Klara And The Sun

Paperback, 303 pages

English language

Published Dec. 31, 2020 by Vintage.

ISBN:
978-0-593-31129-5
Copied ISBN!
Goodreads:
54112562

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (86 reviews)

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

2 editions

Not sure how I feel about this one.

3 stars

Overall, I liked it... I think. It felt slow for me, and I feel like I was never fully engaged with the characters or the story. I appreciated that it put me inside the mind of a fictional sentient AI and asked me to see the world through her lens, and I felt sad at the end. I think it raises some decent questions about how we treat older technology and where the line between a thing and a person is.

Review of '克拉拉与太阳' on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

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 …

reviewed Klara And The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Topical and Moving

4 stars

Ishiguro's novel about a sentient robot is very timely, thought-provoking, and disturbing. My favorite character in this story was definitely Klara, the AF (artificial friend). In some ways, this is a challenging read, since the author does not spell everything out, and there are plenty of details that are not spelled out. Klara's reasoning and sensory clues are well described, however, and the saddest aspect of this story is how much of Klara's knowledge and insights will never be explained or shared with those she cared about most. Like most of those who have been assigned by society to a subservient role, she is vastly underestimated. This is a story that will stay with me, and I do recommend it.

Review of '克拉拉与太阳' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

When he'd posted his question - about children really understanding what it meant to love - I believe he was already sure of the answer and was simply raising the question for my benefit.

Meh?

I am torn on how to review this book. On one hand it was casually engaging and probably had some deep hidden meaning, but on the other it was a bit dull.

I can enjoy a slow burn or character story, but I need a reward for my patience. In those situations I can fall into a well described and immersive world, or have the author deliver such amazing prose that the most mundane becomes interesting (Guy Gavriel Kay is a master at writing and making the ordinary become a thrill). Lacking that little extra the story failed to hook me and bordered on tedium.

Ishiguro subscribes to the "show don't tell" method of crafting …

Review of '克拉拉与太阳' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

3.5 stars. Spoilers ahead.

I went into this book completely and utterly blind. All I knew about this book was that it was one of the most borrowed books of 2021 of a library I visit. No further details about anything regarding what this book was about, not the vaguest clue.

Not knowing what this book was about and thus, having almost no expectations is most likely why I came to enjoy it. The reviews I have come across have either been preaching this books greatness or talking of it as if were the most boring book in existence.

I must agree, it is rather ~slow~ in terms of progression—but it is quite literally written from the perspective of a robot, an AF if you will. Though the writing isn't a masterpiece per se, it does arise some intriguing questions.

Klara, the AF that finds herself accompanying Josie, a teenager …

Review of '克拉拉与太阳' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

My second Ishiguro in a row — why did I wait so long to discover him?? — and it seems almost impossible to talk about his books without going into spoilers. It seems safe to lay out the major themes I note in his writing: classism, empathy, loneliness. Kindness and cruelty. Both books so far have been first-person reminiscence from a quiet but watchful servant-class entity nearing the end of their life, with heavy emphasis on the unreliability of memory and on how, despite our best intentions, our understanding of the world and of others is so incomplete. Both are masterpieces of exposition, with puzzle pieces being hinted at, then appearing in due course, then finally fitting in. Both have been sublime, deeply thoughtful.

I hate using the spoiler tag because of how stupid the Goodreads phone app is with them. But although most of my Goodreads writing is for …

Review of '克拉拉与太阳' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

 Not much to see here, which surprised the hell out of me considering [a:Kazuo Ishiguro|4280|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1424906625p2/4280.jpg]'s reputation and how well [b:Klara and the Sun|54120408|Klara and the Sun|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1603206535l/54120408.SY75.jpg|84460796] was received by critics, most of whom I doubt have read much speculative fiction.
 It's a paste up of a variety of things, some decades old, like A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the 2001 Steven Spielberg film that was based on a 1967 short story by Brian Aldiss; and, heavily, Caprica, the 2010 prequel to the 2004 re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica.
 Of some interest is the notion of artificial life forms that are constructed to grow via algorithms instead of only binary programing, so they form a degree of their own culture, but this too is not a new idea. Klara and the Sun so often read like young adult fiction that I wondered why it wasn't marketed as such. It is …

Review of '克拉拉与太阳' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I loved this novel. The way the author slowly reveals the details of the future Klara inhabits kept me intrigued, and I love that he leaves so much unexplained. Klara’s voice could have been cloying, but I actually found it to be charming, which is a real display of authorial skill. I am still thinking about all the questions this book raises, like what it means to be human, what the purposes of human relationships and belief systems are, and what “intelligence” is.

Review of '克拉拉与太阳' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

In which Kazuo Ishiguro says "betcha I can make you love a fucking little robot girl in 300 pages." Klara is the most deeply felt character for me in 2021.




Review of 'Klara and the Sun' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I happened to also be reading a Yuval Harari book where he observes that robots and AI in fiction are often just stand-ins for human characters, and that is definitely the case here. Klara's being "artificial" serves to point out ways that people may or may not be artificial, and allows some fresh perspectives on other human characters. It works if you can accept the starting point.

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