Klara and The Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Probably because I have been languishing in enforced isolation for 13 months, though it must be said that I am antisocial by nature and therefore comfortable in isolation as long as I have the option to go out (and at the time I wrote this I had not gone out in 7 weeks); probably because I have had to live vicariously through books and movies and place upon them the burden of liberating me from this long sentence of sameness and claustrophobia; probably because I am a great admirer of Kazuo Ishiguro and have been looking forward to a new novel from him for several years (and I disliked The Buried Giant even before I read the withering review/scolding by Ursula Le Guin); and probably because Artificial Intelligence is no longer a science-fiction concept but a banal reality (Are we not all programmed by algorithms now?), no longer something to fear (Terminator) but a potential solution to the arrogant human bumbling that has brought the world to the brink of oblivion, my pleasure (because I did enjoy it) at reading Klara and the Sun was tinged with irritation at the narrator-protagonist’s relationship with the world. I found myself wishing Ishiguro would vary his schtick a little.