This post is part of my series on Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Kazuo Ishiguro archive moved to the Harry Ransom Center in 2015, so the collection does not include materials related to Klara and the Sun. Nevertheless, I thought I would briefly write about the book for the sake of completion.

To say this book was a crushing disappointment for me would be an understatement. That is not to say it was terrible; I did enjoy aspects of it. But coming into the book, I think my expectations were too high. I had been almost saving this book to read as a treat, expecting to find the same earth-shattering magic I experienced in The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.

Admittedly, whenever I saw the term “AF”, which happened a few times every page, I would automatically subvocalize it as “allele frequency”(an unfortunate side effect of doing research in statistical genetics). So that may have broken some of the immersion for me. I also had a mild spoiler about the genetic editing aspect courtesy of a New Yorker crossword clue.

But I think the core problem of this book is that it doesn’t feel like the uneasy atmosphere is leveraged to explore themes in a new way. That, and perhaps the story was just too abstract and full of metaphors for me—I did not truly understand the entirety of things like the Cootings Machine.