Kazuo Ishiguro (2021), Klara and the Sun, Faber, London, pp.307
It is a brand-new year and I am beginning with one of
my favorite writers of all time – the elegant and masterful Kazuo Ishiguro. The
blurb of his most recent book Klara and the Sun spoke about robots and
my inner voice screamed ‘please don’t go to the other side’. Ishiguro is one of
the four authors (others being Alice Munro, Julian Barnes and Penelope
Fitzgerald) that I never want to deviate from the path they tread. The day they
go uncharacteristic will be the beginning of the end for me. In a world where
most things are so irreversibly mutating, I have a terrible propensity for
stability and consistency. These authors remain my anchor points for the world
as I know it.
Dreading the worst, I bravely began this beautiful
story set some time in the future in which children are genetically modified
and have robots with artificial intelligence for companions. I mused, ‘clearly,
the worst has already happened’! But then, something emerged slowly from the
ruins of this dystopian setting, something akin to what you felt when you were
reading The Remains of the Day. A master at work on something delicate
and undestroyed – the primal innocence we are born with. This is Klara’s
reckoning in the human world and she blooms not as AI, but as a child, asking
questions, always being curious, and heartbreakingly human. Before long, we are
rooting for her as she navigates the politics and platitudes of the society in which
she is planted in.
The most beautiful part of the book is the
relationship Klara has with the sun. It is one of the oldest tropes of
nourishment and life and it symbolizes something undying and irreplaceable in
us. It is our capacity to love someone and act on that love. Klara’s love for
the child she accompanies is more poignant in the milieu that it is set
against, that of a withering human world. And what happens to this person as
she unfolds human-like in an inhuman world forms the rest of the story.
It takes mastery to weave the old with the new,
retaining something unexpected from both. Ishiguro weaves a rich tapestry not
with grandiose strokes, but with fragile imperceptible ones that paint pathos,
innocence and first learning, that of children awakening to love and loss with
unfailing dexterity. By extracting the human essence out of humanity, he shows
the most enduring part of us that are yet savable and worthy of saving.
If this is not a great way to begin this year, I don’t
know what is. Here’s wishing you a beautiful year ahead with books!
