Overview
Klara is an Artificial Friend. A solar-powered android designed as a companion for lonely children. Waiting in a shop window for a family to choose her. She is chosen by Josie, a chronically ill teenager, and moves into Josie's home, where she gradually pieces together the world of adults from fragments she does not fully understand.
Ishiguro's whole career is about narrators whose limited perspective becomes a moral tool. Stevens the butler in The Remains of the Day. Kathy H. in Never Let Me Go. Klara here is the most extreme version of the device: her physical perception is literally pixelated, her understanding of relationships is drawn from advertising slogans, her theology is that the Sun is a benevolent god because she runs on solar power. Ishiguro spends 320 quiet pages using her voice to say things about family, illness, and love that would sound sentimental in any other narrator.
It is not his most accessible book; some readers bounce off the deliberate flatness of Klara's voice. Others. I am one. Find that same flatness the source of the novel's power. Won the Nobel Prize author's first novel since the Nobel. It is a good one.
