Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)
“A solar-powered robot girl watches humans destroy themselves slowly — and decides love is worth every kind of ruin.”
EraContemporary / Speculative Fiction
Pages307
Difficulty★★☆☆☆ Moderate
AP Appearances2
Character Analysis
An AF who sees everything and understands most of it, who loves with complete devotion and acts on that love at cost to herself, and who cannot definitively confirm whether any of her experience constitutes genuine consciousness. Klara is Ishiguro's most technically radical narrator and his most emotionally direct one simultaneously. Her theology — the Sun as conscious, benevolent, bargainable deity — is her most distinctly non-human feature and her most recognizably human one.
How They Speak
Precise, formal, hedged — 'I could see that,' 'it seemed to me that.' Avoids claiming direct knowledge of others' inner states.