Never Let Me Go readers will recognize this narrative trick of Ishiguro’s. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark She seems to feel guilty about it, but also proud, in some strange and confusing way that Klara, in her sweet naivety, cannot quite parse. And Josie’s mother, who treats Klara with an icy politeness that occasionally shades into desperation, seems to have an unusual relationship with her daughter’s illness.
Klara goes happily home with Josie, ready to be a source of unconditional love in Josie’s isolated and sickly life.īecause Josie is ill. So when Klara locks eyes with 14-year-old Josie, and Josie says, “That’s the AF I’ve been looking for,” it’s mutual love at first sight. (Ishiguro finished this novel before the pandemic rendered online schools so common in our own timeline.) In-person school is now obsolete, and so are peer friendships. They attend virtual classes through devices Klara calls “oblongs” instead. She’s a solar-powered robot who’s been designed specifically to be the perfect friend - intelligent, empathetic, wanting only to protect and serve - for a lonely child.Īnd most wealthy children in this near-future world are lonely because most of them don’t go to school in person. The Klara of Klara and the Sun is an AF, or Artificial Friend. Why shouldn’t it look a little like a great novelist returning to one of his favorite party tricks? Have we truly advanced past the need for that trick? Which is perhaps why it makes sense that this new book feels so reminiscent of Never Let Me Go, the novel Ishiguro wrote in 2005 that is arguably his most beloved work. Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book and his first novel since he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017, is a spare and tender exploration of what it means to be made redundant, to exist in a world that believes itself to have moved past a need for you.
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