'Klara and the Sun,' Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel

Klara is the perfect companion for young Josie: always there when you need her, friendly and willing to sacrifice herself when the girl is in danger. But Klara is no ordinary friend. At one point, a neighbor asks her, "After all, are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?"

Klara is an Artificial Friend, an android put in place to accompany a human child into adulthood.

How AI influences society

Klara and Josie live in the United States in the distant future. A world that is perhaps not so far off after all, and in which people are categorized in a caste system — those who still seem to be useful to society, and those who are sorted out because they don't want to participate, or because they are no longer needed, as artificial beings have taken over many tasks and made many jobs superfluous.

It's a realistic scenario, argues Kazuo Ishiguro. "I'm not one of those people who are terribly frightened of artificial intelligence," he told DW. 

"However, I think there are challenges that we have to face concerning the question of what happens to employment in our society," he adds. "The way we organize our societies, we all have jobs and that's how we earn a living and feed ourselves and our families. That is going to be seriously challenged in a time when we can't all have jobs anymore. Many important decisions in our lives will be made by artificial intelligence systems."

A world without memories, without rebellion

Klara and the Sun is not simply a dystopian fantasy. Like all his books, Kazuo Ishiguro's eighth novel revolves around existential questions: How do we remember — and what? What makes us human? What does it mean to love — and what price are we willing to pay for love?

Klara has no memories. She discovers the world through observation and only gradually understands what task she has been assigned. And she learns what friendship is, what love is.

One day, Klara's job is done, and she, too, is sorted out. She doesn't even think about rebellion. She has a lot in common with Ishiguro's perhaps best-known literary figure, the docile butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day, which garnered Ishiguro the Booker Prize in 1989 and which was also an international box office success in a film starring Anthony Hopkins.

'We are just not good at rebelling'

But why do his characters never rebel? The truth is, we're simply not good at rebelling, says Kazuo Ishiguro. "In the world of movies and perhaps in the world of novels, very often people accept their fates. People by and large accept orders, accept their fate, and even in the era of freedom and prosperity that we fortunately live in the West, I see people all the time who stay in violent families and bad situations."  

He points out that in the case of the butler Stevens, the protagonist does go through "a very important journey, from thinking that one set of values was correct to thinking that they weren't correct."

Klara and the Sun is Ishiguro's first novel after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Again, he proves to be one thing above all: an elegant narrator, a great moralist who shows us the fragility and also the beauty of human existence.

 

Check out our interview with Kazuo Ishiguro and many other authors on our YouTube channel DW books.

 

This article was translated from German by Dagmar Breitenbach.