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Sto caricando le informazioni... Klara and the Sun: A novel (edizione 2021)di Kazuo Ishiguro (Autore)
Informazioni sull'operaKlara and the Sun di Kazuo Ishiguro
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Fantastic pick for book club. SO much to discuss. We could have met twice! ( ) It means something when the most empathetic character is the non-human one. Klara, as an AF (artificial friend), is even more observant than most, and the lesson is pretty clear (almost from the outset) that if we humans don't observe, don't listen? Then we become rather incapable of empathy. The book muses upon faith, hope, and love. Klara's faith in the sun is based in hope, but also pragmatic observation and an innocent sense of causation. Josie's mother is hopeful about love, yet lacks faith. Ricky, Josie's pragmatic and "unlifted" friend, perhaps has the strongest faith in Klara as he is able to assist her without really knowing why. Josie is the most human of characters in her determination and courage, but also in her code-switching and mercurial teenagery-ness. Josie's father is a skeptical engineer, but he too has to take a leap of faith in Klara, for the love of Josie. Ishiguro does not give us all the details. The AFs get only a store as a backstory context. We know there are the lifted and the unlifted children, but we only see the ramifications of that status, not the details regarding how it happens. In this sense, Ricky is one of the most interesting characters in that he represents the folly of societal categories (one is reminded of Dr. Seuss's Sneetches with the stars, and those without stars), as he's clearly one of the most intelligent characters in the novel. Another lesson from Klara --if only we were all be able to carry the images of our memories and recall them to inform our present understanding. We do, actually, of course, but Ishiguro paints the process slowly and truly through Klara, inviting us to think about our own intentionality and how often we dismiss or suppress our memories because we are not just mere data collectors, but data manipulators. The ending pushed this away from five stars for me...it felt too much like a saccharine epilogue. We get an explanation of Klara's REAL lesson from the store manager and it all smacked a bit too much of a Care Bears animated special for my taste. I found myself frustrated that the manager herself doesn't get much of a backstory, but Ishiguro has a way of making you accept what he gives you, despite your own desires. In her New York Times Review in 2021, Radhika Jones gets it: "'Still, when Klara says, "I have my memories to go through and place in the right order," it strikes the quintessential Ishiguro chord. So what if a machine says it? There's no narrative instinct more essential, or more human." Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I borrowed this on audiobook from my library. Thoughts: This was okay. I ended up finishing it but found this to have a very deliberate pace and be a bit boring. I also felt like the ending was unfinished and not as impactful as I had hoped. This is yet another story about an artificially intelligent robot that helps out humanity but is then forgotten. The story follows Klara, an AF (Artificial Friend). Klara is purchased by Josie's family to be a companion to Josie. Josie is often sick and this puts a lot of stress on Josie and her mother. Klara helps in whatever way she can and for Klara that means petitioning the Sun for help with Josie's sickness. Klara is strangely insightful for an AF and her observations help her human family even more than they realize. There were glimmers of intriguing things here. Like the possibility of this AF (artificial friend) completely replacing a human child, or Klara's mission to stop pollution. There are also glimmers of humanity being feed-up with the corporate, lifted culture. All of these ideas were glimpses and, unfortunately, they weren't fully developed. A number of themes in this story are glimpsed by Klara but never explored or explained. For example, I never figured out what the idea of being "lifted" really was. I never really figured what it meant for Josie's father to be part of the splinter group he was part of. These intriguing issues are briefly glimpsed, never explained, and then forgotten. There wasn't any follow through. It left this feeling like a sketch of some unique ideas rather than a complete story. I was hoping for some surprising end to this, something that would really make me think. However, the ending felt very tired and like a million other stories about artificial intelligence out there. I think the main difference in this story is how Klara deifies the Sun and how subtly Klara helps the family she is with via her unique insights. I listened to this on audiobook and the audiobook was easy to listen to and well done. My Summary (3/5): Overall this was okay but not great. I enjoyed Klara as a character but found a lot of the story felt more like a sketch than a fully developed story. The story feels unfinished and has very typical AI themes and ends in a very typical way for this type of sci-fi story. It is a very calm and deliberately paced story about an AI's faith and the way the AI uses that to help her people. If that sounds interesting to you I would recommend. If you are looking for a faster paced or ground-breaking sci-fi novel about AI I would look elsewhere.
In de licht dystopische roman voert Ishiguro een balanseer act uit op de rand van kitch. Hij slaagt er echter op een uitzonderlijke wijze in om in evenwicht te blijven. Klara en de zon is een zeer geslaagde, enigszins verontrustende en gelaagde nieuwe roman van de meesterverteller en Nobelprijswinnaar…lees verder> Most of Ishiguro’s novels are slender books that are more complicated than they at first seem; Klara and the Sun is by contrast more simple than it seems, less novel than parable. Though much is familiar here—the restrained language, the under-stated first-person narration—the new book is much more overt than its predecessors about its concerns.... Ishiguro is unsentimental—indeed, one of the prevailing criticisms of him is that he’s too cold, his novels overly designed, his language detached. (Some of the worst writing on Ishiguro ascribes this to his being Japanese, overlooking that he’s lived in England since he was a small child.) In most hands, this business of the mother-figure who sacrifices all for a child would be mawkish. Here it barely seems like metaphor. Every parent has at times felt like an automaton. Every parent has pleaded with some deity for the safety of their child. Every parent is aware of their own, inevitable obsolescence. And no child can offer more than Josie’s glib goodbye, though perhaps Ishiguro wants to; the book is dedicated to his mother. It explores many of the subjects that fill our news feeds, from artificial intelligence to meritocracy. Yet its real political power lies not in these topical references but in its quietly eviscerating treatment of love. Through Klara, Josie, and Chrissie, Ishiguro shows how care is often intertwined with exploitation, how love is often grounded in selfishness ... this book focuses on those we exploit primarily for emotional labor and care work—a timely commentary during a pandemic in which the essential workers who care for us are too often treated as disposable ... If Never Let Me Go demonstrates how easily we can exploit those we never have to see, Klara and the Sun shows how easily we can exploit even those we claim to love ... a story as much about our own world as about any imagined future, and it reminds us that violence and dehumanization can also come wrapped in the guise of love. ... the real power of this novel: Ishiguro’s ability to embrace a whole web of moral concerns about how we navigate technological advancements, environmental degradation and economic challenges even while dealing with the unalterable fact that we still die.... tales of sensitive robots determined to help us survive our self-destructive impulses are not unknown in the canon of science fiction. But Ishiguro brings to this poignant subgenre a uniquely elegant style and flawless control of dramatic pacing. In his telling, Klara’s self-abnegation feels both ennobling and tragic. Critics often note Ishiguro’s use of dramatic irony, which allows readers to know more than his characters do. And it can seem as if his narrators fail to grasp the enormity of the injustices whose details they so meticulously describe. But I don’t believe that his characters suffer from limited consciousness. I think they have dignity. Confronted by a complete indifference to their humanity, they choose stoicism over complaint. We think we grieve for them more than they grieve for themselves, but more heartbreaking is the possibility that they’re not sure we differ enough from their overlords to understand their true sorrow. And maybe we don’t, and maybe we can’t. Maybe that’s the real irony, the way Ishiguro sticks in the shiv.... In Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro leaves us suspended over a rift in the presumptive order of things. Whose consciousness is limited, ours or a machine’s? Whose love is more true? If we ever do give robots the power to feel the beauty and anguish of the world we bring them into, will they murder us for it or lead us toward the light? Appartiene alle Collane EditorialiGallimard, Folio (7183) Keltainen kirjasto (517) Llibres Anagrama (82) È contenuto inPremi e riconoscimentiMenzioniElenchi di rilievo
"From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara she is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous tale, Klara and the Sun, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?"-- Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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