Book Review: ‘Klara and the Sun,’ by Kazuo Ishiguro - The New York Times
About halfway through “Klara and the Sun,” a woman meeting Klara for the first time blurts out the kind of quiet-part-out-loud line we rely on to get our bearings in a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. “One never knows how to greet a guest like you,” she says. “After all, are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?” This is Ishiguro’s eighth novel, and Klara, who narrates it, is an Artificial Friend, a humanoid machine — short dark hair; kind eyes; distinguished by her powers of observation — who has come to act as companion for 14-year-old Josie. Like that childhood stalwart Corduroy, she’d been sitting in a store, hoping to be chosen by the right child. AFs aren’t tutors. They’re not babysitters (though they’re sometimes chaperones), nor servants (though they’re expected to take commands). They’re nominally friends, but not equals. “You said you’d never get an AF,” Josie’s friend Rick says, accusingly — which makes Klara the mark of some rite of passage they didn’t want t