Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro is a book I picked up for numerous reasons – the front cover intrigued me, I’d seen it doing the rounds online at some point and it was on my dad’s bookshelf so an easy one to pick up – just to name a few. Therefore, I went into it completely blind with no idea what to expect in terms of characters, pacing or plot. I’ve come out of it with more of an idea but still a little confused.
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Klara and the Sun follows the story of Klara, an “Artificial Friend” who is bought by Josie, a sick young girl. The story follows Klara, from a first person point of view, as she’s bought and then arrives home and begins to better understand the family she has been sold into. Upon realising Josie is sick, Klara believes the sun can cure Josie and so sets out on numerous missions to try and harness the power of the sun to make Josie better – that’s my understanding of all of this anyway. There’s also a darker storyline going on underneath which is where I started to become confused.
Klara and the Sun plot – 3.75/5
So as I said, there are two different plot points going on in Klara and the Sun – neither of which really ever have focus or come to a resounding conclusion. One tells the story I mentioned above and another goes down quite a dark route which I won’t spoil but as the reader you keep thinking “surely that’s not where this is going” and at one point it does get very close to going there but luckily doesn’t completely (if that makes sense).
So with the confusion of which plot points we’re supposed to be focusing on and the fact that none of these stories ever really get resolved, I left Klara and the Sun feeling a little underwhelmed and confused.
Maybe if Ishiguro had focused on one of the attempts instead of trying to run two in parallel, I might have been able to become more interested in one.
Klara and the Sun characters – 3.5/5
To compound the fact that the story had me a little confused, I was also left feeling very uncomfortable with the odd characters involved. Oddly, our main character (the artificial friend) was the most human and believable character in the whole book. I’m not sure if the fact that the book is a translation and so some of the conversations were lost a bit in its naturalness, but I just found some of the things that the characters said to each other incredibly odd. It was almost like when you listen to a dubbed asian show and they say the literal most basic translation of what the character has said instead of adding any English dialect or slang to it.
This element and the fact that, again other than our main character who is an AI, none of the other characters were particularly likeable added to my frustrations for a book that had some really interesting themes and the potential to be right up my street.
Klara and the Sun final rating – 3.5/5
With no real direction, some incredibly odd dialogue and some ambitious but undelivered themes, Klara and the Sun is a book that I had high hopes for but that never actually reached said heights. Klara and the Sun features robots and science fiction elements and tries to tell the story of this AI robot healing a young girl but it never really gets going, I was never really sure what the point of the conversations was and there’s also an underlying conversation going on between the humans that’s incredibly odd and actually never comes to fruition (you’ll know more if you read it). I went in not really knowing what I was getting myself in for and came out not really that much the wiser.
