Unlike the last decade’s threateningly titled and told YA series best exemplified by The Hunger Games, Klara and the Sun is narrated cheerfully, juxtaposing Klara’s childlike hope and friendship with the reader’s creeping, adult realization that this world might be a dystopian nightmare for everyone except the inhuman Klara herself. She is perceptive of detail but not of significance, however, as the reader slowly-and this is a slowly paced novel-begins to understand more than the narrator herself. Klara, we are repeatedly told, is an especially observant AF, which positions her perfectly to be the kind of narrator Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005), favors. Perhaps that’s why we never get a solid description of Klara herself. Klara is our narrator, and her perspective-and therefore the reader’s-from her limited side of the glass, even after she’s free from the store, pervades the novel. Can she change, the reader wonders can she learn anything from her brief existence? Can any of us? The story ominously implies.

There is something of the children’s book, the YA novel, the coming of age story, to Klara and the Sun, in its focus on adolescent self-discovery, of leaving a small world while taking something of it into a larger, more complex one.

Unlike Corduroy, Klara’s story does not end shortly after she goes home with her girl. Like Corduroy, Don Freeman’s beloved department store bear, Klara awaits purchase from the right child, Josie, who had previously visited the store and promised to return. But, it turns out, so are the children who can afford them. But then they get sad.’” “‘A child like that,’” Klara responds, “with no AF, would surely be lonely.’” If Klara were human, this loneliness would surely be a projection on her part. That’s why they come to the window, to dream about having you.

But there is nothing artificial about her friendship.Īs Manager, as Klara calls her, explains to her, “‘There are many children out there who would love to be able to choose you’” or one of the other AFs in the store. She is some kind of robot, to be sure, even though, despite long passages of description, we never quite learn what Klara looks like, and how humans so consistently and easily tell her apart. Klara is an Artificial Friend-an AF, as they’re referred to-but the name is both literal and ironic. So once the grid went up, the realization that there was now only the glass between me and the sidewalk, that I was free to see, close up and whole, so many things I’d seen before only as corners and edges, made me so excited…” “I’d always longed to see more of the outside,” she says, “and to see it in all its detail. Klara, the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s slow burn Klara and the Sun, spends most of the first section of the novel in a store, sometimes looking out the storefront window to observe her sliver of street life.

Klara and the sun book