Clara and the Sun

Ishiguro's novel Clara and the Sun is the confession of a discarded robot named Clara, gifted with advanced artificial intelligence and remarkable powers of observation. Clara's job is to take care of the teenage child who has chosen her in the shop, to the best of her knowledge and conscience. However, Clara, as an exceptional robot, is given an exceptional task - to take care of a seriously ill child for whom there is no cure. In a story told in a language marked by peculiarities in Clara's perception and expression of reality, Ishiguro once again confirms his literary mastery. In transparently simple words, he creates a deceptively complex picture of present rather than future humanity. Clara figures in it as a product of a civilization in which ordinary, technologically unimproved human life increasingly resembles a past that will soon be definitively overcome, or a regrettable mistake. Thanks to the subtlety with which Ishiguro draws the reader into Klara's quest to understand how people actually work, the novel transcends the limits of mere social criticism, satire or allegory. Like Ishiguro's earlier prose, Don't Leave Me, his new novel may belong to the science fiction genre, but it is far more reminiscent of the tragicomic, the melancholic fairy tale. A fairy tale about a human world dependent on the inhuman Sun, in whose changing light adults often appear more childish than children and robots more human than people.