Ibrahim Burki

Klara, an amalgam of Clarion, Ra and, perhaps, Alexa is probably an apt representation of the fever dream captured in “Klara and the Sun”. Masquerading as a dystopian tale in the near future, it is more of a gadfly intent on pandering to contemporary angst. Notwithstanding all the mawkish reviews befitting a Nobel author, one feels embedded in a pretentious audience being pranked by an artist intent on exposing the absurdity of, in his own words, rewriting the same book. The disconcerting disconnect is a future which has more in common with a Flash Gordon comic book, an Art Decco analogue world with futuristic devices, where a sentient AI has empathy but little self-awareness. The narrative appears like a mad dash through a checklist of issues, from slavery (purchasing a “house slave”…the Artificial Friend), pollution, inequality, privilege, divine plans, terminal relationships, all ensconced by a Sisyphean Sun and condescending humans. That being said, quite an effort has been made to anchor the script in anthropological parallels to Helios and Homer’s “giving light both to gods and men”, but instead of being pulled off the end of a cliff and into the sea in a giant chariot, the sun takes its leave behind a barn. Drawing on his early writing apprenticeship as a songwriter, Ishiguro has been drawn into an exhausted refrain where instead he would have been better served had he just moved beyond the chorus of his original work. The story ends where it started, adrift.

a snapshot in time...from a true storyteller