The only visitor is Rick the neighbor who is Josie’s childhood friend and current boyfriend. She is purchased by a girl named Josie and moves to her house where she has to learn to understand her and the other adults of the house that include Chrissie, Josie’s mother and Melania, the hostile housekeeper. She is exceptionally observant and intuitive.
One of the AFs named Klara is different from the others. Yet they have very limited knowledge of the world outside. They come programmed with a knowledge of many things. Artificial Friends are robots created for the express purpose of providing children with guidance and companionship and to help them deal with their loneliness. They are displayed in different areas of the store and get their turn at the coveted spot by the window to entice potential customers. In a shop on a busy street, there are solar powered AF or Artificial Friends waiting to be sold. We are in an unnamed city in a futuristic world, albeit a foreseeable future. The same themes that we find in Never Let Me Go are rehashed and packaged in a new form in Klara and the Sun and although there are aspects to the book that are thought provoking, it falls far short of the former which packed great emotional force. To me it seemed similar to Never Let Me Go they are both sci-fi dystopian novels in a sense, and yet, I would hesitate to include them under any rigid genre categorization as they are also philosophical in tone and ultimately a meditation on the human condition and our existential plight. Klara and the Sun is not painstaking to read on the contrary, it is fast-paced and a page turner. I found it a laborious read and trudged along through the pages waiting for the novel to end. I didn’t have a great reading experience either with The Buried Giant, the book published prior to this one. I was eagerly looking forward to reading this book and unfortunately it left me a little underwhelmed. Regular readers of my blog will know that Ishiguro is among my favorite contemporary authors. Klara and the Sun is the latest novel of Kazuo Ishiguro and the first since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
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