Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun Is Another Stellar Achievement

Ernest Hemingway once made a dismissive remark about Nobel Prize winners in which he declared that once people win the prize they don't produce anything good or important again. (This is my paraphrase.) Kazuo Ishiguro's remarkable Klara and the Sun proves that such pronouncements are absurd. 

Ishiguro demonstrates once again why he is considered one of the great writers of our time. The English language has a shortage of superlatives to describe the power of his prose, so I shan't even attempt it. 

When I was asked yesterday what genre he writes in, it seemed impossible to explain. Magical Realism? Literary Exceptionalism? Maybe "serious literary fiction" says it best. 

Good Morning America Book Club, NYTimes Bestseller, and Best Book selection by numerous others.... 

Ishiguro's stories are always original, the characters vividly drawn. Klara and the Sun is no exception. A writer's first task is to draw you in, and from the opening paragraphs you are hooked, willing to go wherever he plans to take you. For any reader seeking more than superficial escapism, Ishiguro's books always deliver a payoff. (I have to qualify this remark. In reading the Amazon reviews afterward, I see that a number of people disliked this story. I will give my reasons for liking it and recommending it.)

The novel is told in first person from the point of view of Klara, an AF, which is short for Artificial Friend. In other words, she is an intelligent robot that families can buy from a store downtown. The AFs are designed to befriend children and to be kind.

Part One
The story begins with 45 pages about life in the retail store for AFs. Klara is paired with Rosa, which gives the author a chance to show how Klara is extremely perceptive to such a degree that is unique for an AF. The AFs are solar powered, which explains Klara's unusual relationship to the sun. Eventually Josie comes into her life.

Part Two
The next 60 pages detail life with her new family. It is a three story house in the country. The Mother is a professional woman, Josie somewhere in her teens and Melania Housekeeper is the third member of the household. We learn that Josie had a sister who died, and that Josie herself is sickly so that everyone worries about her surviving. There is also a house next door and we soon get to know a boy named Rick. As the story progresses there are things we don't know but, as in a mystery novel, we feel their weight in the way Klara tells the story. 

Part Three 
The relationship between Josie and Rick is explored and challenged as their expectations for the future seem to collide with present realities. We learn more about Rick's family after Klara visits their house, and we see how much Josie's illness impacts nearly everyone around her.

Part Four
In this section we meet the scientist/artist Mr. Capaldi and Josie's father. There is a clash between each of the characters that turns pretty ugly. Issues regarding motivations, fears and a sense of impending doom color the atmosphere, yet Klara throughout has maintained a sense of irrational hope. 

Parts Five and Six
The last two sections of the book tie together a number of clues that have been sown throughout and answer the questions that may have been raised in the reader's mind. 

One of the themes in this and other Ishiguro stories has to do with what it means to be human. Loneliness is another recurring theme. The challenges presented by relationships are part of his stories as well -- misunderstandings, fear of being hurt, et.

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Kazuo Ishiguro. Creative commons.

Not all the reviewers at Amazon.com fell in love with this book, so I can't promise this is for you. For me, however, I not only read as a reader but as a writer as well. I get mesmerized by the manner in which a great writer weaves a spell on the reader. I am especially impressed when a writer creates a unique narrator and is consistent throughout for 250 pages and more. An example of this might be Graham Greene's The End of the Affair in which the narrator tells a story, but the reader understands that the narrator is not reading things correctly.

In Klara, anxiety sets the tone from near the beginning. When she sees Josie in the store, will Josie come back? Will Josie recover from her illness? Will Rick and Josie live happily ever after in a world as broken as this? Will Klara fulfill her mission? As in real life, we never really know how things will turn out, so we have to keep following our path.

Maureen Corrigan of NPR described this as “one of the most affecting and profound novels Ishiguro has written….I'll go for broke and call Klara and the Sun a masterpiece that will make you think about life, mortality, the saving grace of love: in short, the all of it.”

Followers of this blog will know that I am a fairly big fan of Kazuo Ishiguro. People ask if he is a Japanese writer. The answer is that he was born in Nagasaki but grew up in England since age five. He's won numerous awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.

Here are some of the posts I've written about his other books, as well as an interview about Dylan that appeared in a 2008 Paris Review. 

Ishiguro Again Shows His Mastery in Never Let Me Go

In Awe of Ishiguro's The Buried Giant

A 3-Day Ride with Ryder: Ishiguro's The Unconsoled

Kazuo Ishiguro On Dylan

Ishiguro's Klara Is Apparently No Fiction

I have a habit of acquiring, through purchase or library borrowing, more books than I will read. My curious approach to reading is to try to read a little of each one. Afterwards, I have three stacks: must read, hope to read, most likely not finish. Books in the latter stack that are library books will be returned. If they are books in my possession, they will be shelved. 

Which brings us to Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun. Kazuo Ishiguro is unquestionably one of the great novelists of our time. At this moment Klara and the Sun is in my Must Read stack. Having a book like Klara in that stack is forcing me to finish two other books there so I can dig into it. 

In the Ken Burns documentary on Ernest Hemingway this past year, Hemingway is quoted as saying that writers who win a Nobel Prize never produce anything great again. Ishiguro is proving Hemingway wrong. 

Ishiguro's stories are beautifully crafted and each an original. He paints such vivid characters and scenes and always leaves you feeling something and engaged in reflection. For example, in Never Let Me Go the story is told by a character who is nearing her life's end and discovering how many different ways she misunderstood what she experienced while living it earlier. This led me to reconsider many events in my own life and the ways I failed to see what was really happening.

WHAT PROMPTED this excursion into Ishiguro's writings was an article I came across this week about robots being created to serve as assistants for health care providers. Their mission, among other things, is to brighten people's lives. They can also do "talk therapy."

For the past 30 years I've held the opinion that by the time Baby Boomers are in nursing homes, there would be renewed opening of our borders to immigration in order to have more workers available to attend to our needs. (i.e. empty bedpans, keep us company, etc.) It never entered my mind that robots might be created for this purpose one day. 

The article is a photo gallery with a bit of description as regards what you are seeing. It's titled, Meet Grace, the healthcare robot COVID-19 created.

Having been introduced to Klara, the AI narrator of Ishiguro's novel, I can hardly wait to hear the rest of her story. 

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Related Links

See my reviews of two other Ishiguro novels I've read in the past couple years.
The Buried Giant
The Unconsoled

Ishiguro Again Shows His Mastery: Never Let Me Go

This past week I've been wholly captivated by yet another Ishiguro marvel, Never Let Me Go.

What is it that gives Kazuo Ishiguro's writing such power? Perhaps it's his patience in laying out the story and developing such vivid characters. Perhaps it's the gravity, though we as readers are not even certain what that force behind the story really is. Perhaps it's the manner in which the stories are told, in which you know that there are things the characters don't know, but then you don't really know either.

The above paragraph reminds me of an exercise in John Gardner's On Becoming A Novelist in which the writer is asked to describe a pond. There is a dead body hidden from view, so it is a serious scene, but the writer has to create the feeling only through describing what is seen.

Ishiguro clearly has become masterful at conveying this kind of undertone without ever explicitly stating it. "Show, don't tell" is one of the first dictum's fiction writers hear at writer's conferences, and this author does it ever so well.

Perhaps its the manner in which these situations he creates unearth painful revelations within ourselves is another aspect of his writing that makes it so potent. I think that right there is a big part of it. Or at least for me. As our narrator Kath tells the story, which consists of strings of interconnected narratives about various people, it seems as if she is striving to resolve what was really going on, things she'd not fully grasped as she experienced them.

So it is that I have remembrances come to mind, instances in which I behaved badly, or failed to speak up, or spoke and should have kept silent. Little did I know that some of these moments would become critical turning points in relationships that once were meaningful.

Friendship and loss, memories and revelations, loneliness and meaning--these are key themes in Never Let Me Go.

SPOILER ALERT

There's something special about the students living at Hailsham, a boarding school in England. At first we don't know what's so special about this school, and neither do the children who grow up there, but eventually a little light streams in and we learn that these children are here for a purpose.

The three main characters in Never Let Me Go are Kath, Tommy and Ruth. These characters are drawn with such detail that you can almost hear them breathing and recognize their fingerprints. Ruth's manipulations are ever so annoying, and Tommy's struggles create such empathy that you lose yourself in Kathy's meandering reflections on the key moments they have shared both at Hailsham and afterwards.

Any number of thoughts come to mind here, one of them being the manner in which a family secret comes to light after it has been suppressed for many years. I'm thinking of a child born of incest, who never realizes why he has no father but eventually senses, then learns, that it's his grandfather.

In this story, the children of Hailsham were part of a program to clone humans who would grow up to become organ donors. As young adults they give until they do not survive. It can be two, three or four, but eventually you give your body parts till you are "complete," which is a euphemism for death.

It's no wonder that a pall hangs over everyone's tale of self-discovery. How the characters respond to these revelations, often nothing more than rumors because the teachers of Hailsham are limited in what they can openly disclose, is the heart of this story.

Eventually the students leave Hailsham and move to the Cottages. From here they become Carers, and then Donors. Some lucky ones will have a chance to get deferrals for a couple years before entering that Donor stage. This is another undercurrent in the story of this threesome.

* * * *

The title of the novel, "Never Let Me Go," is taken from a late 1950's song by Judy Bridgewater, recorded on her album Songs After Dark. Judy Bridgewater and this song recur several times as events unfold involving Tommy, Ruth and Kath.

I love Ishiguro's writing. There's a beauty in the way he digs into the nuances of relationships. Here's a sentence that illustrates this. Kath is reflecting on an incident which seemed insignificant at thee time, but was not.

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.

Hailsham seem's like an interesting choice for the name of the school. The student clones are shams, not real humans in a sense. This particular school, though, is an elite version of this system of cloning humans to become organs donors, so it is "hailed" by clones who went to other schools. Some time after Kathy, Ruth and Tommy have graduated, however, the school gets closed, no doubt for a sea change in public opinion about the ethics of this business.

Lots of food for thought throughout, and an engaging read as well. 5 stars out of 5.

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Related Links
Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled Is an Achievement of the First Order
In Awe of Ishiguro's The Buried Giant
Throwback Thursday: Ishiguro On Dylan
  For what it's worth, here's a link to the Judy Bridgewater song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UX6tzE7P44

Another Echo of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled: Dreams of Frustration

A year ago I went on a cross country road trip out East to visit kin, friends and family. It was a very special time during which I listened to a powerful novel by Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. It's an amazing, surreal story which I wrote about here last April.

I'd already read a couple of his books, and when visiting my daughter earlier that year I saw that she also had several books by this Nobel Prize winning author on her bookshelf. When I asked her favorite she said "this one." I ordered the audiobook to accompany me on that road trip.

A primary feature of this story is its dreamlike scenes and imagery coupled with extreme frustration. From time to time since reading it I've had similar dreams, including this morning, which I'll try to relate to you here. It's an interesting tale.

14 APRIL 2020

The setting is Canal Park here in Duluth during it's busiest season, summertime. Sidewalks are crowded, parking lots crowded, and the Lakewalk is crowded, which is totally contrary to the emptiness you'll find there right now during our lockdown.

I'm driving near Lake Avenue and returning to my car when I see a friend whom I haven't seen a while, so I pull over to chat. It's not a legal parking spot but it will only be a minute. I cut the conversation short for some reason, perhaps anxious about where I'm parked, so I return to my car and start to pull away.

But my conscience bothers me for the abrupt ending to our conversation and I stop again, leaving the car running as I jog over to properly close our conversation with a Minnesota goodbye. A police officer pulls into the slot where my car had just been and blocks the view of my car with its engine running. When I return to my car it's now missing.

I swing around to tell the cop and he's gone, too. Now what?

When I pull out my cell phone there's some problem getting it to function properly. I press the buttons for 9-1-1 but instead the screen shows 9-11 and says this is not a number. No matter how many times I try the error message comes up.

I begin walking through the crowded sidewalks, jostled and disturbed. I find myself in front of a small sidewalk cafe and see a woman whom I recognize there serving customers. I go take a seat and John Heino, another friend who retired a few years back, steps out from within. He's a server there and he comes over and sits with me, as does the other woman whom I recognized but couldn't recall her name.

Two more people join us from the sidewalk and everyone is chattering on about things. I can only think about my car being stolen. I wait patiently for my turn to say something, but it never comes so I finally interrupt and tell them my car has been stolen and I need to call the police.

Everyone stops talking, not knowing what to say. Then John and the woman, who may have been the manager, get up and return to work. As they do I overhear her comment to John something like, "I don't remember him being so rude."

The other couple gets up and leaves also. I want to defend myself but now don't know what to say, so I head over to the Lakewalk. There's a long sandy path there with something like an arts and crafts show taking place with lots of vendors on my right and left, and people jostling me. My mind is in a fog as I weave through various comical scenes. Some of the vendors are in teardown mode. One vendor had a tipi-like cone shaped display with a dog in the middle wearing something like a millstone collar around its neck like those paintings by the Dutch Masters of the 16th century.

As I look down I see a leather case on the ground, slightly larger than a checkbook. When I open it there's a cell phone inside, but just as I start to call 9-1-1 a middle aged man with a dark mustache leathery skin grabs it out of my hand saying, "Hey, that's mine." He's very angry with me for having his phone.

I ask him to call 9-1-1 but he turns and walks the other direction in a huff.

As I proceed down the path I continue to be jostled, and then come to a mottled grey-green wall that I can't get over. Looking up I see a walkway going perpendicular along the top of the wall which is heading back to Canal Park where I'd started.

When I finally get atop the wall and start heading back I have someone's infant accompanying me. Now I must not only find a phone and my car but also the child's parents. The thought I'm having at that point is that if I call the police they'll accuse me of kidnapping.

It's at that moment of extreme frustration that I awake.

* * * *

In the event that you are wondering how I, or anyone, could remember so many details from a single dream, well, there's some backstory to be aware of. I first began recording my dreams when I was in seventh grade. Upon awaking I would write what I remembered. Over time, and I did this for near six years, I could pull up three, four and sometimes five dream sequence stories. It is a skill one can cultivate, like playing the piano. It's a matter of practice. It also involves writing what you remember as soon as you wake.

The seed for a few of my published stories began with a scene from a dream. My novel The Red Scorpion began that way. A crisis point late in the book began with eight or ten pages of notes that I wrote out longhand one morning upon waking. More than a dozen years later it became fodder for what developed into a full length book which many have found rewarding to read.

As for this morning's nocturnal misadventures, let's just say that fortunately I haven't felt as stressed as that dream during our quarantine period here in our coronavirus era. The dream, however, does seem to hint toward an underlying anxiety beneath the surface of my consciousness. One way or another we'll get through.

Throwback Thursday: Kazui Ishiguro on Dylan

Like most avid readers I read when I can, and never as much as I'd like. A lot of my reading occurs in snippets during my lunch hours. This week I carried around with me a borrowed Spring 2008 edition of The Paris Review, chiefly with the purpose of reading a fascinating interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, author of Remains of the Day which I recently wrote about here.

In this excerpt Ishiguro speaks of his early influences.

INTERVIEWER
What was your next obsession, after detective stories?

ISHIGURO
Rock music. After Sherlock Holmes, I stopped reading until my early twenties. But I’d played the piano since I was five. I started playing the guitar when I was fifteen, and I started listening to pop records—pretty awful pop records—when I was about eleven. I thought they were wonderful. The first record that I really liked was Tom Jones singing “The Green, Green Grass of Home.” Tom Jones is a Welshman, but “The Green, Green Grass of Home” is a cowboy song. He was singing songs about the cowboy world I knew from TV.

I had a miniature Sony reel-to-reel that my father brought me from Japan, and I would tape directly from the speaker of the radio, an early form of downloading music. I would try to work out the words from this very bad recording with buzzes. Then when I was thirteen, I bought John Wesley Harding, which was my first Dylan album, right when it came out.

INTERVIEWER
What did you like about it?

ISHIGURO
The words. Bob Dylan was a great lyricist, I knew that straightaway. Two things that I was always confident about, even in those days, were what was a good lyric and what was a good cowboy film. With Dylan, I suppose it was my first contact with stream-of-consciousness or surreal lyrics. And I discovered Leonard Cohen, who had a literary approach to lyrics. He had published two novels and a few volumes of poetry. For a Jewish guy, his imagery was very Catholic. Lot of saints and Madonnas. He was like a French chanteur. I liked the idea that a musician could be utterly self-sufficient. You write the songs yourself, sing them yourself, orchestrate them yourself. I found this appealing, and I began to write songs.

INTERVIEWER
What was your first song?

ISHIGURO
It was like a Leonard Cohen song. I think the opening line was, “Will your eyes never reopen, on the shore where we once lived and played.”

INTERVIEWER
Was it a love song?

ISHIGURO
Part of the appeal of Dylan and Cohen was that you didn’t know what the songs were about. You’re struggling to express yourself, but you’re always being confronted with things you don’t fully understand and you have to pretend to understand them. That’s what life is like a lot of the time when you’re young, and you’re ashamed to admit it. Somehow, their lyrics seem to embody this state.

The Paris Review
The Art of Fiction No. 196
Issue 184, Spring 2008

The rest of the interview is a good read, though I don't believe you can find it in its entirety online. Once your appetite has been whetted you'll have to make a purchase to get the rest.

In the meantime, if you were being interviewed today and were asked about your own early influences and interests, what would you say?

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This post originally appeared in June 2010 here at Ennyman's Territory and is included in Volume 1 of my collection of Dylan blog posts currently available for take out at the Duluth Public Library.