Klara and the Sun

Despite the whole Nobel Prize thing and multiple major motion pictures, Klara and the Sun turns out to be the first Kasuo Ishiguro novel I've picked up.  What interested me most was the fact that it was described as a sci-fi novel.  Since sci-fi is so often a genre that suffers from some truly appalling writing and storytelling craft, it usually pays off to find those few sci-fi writers who can actually, you know, write.  Klara does not disappoint on this front.  While it's a breezy read without a hint of challenging high literary style, it's still clearly the work of a master craftsman.  Ishiguro manages the build-up of tension, and the various possible directions the story could move in like, well, a Nobel Prize winning author.  

Like the best sci-fi, the focus of the book is on the relevance of a hypothetical future to our image of our present identity.  The novel is narrated by Klara, an AF (artificial friend) purchased for the sick young girl Josie.  Just like when an author tells a story through the eyes of a child or an animal, Ishiguro' use of an android voice allows him to make the commonplace and everyday look strange and new.  Klara has to learn about the world, about the dynamics of the family who purchases her, and about her own perceptions and feelings along the way.  Like I say, mostly this lets Ishiguro explore human universals like love, sacrifice, and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, from a new angle.  But he does allow himself one more technical speculation; the novel comes closest to 'hard' sci-fi when Klara describes her perception of the world as fractured into multiple box-like screens or views that zoom in on certain aspects of reality.  Ishiguro doesn't make the import of this perception completely clear, but it struck me as something akin to describing the inner experience of a parallel processing algorithm.  And if you don't feel like one of those yourself these days, you must have been living in a cave for the past 20 years.  

Since the novel has something of a page-turning thriller aspect to it, I won't spoil the plot any more than I already have.  I think it's best read with no prior knowledge (we learn that Klara is artificial on the first page, so knowing this spoils nothing).