Klara and The Sun
This is the latest work of Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize winner for literature. Is it worthy that level? The one of an author awarded with the supreme prize? I would say yes.
Central to this book is the character of Josie, a teenager which has some health
issues, while the Klara of the title is the artificial friend that her mother buys as a companion for her loneliness. All set in a world
in which kids are genetically modified to be geniuses but most live
lonely and isolated.
It is a pretty simple story in a dystopic society. Or so it seems.
Dystopic to us, beware, but only 'mildly', because under the surface of a simple story, the author leaves some reasonable question of ethic and morals. Things that only apparently seem belonging to another reality, far from us, mere sci-fi, but which differences are minimal, almost 'reasonably near' to our present.
It is a book about choices of any kind. Being them moral and ethical from all characters, of parents about their own children and their future, of teenagers about themselves and how they related to the world (the adult built one and the adult idealized one).
It is also, and perhaps mostly, a book of discoveries, of devotion, and about doing anything for who we love.
Each character shows his/her/its love differently; in fact it does not matter if you are an inexperienced android who seems to believe in a religion she/it? her/itself creates (see here yet another theme), the housekeeper, the divorced mother (who makes her daughter do again the same procedure that cost her first daughter's life, just to give her a bright future), the father who seems to have escaped from the extremely competitive world and questions it all for him and for his daughter, or the childhood boyfriend of the kid that grows with her and is willing to do anything to help. There is also the comparison with this boyfriend's family, his mother that is getting mad and would do anything to help her not genetically modified kid to have a future that, in that world, seem gloomy.
There are also monologues/outburst of the two mothers that took two different paths for their children, questioning themselves and the others. There is also a little desperate attempt from the mother to 'keep' her sick daughter. It's a book with a lot. Read it
It is written by a grand master, you can feel it.
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