july read / klara and the sun

In a near-distant future dystopia, society is stratified into “high ranking” and “low ranking” people. Pollution is rampant, machines are taking away jobs, and children learn in isolation on tablets, only engaging with other children during scheduled interaction meetings. The wealthier children are able to choose solar-powered humanoid robots, called AFs or Artificial Friends, to be their companions as they grow up. The book is told from the point of view of an AF named Klara and follows her journey alongside a sickly girl named Josie… who also may be dying?

Our July read is Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, which was long-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize. It takes a lot for me to enjoy anything techno-dystopian without feeling absolute doom and gloom about the world. I will actually go out of my way to avoid the entire genre, and only caved for Klara and the Sun because I learned that Taika Waititi was directing the adaptation, which is set to release this year (?). I’m so glad I gave this book a chance though; there is actually so much love that anchors it, and as a result it’s one of the most ‘human’ stories I’ve ever read. Ishiguro always dives layers deep into themes, but his writing is effortless and easy to read. He guides us, but never over-explains, leaving the reader with just enough to ultimately draw their own conclusions. I can’t wait to discuss this one.

Here is the month’s schedule:

Substack Posts: July 1 - Book announcement | July 7 - Moodboard + Playlist | July 21 - Further Reading/Watching List | July 28 - Post-Discussion Wrap Up | July 30 - Video Diary

Discussion Threads: July 11 - Parts 1 & 2 | July 18 - Parts 3 & 4 | July 24 - Parts 5 & 6

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in 1954 in Nagasaki but moved to England with his family when he was 5 years old. He’s talked about how growing up in a Japanese household gave him a different artistic perspective from his British peers.

As an example, he’s mentioned how the “slightly detached nature” of his narrators comes from “a long tradition in Japanese art towards a surface calm and surface restraint.”

At just 27 years old, he was the youngest on Granta’s inaugural best of young British novelists list. Six years later, he published his third book The Remains of the Day (1989), which catapulted him into international fame; it sold more than a million copies in English, won the Booker Prize, and was adapted into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins. He ended up winning the Nobel Prize in 2017 and is regarded as one of literature’s most important contemporary fiction writers.

Around 2014, somebody at Ishiguro’s publishing house asked if he’d want to write a children’s story. If you’re surprised as I am why anyone would ask Ishiguro to write a children’s story, he clarified that the publisher probably meant a YA novel. But he got stuck on this idea for a small picture book. He asked his daughter, Naomi, who was working at a bookstore at the time and therefore used to selling children’s books, what she thought of the story he came up with.

He recounted, “[Naomi] looked at me coldly and said there’s no way you can tell that story to children. You’re just going to traumatize them. I thought, ooh, well maybe I can use it for a novel, and that’s kind of where Klara and the Sun came from.”

Readers have compared Klara and the Sun to his previous work, Never Let Me Go, a story about three teenage clones whose organs are being harvested for their ‘original’ bodies, and so their certain death at around age 30 is guaranteed. NLMG explores the question of what it means to ‘have a soul’ through the narrative of clones. Klara and the Sun tackles a similar question but through AI robots.

He’s responded to this comparison, “Literary novelists are slightly defensive about being repetitive. I think it is perfectly justified: you keep doing it until it comes closer and closer to what you want to say each time.”

In another interview, he said, “Never Let Me Go has a certain sadness about it, and perhaps Klara and the Sun is a way of replying to my own earlier book. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I think I wanted to express a kind of optimism and sunshine in Klara that could balance the bleaker mood and vision of Never Let Me Go. Like anybody else, I have to cheer myself up from time to time!”

I think part of this optimism also relates to Ishiguro’s idea that Klara and the Sun might be his swan song. In his Nobel lecture in 2017, he described himself as a “tired author, from an intellectually tired generation.”

He explained to Time, “The thing about the Nobel is, it’s like a lifetime achievement award. Nobody expects you to publish anything after winning it. You begin to think — well, what if this is my last book? Do I need to make a late career statement?”

Ishiguro sought comfort through Bob Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind, which he explains as being “the first time I was aware of someone creating art that embraces the idea of getting old.” As a result, I think these ideations bled into his work. I found Klara and the Sun to be very reflective of aging and of — maybe — Ishiguro’s personal realizations towards it as well.

• Why do you think Ishiguro made Klara the narrator? How would the story be different if Josie was the narrator?

• There is something akin to religious worship that Klara has for the sun, which the human characters are unable to understand. What purpose does ‘the sun’ play in the narrative?

• When looking at the experiences of Josie and Rick — do you believe it’s better to be lifted or unlifted?

• How does the concept of ‘time’ come up as a theme in Klara and the Sun? Is there a difference between the way a human and a machine ages?

• Do you think Klara and the Sun is an optimistic or pessimistic novel?