Klara is my first flirt with Ishiguro, and in doing my famous move of ignoring the consensus masterpiece and diving straight into a lesser work with mixed reception, I've become quite fond of him very quickly. The logline promises something between Spielberg's AI and Spike Jonze's Her, and both are obvious influences w/r/t the soft autumn glow dystopia and the bridges built and crumbled by troubling a machine with the curse of emotional attachments, but what you get is instead a book about the tragedy and vitality of faith. Ishiguro is a very restrained writer; something I'd credit equally to the British and Japanese literary traditions that he's inherited (though if you'd asked me, sight unseen, to guess whether or not this book's prose was translated Japanese or written as English, I would likely have guessed wrong). His characters move with masks of detachment, and it's only the slips that show them to us. It was fascinating then to watch these characters come into contact with a hyper-observant and emotionally attuned narrator with no intrinsic understanding of them. How pitiable Klara's life is, a servant to aliens whom she truly, madly, deeply loves, but for whom she has no real means to help other than boundless faith. Ishiguro continuously visualises her world through 'boxes' that call to mind for me something between the millions of refracted images on the surface of a fly's eyeball and a camera's closest zoom-in, though the incompatibility of these things means that I never truly saw through her eyes. But, curiously, almost impossibly, that is what saves them.

The conclusion to the lethargic narrative throughline is cosmic, like experiencing a religious episode involving a god you don't believe in. There is no answer to 'how' it happens if that's the sort of thing you care about. There is an answer as to 'why,' though, and it's squishy and sentimental, but I think that's sort of the buy-in on his whole deal. I read an interview with Ishiguro in The Guardian where he said as much: he is under no illusions about being a great writer of prose, but knows he is an expert at twisting the invisible knobs of people. He is also, in my view, a keen observer of the value of the novel as a medium. The book dives fully into her alien psyche, childlike and uncomprehending and unblinkingly faithful in her perpendicular understanding of the world. That she can sit on the cold, hard floor at the end of the book, and confidently tell someone that she has no regrets; it truly hurt me. I would say her life was wasted; she would say that she can imagine no greater joy than what she was afforded. I'll concede this is all obvious, sometimes bordering on kitsch, but the simplicity is the achievement. By telling it all in such a lean and decisive way (I think we experience the exact right amount of scenes necessary to learn everything we should about Klara), it takes on a storybook quality. Now, that said, the other guy who reviewed this on here made that same connection, and he didn't seem to like it so much, so maybe I'm just a bit of a sap.

That Taika Waititi is helming the film adaptation does not bode well.