The book of the Nobel laureate tells the story of the android Klara, created for friendship with adolescents: in the world of the future, children study at home and they need artificial friends so as not to feel lonely. We tell why "Klara and the Sun" is more like a light fairy tale than the previous epic works of the author.
"Until recently, I didn’t think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness." ― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
The Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017, in general, did not reveal anything new to the world, but only recorded the obvious: starting with the novel "Don't Let Me Go", each of the writer's books is an event, and (which does not happen often these days) only literary, but, more broadly, general cultural and even social. In 2005, the novel Don't Let Me Go formed a powerful trend towards polemics about the boundaries of the human (in a world that simultaneously anticipates transhumanism and fears it to death, it is difficult to think of something sharper). In 2015, the large-scale "Buried Giant" at once stirred up in the public consciousness all the problems associated with memory - historical, personal, false, elusive, defining our personality, making this topic almost the mainstream both in literature and in the media for several years ...
It would be logical to expect that the new novel by the writer "Clara and the Sun" will continue the same trend towards creating (or, if you like, extracting) global intellectual trends from the pure spirit of high literature. But instead, Ishiguro does something exactly the opposite - he writes a chamber, gentle and pure fairy tale in the best traditions of the animated Toy Story.
The title heroine-storyteller Clara is an IP, an artificial friend, a product of a new reality in which children do not go to school, but study at home (this detail, apparently, appeared in Ishiguro's novel under the influence of coronavirus restrictions). So that teenagers, deprived of their peers, do not feel too lonely, parents buy them android dolls that look like children and are designed to help their owners in everyday life and brighten up their leisure time.
However, homeschooling is not the only (and not at all the most disturbing) sign of a total renewal in Clara's world. Advances in automation and robotization have created global unemployment, with millions of people stranded on the streets without a livelihood. And the only chance for humanity to get ahead in the competition with machines is to "force" their own children, genetically modify them in such a way that natural intelligence again surpasses artificial intelligence. But this operation is risky: after the "forcing" many children remain disabled or die. And this situation, as it is easy to guess, imposes on the parents a new, fatal in its severity responsibility: to leave their child “as is”, thereby depriving them of hopes for prosperity and career, or to endanger his life and health.
After a long exciting wait in the shop window (will they buy it? Will the owners be kind to her? Will she handle it?) Clara finally finds a house and a mistress - she becomes the girl Josie, fragile, impetuous and funny. They are happy together, but rather quickly Clara realizes that Josie is one of those unlucky in the genetic lottery: unsuccessful forcing kills her. It seems that neither the selfless adoration of the mother, nor the pure childhood love of the best friend - the boy Rick, gifted, but not forced, and therefore physically healthy, but doomed to life-long vegetation, are not capable of keeping the girl in the world of the living. And then Clara decides to make a deal: she, who lives on solar energy and is literally animated by the heat of the sun, is sure that only the Sun can heal Josie - all that is needed is to make him a significant enough sacrifice.
The first association that arises at the beginning of reading the novel is, of course, Ishiguro's book "Don't Let Me Go" before last, where "not quite people" also acted - not androids, as in "Clara and the Sun", but clones raised by mankind as a cheap source of organs for transplant. This is also indicated by the theme of love, which again plays the role of a saving anchor in the novel, giving the illusory right to postpone the inevitable: like the heroes of Don't Let Me Go, Clara, Rick, and Josie's mother believe that the one whom they love so much , simply cannot, has no right to die so early. That love and devotion are the best amulet against death and evil.
Considering these signs and recognizing the parallels, an experienced reader Ishiguro will most likely experience a justified anxiety: "Don't let me go" went through all our pain points with such deadly accuracy that the repetition of this experience is seen at the same time and alluring emotional response, far beyond the purely aesthetic experience), and frightening. However, this allusion is superficial and, as further reading shows, imprecise. There is nothing to be afraid of: it will not hurt - in any case, it certainly will not hurt so much.
Unlike "Don't Let Me Go", where the main tool for influencing the reader was absolute similarity, the actual indistinguishability of clones and people with an impressive and tragic difference in their fates, in "Clara and the Sun" Ishiguro does not humanize his heroine. Clara is not a girl dressed in plastic flesh, but a creature of a completely different nature. Perceptive, inquisitive and sensitive, she, nevertheless, is limited by her functionality: to love, help and support. In fact, she has no personal aspirations and desires - her whole world revolves around Josie. In order to emphasize this fundamental otherness, Ishiguro uses several completely formal techniques - for example, he endows his heroine with very specific, completely non-human optics, and not in a figurative, but in a completely literal sense: Clara sees the world as a pixel combination of planes of different colors that are not always easy to fold into recognizable three-dimensional designs.
Clara's inner world is also not like the inner world of a living real child: her psychology is, so to speak, the plane psychology of a toy, inherited in a straight line from Milnov's Winnie the Pooh or Edward the rabbit from the novel by Kate Dicamillo. The only difference is that Clara does not come to life at night, like plush leopards and toy hares in the famous poem by Vera Polozkova, and not in the imagination of the owner - she is filled with life by the Sun and high technologies. She does not grieve when faced with cruelty, and does not take offense at neglect - there is simply no place for grief and resentment in her emotional range. We worry about her, attributing human feelings to her (it is no coincidence that one of the most difficult scenes in the novel is the one where the teenagers who have played around behave frankly badly with Klara), but she herself does not think in such categories.
And since Clara is just a toy, then the sacrifice that she makes in the name of Josie is not unnatural and painful, like the clones from "Don't Let Me Go": Clara was born for this, she doesn't want anything else and doesn't know how. It was created in order to faithfully serve the mistress, to be loved by her for some time, and then to be unnecessary, locked first in a closet, and then in the backyards of memory.
Thus, Clara's drama is, in fact, the drama of Winnie the Pooh: her Josie, her Christopher Robin, is also destined to leave her favorite one day, and the feeling generated by this is only partly painful - as painful as everything that is associated with growing up. Clara is limited by nature, she does not have the ability to change, and therefore she is vulnerable in her immutability: her destiny is to remain a touching and motionless mechanical constant on the platform, past which a train of changeable, fluid organic life rushes past with a roar. And this is sad, no doubt, but in no way painful. The theme of primordial predetermination, which is important for Ishiguro, is this time again resolved in a minor, but a very soft, restrained minor, completely devoid of the tragic and hysterical pathos of his two previous things.
In one of his interviews, Kazuo Ishiguro says that he originally wrote "Clara and the Sun" for children and planned to publish it in a large format and with pictures, but then, under the influence of his wife and the editor, he abandoned this idea. Perhaps this decision was correct: for a children's book in "Clara and the Sun" there are still too many "adult" problems related to ecology, artificial intelligence, social tension, parental responsibility for the child's future and the like. However, this time they appear in the form of diffused light that complements the picture, but does not distract the reader's attention from the quiet children's drama playing out in the foreground. In the world of competition between man and machine, the story of a girl and her beloved doll, no doubt, does not sound like in the scenery of a cozy fairy-tale Forest, planted for his heroes by Alexander Miln, but its essence does not change from this - it is this idea, in essence, and trying to convey to us Kazuo Ishiguro. Growing up, a person inevitably loses something important, and this loss is bitter and at the same time normal, regardless of the surroundings.
Against the background of Kazuo Ishiguro's two previous epically significant, truly symphonic novels, Clara and the Sun may seem frustratingly local, almost trivial in its nagging simplicity. Indeed, intonationally and conceptually, Ishiguro's new novel is not more like Buried Giant or Don't Let Me Go, but rather his much more intimate and less ambitious early works, such as In the Hills in the Haze, or "Artist of the Shaky World". But if we digress from our own expectations, formed by the two last books of the writer, we will have to admit that Ishiguro's chamber pieces for one fragile half-childish voice are no worse than magnificent symphonies. Moreover, it is precisely in them that the author's literary (and not philosophical, visionary, or, let us say, deontological) skill of the author appears with particular clarity and undeniable power.
You can get this book HERE.
This article was sponsored by Gary Gurevich.
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