“Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro

This novel, by Ishiguro, is a consideration on what it is to be human. It is narrated by an Artificial Friend, Klara, an AI, who is brought home by a sickly teenage girl, Josie. However, the first part of the novel takes place in the AF store, before she is bought. Klara, at this time, is still using her machine learning skills to decipher the human world. She is curious about everything. “When AFs did go by us they almost always acted oddly, speeding up their walk and keeping their faces turned away. I wondered then if perhaps we—the whole store—were an embarrassment to them. I wondered if Rosa and I, once we’d found our homes, would feel an awkwardness to be reminded that we hadn’t always lived with our children, but in a store.” Behind the plot, Ishiguro makes the reader wonder about the nature of consciousness. The novel is a meditation on materialism vs. Cartesian dualism and, also, even determinism. A scientist, Mr. Capaldi speaks to Josie’s mother, “We’re both of us sentimental. We can’t help it. Our generation still carry the old feelings. A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now.” Later in the novel, Josie’s father admits, “I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond a doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know any better.” It takes Klara, in the end, to perhaps straighten them all out, “Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr Capaldi was wrong.”