Klara is solar powered, childlike and without question an individual. For example, she loves sunsets, finds privacy important, and considers the smoke and noise produced by construction machinery to be inconsiderate environmental pollution.
She tells her story in solemn sentences like “I have my memories that I want to sort and put in the right order”, and when it comes to mobility, they would like to give her an upgrade, so carefully does she have to put her feet on the gravel of parking lots put.
When she ventures out into the open and promptly gets stuck, her companion compares her helplessness with that of a fly “that keeps banging blindly on the window pane”; she doesn’t take it personally. Even though she is a robot! The fact that there is a rebel in each of these beings who will at some point rise up against their human masters has been part of the basic knowledge of science fiction since Karel Capek’s conceptual piece “RUR” from 1920.
So convincing is the idea of the inevitable uprising of our androids and artificial intelligences that even bright minds like Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk warned that they could soon usurp control over humanity. As if the opposite weren’t at least as scary: that a robot may have an ego and feelings, even like Klara, a belief, but it would still be willing to do anything for its human attachment figures. And at the price of giving up on oneself, he would still fulfill our most remote desires, simply because he considered it his “duty”.
You have to see it this way: KF Klara, model series B2, the narrator-protagonist from Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, is not a relative of the replicant Roy Batty, who in “Blade Runner” wanted to forcibly ensure that his existence was respected. Instead, the always undaunted, optimistic Klara is a descendant of the self-sacrificing butler Stevens from “What was left of the day”, Kazuo Ishiguro’s most famous novel from 1985. And a kind of cousin of the self-donating clone Kathy H. from “Alles, was we had to give ”, the British author’s first foray into the science fiction genre in 2005.
At the beginning of Ishiguro’s new novel “Klara und die Sonne” (Clare and the Sun), which unfortunately does not quite come close to these two classics by the Nobel Prize winner for literature, the first-person narrator waits in a shop to be chosen by a child to serve as a “Artificial girlfriend” to drive away loneliness. As time is of the essence – the first “B3” models are already bustling around in the store – Klara is allowed to represent the shop in the shop window, at least for a few days, at a special price.
Equipped with, as the manager notes, “extraordinary powers of observation”, the little creature gets to know the world from there: She is amazed at the joy of a “coffee cup lady” and a “raincoat gentleman” who fall into each other’s arms when they happen to meet again . Or is happy when the benevolent sun makes the “beggar”, a homeless person who Klara believed dead, healthy again the next morning. She is all the more frightened by the sight of a boy who demonstratively keeps his “artificial girlfriend” at a distance. What would it be like not to be loved by your child as a KF?
[Kazuo Ishiguro: Klara und die Sonne. Aus dem Englischen von Barbara Schaden. Roman. Blessing Verlag, München 2021. 352 Seiten, 24 €.]
Fortunately, Klara is spared this fate. Because the 14-year-old Josie, in whose household she ends up, closes her theatrical version into the heart so quickly that the reader forgets the manager’s warning that it is better not to give too much to childish promises. As it turns out, Josie suffers from a potentially fatal illness. For a while, it was thought that this was the reason why she was receiving distance lessons from “screen professors” from home, as befits our pandemic times.
The class society of the future
In fact, around the year 2050, in the two-class society of the USA, which Kazuo Ishiguro only hinted at, other elite children will also receive private tuition, namely those who have been “raised” by their ambitious parents.
But because this mysterious “genome editing” means that social skills are left behind, extra “interaction meetings” are held with people of the same age, discreetly monitored in the background by the mothers. In Josie’s meeting, things get temporarily out of control when one of the teenagers invited to test the skills of Josie’s new theatrical version just wants to throw it around.
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The scene is a special case, because one of the most fascinating motifs in this novel is the almost consistently respectful way people treat the android. Instead of commanding her, one asks her to do something. The fact that she is free to decide for herself whether she wants to go on an excursion seems to be out of the question, despite occasional confusion. “You’re a guest, aren’t you?”, Klara is asked by the mother of Josie’s friend Rick. “Or should I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?”
The novel draws a large part of its tension from the raising of many questions that are only answered late – and often in a different way than expected: Why, for example, does the “unhealthy” Rick have no chance of college despite his talent? “Did his parents just… decide not to participate? Lost your nerve? ”Ask the elite mothers.
Great future literature with existential questions
What did Sal, Josie’s older sister, die of? Can Klara’s idiosyncratic belief in the “benevolent” sun be able to heal Josie? But above all: do people really have a unique soul or could this be “extracted, copied, transferred”, as Josie’s father fears? And what is the “human heart” ready for just to escape loneliness?
“Klara und die Sonne” asks existential questions as only great future literature can. Interesting about Ishiguro’s largely sovereignly composed novel are also narrative details such as the alienation effect that always occurs when the complexity of human emotions overwhelms Klara. Because then her image of the world is fractionated into simultaneously appearing “boxes”, like the facial expression of Josie’s mother when she remembers her deceased daughter Sal: “In one box, for example, there was a malicious laugh in her eyes, and in the next she full of sadness. “
At the end of her journey, the little android, whose empathy far exceeds her mobility, will have seen through the “human heart”. That she still doesn’t judge us is the comforting message of the novel.
