From the Bookshelf of Apocalypse Whenever…

Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro

Start date: June 15, 2024

Finish date: July 1, 2024

Discussion: AW BOOK CLUB (spoilers)

Discussion leader: Gertie

Why we're reading this: July 2024 book selection, read by July 1st: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...…more
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AW BOOK CLUB (spoilers)

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last updated Aug 15, 2025 08:35AM

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What Members Thought

Mar 26, 2022 🥀 Rose 🥀 rated it it was ok

Shelves: book-club, dystopian-speculative-fiction, audio-book

Klara and the Sun is the only other Ishiguro book I’ve read since Never Let me Go. I loved that book and was very excited to read another speculative fiction from this author. However, this one was a terribly let down.

The story had me at the beginning when Klara, the AF (artificial friend), was in a store waiting to be purchased by the perfect teen looking for a friend. You as the reader only see the world through Klara’s eyes and thoughts, which, at first, I found facinating. As she observes th ...more

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Sep 07, 2021 Gertie rated it liked it

"Blind read" - I like to select books that sound good then forget as much as I can about them by the time I read them. This was one of those, gotten as an audiobook from the library.
(I really need a better term than "blind read", open to suggestions.)

As I read I like to try to guess about the author. Gender, nationality, age... has the book been translated? From what language?

So as I was reading this I thought "translated yes, probably Asian" and that's as far as I got. I waffled a lot, which I ...more

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Jun 03, 2021 Julie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, speculative-fiction, audiobook, genetics

3.5 I’m really torn on how to rate this. The structure and perspective are absolutely brilliant. The idea that AI could develop magical thinking/religious beliefs is mind-bending. The story itself starts slow but interesting and about halfway through turns Black Mirror disturbing. But then the conclusion kind of fizzles. I will be thinking about this one for awhile I suspect.

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Apr 10, 2021 Dave Schumaker rated it liked it

I felt kind of indifferent about this. I originally picked it up due to the hype around Kazuo Ishiguro writing a book about an a near-future world involving AI assistants known as “artificial friends”.

Klara is an AI assistant (an older, lesser desired version, no less) who longs for the sunlight ("The Sun's Nourishment") and a human companion. It becomes clear early on that she has some exceptional observational powers and we see this as she lives out the early stages of her life in a department ...more

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Feb 02, 2025 Brook rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Spoilers.

I didn't understand this book at all. The storytelling is very good, hence the second star. The writing of the human characters was so "off," and the dialogue so stilted, that I thought there was going to be a twist at the end that the humans were not humans, or the world was made up. I could tell that the book was not written by an American by the use of certain phrases, which is neither good nor bad, but I thought that the general "weirdness" of the story and writing style was being u Spoilers.

I didn't understand this book at all. The storytelling is very good, hence the second star. The writing of the human characters was so "off," and the dialogue so stilted, that I thought there was going to be a twist at the end that the humans were not humans, or the world was made up. I could tell that the book was not written by an American by the use of certain phrases, which is neither good nor bad, but I thought that the general "weirdness" of the story and writing style was being used to indicate an "otherworldliness." It turns out it was supposed to be just what was implied, our current world in the relatively near future. This is what made the book so confusing for me. None of the people talked or behaved like "people," and by that I don't mean "Americans." In particular, there is a long scene in a diner, where a mother is speaking in a manner so unusual, so irrational, that I was certain at that point that it wasn going to be revealed that this world was somehow artificial, and that the "artificial" character, who is the only one who behaves, thinks and speaks like a human, was the "real" one. But no, it just appears to be a scene with improbably written, stilted dialogue that makes no sense. I'm that scene in particular felt written by a high-schooler writing a play in first draft. That would have made sense, if the world was somehow artificial and therefore shallow and stilted. But it turned out to be the real world, which meant I couldn't identify with any of the people in it, as none of them behaved like humans. Perhaps there is some cultural divide between this American reader and the UK reader that I am aware of, some statement on class I am missing (although the book takes place entirely in America).

Then it turns out (it would seem to this reader) that the title character and everyone else are exactly what they appeared to be in the story, which meant that the motivations are accurate and not the result of the interpretation of an unreliable narrator, and therefore make no sense.

I thought, then, that the entire thing must be allegory. The book would have worked in this format as well, as allegories can be weird or fanciful as they make a larger point (for example, Animal Farm takes place in "this world," but it's an allegory filled with talking animals who form systems of social control; this works just fine because the point is not the world they inhabit, but the lesson that other book is trying to teach; in fact, now that I write that, this does read like someone who enjoyed Orwell and wanted to create something similar, and failed). For example, I thought that the "sun" was something else, since the interactions of all of the characters with it has no basis in reality. The main character, towards the end, reenters the barn where she previously asked the Sun for help. She begins seeing things on the floor and shelves of the barn from the store where she was displayed and sold. This is when I was sure that the entire world created was in the head of the main character, and we were going to get some sort of twist. But no, it appears that everything was real, and so the story lost its point for me, and also made no sense (why was the barn there? Why were there items from the store in the barn? What was the point of the Sun being reflected multiple times in the glass?).

One could take it as an allegory for growing up an outgrowing of one's toys and childhood, I suppose, a more adult version of the "Toy Story" movie, and that's the closest I can get to the "point" of the story. I got nothing else from it.

The human characters follow a mysterious plan of the AF that is never revealed, and while the author does give motivation, it never makes any sense. Another reason I thought the humans weren't human. Hell, it is never explained. Again, fine for an unreliable narrator, but it is never revealed why they follow her.

The writing is good in that we have a somewhat unreliable narrator, and the author never veers from that, providing an "outsider" perspective to explain what the unreliable narrator was really seeing. I appreciate a book where you are only given the view of the unreliable narrator, as I saw recently in "Piranesi." But here, the reader is never given a larger understanding of the world the narrator is narrating, which is fine. However, if the point of the book was not to point out something about our world, then I don't know why we saw the story through this narrator's eyes.

Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, or perhaps my brain is wired differently, but I did not at all see the allure of this book. Nor did I see the point, ultimately, of the unreliable narrator. I am frustrated that I chose to finish this. If there was no point to the unreliability of the narrator (and ultimately there was *not*), then why include it? This reads like a book for someone who wanted to get a movie made out of it, moreso than they wanted to write a good story. The book is admittedly readily convertible to a movie with interesting visual effects, so perhaps that was the whole point. ...more

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