Notes on Klara and the Sun

In my efforts to write more about what I read, I have a few thoughts to share on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. I finished reading it last week while in the midst of being sick. 

Klara and the Sun is a beautiful novel. It feels at times like a high literature version of something we’ve read many times before. The Velveteen Rabbit or The Brave Little Toaster or Toy Story or any sad story told from a pet’s story perspective. It’s sad and you know from the beginning that it will be sad, but you aren’t certain why, and I won’t tell you exactly why, because I think you should read it if you haven’t already. So, yes, Klara and the Sun is a literary version of The Brave Little Toaster. Let’s go with that. 

I don’t think I need to write a lot about this novel. But I do think it has cemented my belief that Ishiguro is one of the greatest living writers.

Klara and the Sun did not make me cry, but I think it might make a lot of people cry. Alongside the sadness in this book is a gothic horror, the robot in the house where there are mysteries, where people have died before and might die again. And then there’s the humor, more humor than Ishiguro typically goes for. 

You could call Klara and the Sun paint-by-numbers Ishiguro. All the tropes are here. Almost every novel Ishiguro writes is a narrator looking back on their entire life, telling us of moments they lived through and what those moments meant and how those moments took on greater meaning when, later, they realized how those moments connected with the greater sweep of their lives. There’s always a scene where something happens and in the moment, the author isn’t sure what to make of it, but as they describe it to us they have the knowledge of what it meant, that distinction between the protagonist living it and the narrator who has lived it all. Only in The Buried Giant does he not do this—although he might not do it in The Unconsoled either; I still haven’t finished it—as in The Buried Giant, that the characters don’t know where they’ve been or where they’re going and neither does the audience. 

I turned the pages quickly, needing to know what happened and trying to understand the aspects of the world he keeps ambiguous. Like the children’s intended fates in Never Let Me Go or the butler’s backstory in Remains of the Day, he keeps realities of Klara’s world hidden from us and lets them through in drops. Ideas like lifted and the slow fade and substitution are slowly explained as the novel goes. Eventually we have just enough of the world to understand the world, and then it ends. 

My friend Conor summed this up in a good way: it’s maybe the weakest books by Ishiguro he’s read, and still better than a book by almost any other author.

So, the two questions I like to answer any time I write about a book: do I recommend it and would I read it again? In this case, I don’t know that I need to answer those. Yes, of course I recommend it, but if you haven’t read Ishiguro I don’t think this would be my starting point. If you have read Ishiguro before then you don’t need my advice. You know you’re going to read it. And yes, I’m sure I’ll eventually read it again.