie en artificiële intelligente en allerlei grote maatschappelijke veranderingen wegend die dingen.

We zien de wereld door de ogen van Klara, een Artificial Friend. Ze is duidelijk (zeer) intelligent, heeft echte en diepe emoties, maar bijzonder weinig kennis. 't Is niet alsof ze een verbinding met een internet heeft of een interne encylopedia, en dus bouwt ze haar eigen wereldbeeld op.

En dat is van een ontroerende schoonheid. Ze werkt op zonne-energie; in de winkel worden de AF's geroteerd van plaats naar plaats en heel soms mag ze een tijdje in de etalage staan waar ze de zon kan zien. Ze heeft praktisch met niemand interactie, en ontwikkelt een eigen soort mythologie/godsdienst rond de Zon.

En dan wordt ze gekocht door een vrouw, voor haar dochter. En blijkt dat de dochter ernstig ziek is.

We weten alleen wat Klara weet, en dus wordt het maar met stukjes en beetjes duidelijk in wat voor een dystopische wereld we ons bevinden, en wat voor een keuzes de verschillende personages gemaakt hebben en maken.

Er veel meer over vertellen zou niet goed zijn. Het is een fascinerend boek. Over keuzes maken en loslaten, en wat het is om een mens te zijn en wat hoop en liefde zijn.

Ik zou het iedereen aanraden.

Er zijn nogal wat mensen — vooral uit de “echte sciencefictionlezer”-categorie die het een traag en onduidelijk boek vinden, die het een gebrek aan diepgang verwijten, die gemiste kansen tot maatschappijkritiek zien, die het allemaal veel en veel te clichématig vinden, met oude tropes die al totterdood verkend zijn, van I Robot tot, welja, Murderbot.

Ik vind dat mensen die de essentie niet vatten. Dit is geen alwetende verteller, dit is Charlie uit Flowers for Algernon, maar dan als hij een robot zou zijn die emotioneel intelligenter wordt, maar toch begrensd door zijn programmatie. Achtig.

Kazuo Ishiguro is an exceptional writer, no questions asked. He has a very unique, clean style and intriguing creativity around fiction stories.

He doesn't disappoint in this book either.
I had a very interesting experience getting into this book though: I had difficulty getting into it when I started reading it first. But things changed when I continued the book while listening to its audiobook version, which was narrated beautifully.

For some reason, the end felt a little flat compared to the build of the story.

Continuing to work my way through Ishiguro's bibliography in a completely arbitrary order. This touches on a lot of similar themes as Never Let Me Go - systemic caretaking, human costs of technology, being beholden to a world you barely understand - but with less clarity and emotional sophistication than made that book so exceptional.

It's quite interesting to see how in the 15 or so years, Ishiguro is now working through new concerns around AI and climate change as opposed to more allegorical technology. I think this one may end up aging better than I feel about it today, but I was left feeling like it never quite arrived at the ideas it was toying with. This is partially by design as it's told effectively from the perspective of a child, but even taken in perspective with the premise it's quite detached. In particular wish there was a bit more of an idea what this near future society is like. We hear about it in incongruous whispers but it ends up feeling like hypotheticals than anything coherent with the rest of the text.

An enjoyable read despite its frustrating inconclusions. Shockingly breezy for an Ishiguro book, I tore through this much faster than anticipated which may also speak to the reservations above.

I have some mixed thoughts on this book. I liked it, but more in an intellectual way than an emotional way. There were a number of details that were not clear to me that seemed like I should know by the verbiage. In retrospect, I believe that was intentional as the story is told in first person by a character who is learning these things as the story goes along. That being said, this is a well written book. 

The thing that I struggled with most was how certain thoughts of the protagonist were not revealed in developing the story. I was confused by the character's reasoning and perspective when the story is being told from that character's perspective. For that reason, I missed out on seeing the main point of the story as I was distracted by other details in trying to understand. 

Ideas about discovering one's self, the influences family and circumstances have on our views and choices, privilege (and lack of it), and how we see others are all themes that are visited in this story. What I like about this story and the way these ideas are visited is they are presented as observations from the protagonist without judgment or qualification. 

A humanoid AI tells the story of her life from department store to her role as service companion to a young adolescent. Klara's relationship with the Sun is central to the story but remains enigmatic, almost spiritual. I was waiting for more technical explanations but Ishiguro appears to prefer to leave the reader with philosophical and spiritual questions.
This story muses on what it means to be human, to have hope and reminds me somewhat of the Simone Weil phrase that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”.

This story reminded me a little of the Kogonada film After Yang, which has a similar premise.

I felt Klara and the Sun had potential to embrace and explore greater complexity, but I also appreciated Ishiguro's focus on simplicity.

I listened to this as an audio book, so my experience of it is influenced by the media. It was a creative story well-told from the first-person perspective of the AI Klara. The world building was mainly hinted at and thus I would have liked it to be more clear and direct. I think the author is one of the most innovative novelists of our time.??

The goodreads app kept eating my review so here is my last attempt. Very slow start but ramped up extremely fast beyond the 50% mark. Left me extremely confused and very deliberately does not answer the questions it forces you to ask, which I think was a key point of the book and something commonly found in other books by the author (from what I've heard). I know it sounds negative but I don't mean this in a negative way, it means we have to come up with our own answers, which isn't always a bad thing.

Ultimately was a study of human behaviour, interaction and motivation in a future that doesn't seem too far off from where we are. I was interested enough to keep reading till the end and, honestly, if you make it past the slow beginning, and enjoy stories like this, it is truly worth the read.

Klara, an Artificial Friend, is in her store waiting to be sold to a family. When she is chosen by a teenage girl named Josie, she is thrilled. She goes to live with them, and this is the story of Klara's life.

This book was ok. I went into it hesitant because the synopsis did not seem like something up my alley. My instincts were correct. I didn't hate this book. I enjoyed it well enough and listened to the whole thing. But I wasn't wowed by it. I found it to be anticlimactic and boring. The whole story is told from Klara's point of view. Because she is a robot, there is a naivete and matter-of-factness to her inner dialogue that, while intriguing at first, eventually became kind of boring. There were a few small twists in the book that were off-putting as intended, but it felt like nothing ever really came of them. The characters all felt pretty 2 dimensional, and ultimately I felt like this book was just a slice of life story with a robot narrator.

Again, this isn't a bad book by any means. I'm sure there are people out there who would really enjoy this book. It just wasn't for me.

TW: death, depression, child illness, neglect

Masterful.

There is a wonderful moment in this book where the secret of what makes us unique and distinguishable as humans is revealed.

Sometimes when I finish a book, the experience of reading it is so special that I feel reluctant to put it away. As if setting it back on the shelf is some sort of betrayal.

Recommend.

This book was definitely interesting. And the ending was very sweet. But I think I was just really thrown off by how the adults in the book behave and talk and act. It was extremely off-putting but maybe it was supposed to be. I like the idea but ultimately not much happened if anything. And I don't think there is enough character development for nothing to have happened.

As with other Ishiguro works I've read, the narrative of Klara and the Sun floats me along, like a gentle river. The point of view character is Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF), a humanoid designed to befriend humans and have their best interests at heart.

From the storefront from which she observes human goings on outside the window and arrives at a conclusion that will shape her decision in the later part of the story, to a home in the countryside, after she is selected and purchased by Josie, a sickly child of about fourteen, for company, Klara's point of view is an interesting one.

Visually she discerns the world through geometric shapes, angles, light and shadow. At times, her vision divides into squares with each segment a piece of out-of-place jigsaw, the result like an abstract art work. Despite this, Klara is unusually perceptive, even compared to newer AF models, with a deep curiosity about, and compassion for humans.

Can almost humans make life better for humans? This is an intriguing concept, and the premise begs deeper exploration of humans and machines, AI and its applications, and what constitutes human-ness. Because the story is told by Klara, we are at a point removed from the drama, and the human interactions - especially the scene of Klara's friends at her home - take on a slightly surreal quality.

In the time and age of the story, parents are expected to have their children “lifted” or genetically enhanced but there are side effects. One can deduce that the children are the first generation to be able to benefit - or die - from the process of genetic enhancements. Josie's childhood sweetheart and neighbour, Rick, is unlifted and life for him presents different prospects with fewer opportunities. In the second half of the novel, there is another reveal, when Klara is taken to the city and discovers what Josie's mother has in mind for her, should Josie not become better.

The story reveals information in slow drips. The narrative is leisurely, and though the eddies become more turbulent in the second half of the novel, the pace remains sedate. I had no trouble with this. The slow pace enabled absorption of the world Klara inhabited, a world where creators (humans) questioned the value and virtues of their own creations.

Having read Never Let Me Go, which was sad and deeply disturbing, I found Klara and the Sun to be a more hopeful rendition of the same theme, albeit still a melancholic one. If there is a criticism, it is that there is no central question to be answered, or explored. In NLMG, the rights of clones comes into sharp focus but in this one, there are instead a multitude of smaller questions. The question of what makes us human is explored, but I am reluctant to settle for Klara's touching but simplistic conclusion.

Klara and the Sun is a moving narrative of humans and machines, the latter of which can be programmed to have our best interests at heart even while we humans with our complicated intelligence and tangled emotions often act against our own.

This is a book that explores the future world in which there are robot friends (Artificial Friends, or AF) for children. These AF have some capacities which exceed our own, but in other ways they're not considered fully human. The book is an exploration of a relationship between a little girl and an AF. The author does a great job in getting into the mind of a foreign character in a realistic and believable way. For me this was too much of a slow burn, the ending falls flat and just left me wanting something more.