‘Klara’s Sun’ by Kazuo Ishiguro and ‘My Trips Around the Sun’ by Ms Paige Turner
Klara in Ishiguro’s ‘Klara’s Sun’ is an AF: Artificial Friend. I probably need one myself, not because I fear my own mind is yet deteriorating but because my blog is and I don’t know how to ‘fix’ it. The subscriber button doesn’t work and even my three faithful blog readers, seem, no longer to be receiving my words, so, as long-suspected, my written and spoken words fall on parched ground.
Back to Klara: one of my favourite all-time unreliable narrators, created by one of my all-time favourite writers, who I long had guessed was a ‘premise-driven’ writer. Having just finished ‘Klara’s Sun’ I typed his name into Google and up he popped, expressing within minutes that he is a ‘premise-driven’ writer. This latest novel is not really about AI. Klara, who views the world in boxes, cannot smell or taste, is born into the world in a shop window, waiting eagerly to be sold. Her computer brain life is short, so we witness, in short, a life. A life of willing service. (The novel has echoes of his ‘Never Let Me Go’.) To be discarded when her job is done. As one character says to ‘her’: ‘’Do I say ‘hello’ or are you a vacuum cleaner?’
I guess from time to time, we all feel that way. But Klara, built in fabric, does ‘feel’ and Ishiguro, amongst may other things, explores what it is to be human.
So how does this relate to my many trips around the sun and my recent Big Birthday? I’m not sure; as I write on, I may find out …
Well, maybe when my daughter Miss Trial said to my friends and family on that big birthday celebration that: ‘Mum always has a project on the go’, I realise, at present I don’t. That’s probably because I’ve just finished three Amazon Audio projects of my own books, and we need, if not parched fields but fallow ones from time to time. As Ishiguro himself says, ‘Projects find you’. He is a writer who examines the life goals of all his narrators: some worthy – like Klara – some not: like his misguided butler Stevens in ‘Remains of the Day’.
Big birthdays invite that kind of examination.
So do dying blogs. I’m looking into Substack so I can continue. I need a Klara.
Links to my two novels and poetry collection on Amazon Audible and narrated by me:
Saturday 12th October at Highcrest – ‘Humour – Writing Which Raises a Smile’.
Saturday 9th November at Beaconsfield – ‘Writing for Children’.
2025
Saturday 29th March at Highcrest – ‘Poetry with a Pen and a Passsion’.
Saturday 26th April at Gerrards Cross – ‘Get That Book Out of You’.
Monday 2nd June at Beaconsfield – ‘Life Writing – a Memoir for Your Grandchild, Posterity or Publication’.
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