en-US Fri, 07 Mar 2025 10:02:49 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7383661918 Fri, 07 Mar 2025 10:02:49 -0800 /review/show/7383661918 Evan gave 3 stars to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Mass Market Paperback) by William Shakespeare
]]> Review7383659055 Fri, 07 Mar 2025 10:01:11 -0800 /review/show/7383659055 Evan gave 5 stars to Waiting for Godot (Paperback) by Samuel Beckett
]]> Review7383656784 Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:59:48 -0800 /review/show/7383656784 Evan gave 5 stars to On the Calculation of Volume I (Paperback) by Solvej Balle
]]> Review7383653258 Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:57:58 -0800 /review/show/7383653258 Evan gave 5 stars to James (Hardcover) by Percival Everett
]]> Review7383651405 Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:57:24 -0800 /review/show/7383651405 Evan gave 3 stars to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Paperback) by Mark Twain
]]> Review7383651405 Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:56:59 -0800 /review/show/7383651405 Evan gave 3 stars to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Paperback) by Mark Twain
]]> Review7383648265 Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:55:25 -0800 /review/show/7383648265 Evan gave 4 stars to Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Hardcover) by Salman Rushdie
]]> Review5879839307 Sun, 01 Oct 2023 11:32:47 -0700 /review/show/5879839307 Evan gave 4 stars to Klara and the Sun (Hardcover) by Kazuo Ishiguro
I will write a more full review of this book, which prompted so many thoughts. It’s a slow burn and inevitably there were plot developments I surmised well in advance, though I didn’t anticipate where it ultimately would go.

It is about the nature of consciousness, intelligence (especially emotional intelligence) and the authenticity of relationships. It is also, deeply and disturbingly, about how these fundamental aspects of the “human� condition relate to late capitalism and consumer culture. It is somewhat more obliquely about surrogacy, mimesis and slavery. Think of Klara as a house slave and the novel takes on another sense altogether.

The title foregrounds the relationship between Klara and the Sun, which is surprising and perhaps the hardest for a Western reader to reconcile. My first thoughts were of Plato and of the myth of Icarus. Neither of which, I think, are what Ishiguro had in mind. Rather, the Sun is both practical (Klara is solar-powered) and mystical, a focus of divinity, an entity to whom supplication can be made. Which approaches the usual debates about AI from the seemingly quaint angle of humanity’s supposedly privileged relationship to God.

If the divinity hears and answers the prayers of an artificial being, how can we not see that being as a person in its sacred implications? ]]>