Klára a Slunce

by , ,

Hardcover, 344 pages

Czech language

Published June 29, 2022

ISBN:
978-80-257-3861-0
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3 stars (4 reviews)

Ishigurův román Klára a Slunce je zpovědí vyřazené robotky jménem Klára, nadané pokročilou umělou inteligencí i pozoruhodnými pozorovacími schopnostmi. Klářiným úkolem je starat se o dospívající dítě, které si ji v obchodě vybralo, podle svého nejlepšího vědomí a svědomí. Klára ovšem coby výjimečný robot dostává výjimečný úkol – starat se o dítě vážně nemocné, na jehož nemoc není léku. V příběhu vyprávěném jazykem poznamenaným zvláštnostmi v Klářině vnímání a vyjadřování skutečnosti potvrzuje Ishiguro opět své literární mistrovství. Průzračně prostými slovy vytváří záludně složitý obraz současného spíš než budoucího lidstva. Klára v něm figuruje coby výplod civilizace, v níž obyčejný, technologicky nevylepšený lidský život stále více připomíná minulost, která bude brzy definitivně překonána, případně politováníhodný omyl. Díky rafinovanosti, s níž Ishiguro vtahuje čtenáře do Klářiny snahy pochopit, jak vlastně lidi fungují, přesahuje román meze pouhé společenské kritiky, satiry či alegorie. Podobně jako dřívější Ishigurova próza Neopouštěj mě sice i jeho nový …

17 editions

reviewed Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Missed Opportunities

2 stars

The premise is beautiful, it hints at deep reflections about being human, but it didn't work for me. The dialogues were super weird and unnatural, they really bothered me. I missed more exploration of the technology behind the Artificial Friends (AF) and how they worked. Was Klara all mechanical? Was she an android? I wasn't convinced that AF's would find mystical significance in the Sun. The story hints at several themes but never really goes deep: environmental pollution, empathy, robots taking over human jobs, loneliness, gene editing, social class privilege. The plot is super simple and predictable, and the ending was very bleh. Probably not my thing.

reviewed Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Surprisingly underwhelming

3 stars

  • I listened to this as an audiobook, my first checked out from Libby.
  • I liked the narrator's voice and felt it was generally quite well to meet the range of voices for the characters.
  • The book took too long to build up and the ending was too abstract and fell apart.
  • I also generally didn't like or understand why the characters were selected with the traits they had.
  • Some of the dialogue felt well played, while others felt jarring
  • In the end, my favorite part is Klara's relationship with the sun, which goes for the most part unexplored with other characters. This book has vague environmentalist themes.
  • many of the tropes that show up in this book I feel, have been better expressed in other works I've read.
  • I think this book would be fine for a middle schooler as it goes generally without much complexity with its readability. Though …

reviewed Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

-

3 stars

Read this mostly as a bedtime read, which it was good for - pretty easy and not too creepy (although slightly unsettling at times). It nodded to a few things that piqued my interest (AI, eco-sabotage, transhumanism?) But didn't really flesh out any of them, they were mostly just a vibe/backdrop for the story of the characters, which was fine. Ive really enjoyed some books that explore human-robot interactions - marge piercey's body of glass comes to mind - but this didn't quite do it for me in terms of making my brain stretch around those questions of how we relate to machines. Which I don't think was the point of the book, I think the point was to build the world up from the perceptions of the narrator (an android) and that part was done quite well.

Overall a totally fine read and well-written but just didn't scratch anything …

avatar for nichobi@bookwyrm.social

rated it

4 stars

Subjects

  • Fiction, science fiction, general
  • speculative fiction
  • Fiction, dystopian
  • British and irish fiction (fictional works by one author)