Klara and the Sun Review

E-Book, 303 Pages
Adult/ Sci-Fi/ Contemporary
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
Rating: 🌟🌟 1/2

“Sometimes,’ she said, ‘at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness.”

Klara and the Sun is my first exposure to Nobel prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. I have seen the author’s works on my GR page more than once but I was never really interested in them. Last year, when this book came out, I kind of liked what it is about and decided to give it a chance specially that many of my friends like it.

When an author wins a fancy prize as the Nobel prize in literature, there ought to be some expectations and unfortunately they were not met here. I am going to be totally honest here and say that even if he wasn’t an award winning author, it would not change my mind because simply this was not it!

The story itself is not unique, I am not an expert when it comes to this genre and yet I have already read books with similar messages but better execution. The story is told through Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF) and she does narrate it using first person. The problem is that the writing was very dry, very artificial (Pun intended).
The Humans by Matt Haig also has similar themes but it is narrated by an alien visiting Earth and it was so much more compelling.

Pollution and saving the environment, human relationships are all important themes to the story but the cold writing style and slow story that is really not going anywhere -despite it being a relatively short book-did not simply work for me.

Summary: I usually tame my expectations for hyped books to try and enjoy them as possible. Despite me doing that with this book, I still did not enjoy it or think it was that revolutionary of a novel. I just think it was vague and robotic for my own taste. I am willing to give the author’s earlier work a chance though.

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