So What Will Happen in the Movie?

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Pages: 303 Genre: science fiction

Rating: 3.5 Star

Klara is an Artificial Friend who has excellent observational abilities. She loves to watch the world around her and dreams of being chosen by a child. Through the store window, she meets Josie who promises to come back for her.

So, that's really all you get from the Goodreads summary, and I don't know how to explain more without technically spoiling everything. I won't elaborate, but I don't want you to think the story is exclusively about Klara in the store.

I saw the movie trailer and thought that it looked interesting, so I put the book on hold at the library. Now, months later, I'm happy to report that The People are correct and the vibes of this book do not match the vibes of the movie trailer. Although it was not what I was expecting, I still really enjoyed the book. The first half dragged, and while I came to appreciate it once I had finished, it still made a slow start.

Klara was a very endearing protagonist. I don't think it's accurate to say her intelligence is like a child's other than the sense of new-ness. But it was interesting how her personality and personal background was built around and informed by the gaps in her artificial intelligence. I liked seeing her relationship with the Sun and with humans evolve as she experienced more and more.

The other characters were alright, but they were almost more interesting to me as what they represented rather than who they were. I can appreciate what that meant within the context of the story, as the whole thing was fed through Klara's first person perspective, but it also made me more detached from them than would've benefitted the story.

The world of the story, and the way it was revealed to the reader, was super engaging to me. I loved that the author trusted me to keep up with everything — it's not something you get with every book these days. It also was interesting to be in a world that seemed to be just after major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. It's present enough to have changed the world (for AFs to have seen multiple generations) but it's new enough that people have still not fully adjusted to it (Klara is only Gen 2). In some sense, this is the part I'm most interested to see in the movie because our world has changed a lot in that regard from when the book was written just five years ago. It's hard to not let my own feelings on modern AI influence my reading of the book and the moral questions presented. Regardless, I appreciated it.

I don't want to spoil anything by saying too much, but I was really moved by the plot. It certainly played on my own expectations.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was a perfect mix of literary fiction and science fiction (not that it is literary fiction; more literary fiction if we lived within the world of the novel). While it took a while for me to really connect with it, once I did I was really into it.