Review: 'Klara and the Sun'

(Spoilers ahead).

Faith is something we cobble together out of our own needs, observations, coincidences and hope. And yet it also helps us create the story of ourselves for ourselves -- it might be not entirely rational or correct, but that doesn't mean it can't be meaningful. 

A lot of reviewers have talked about Kashuo Ishiguro's "Klara and the Sun" as a love story, and it's sort of that, but it's Klara's faith journey that sits with me most. Our protagonist is an "artificial friend," a living doll of sorts chosen to be a companion for a young, sick girl. Klara, we see from the beginning, is endowed with a consciousness, but is treated by humans around her either as an object of sorts -- one unkind character likens Klara to a vacuum cleaner -- or as a potential vessel for something of more value than she intrinsically possesses.

We see from the beginning that Klara sees the world in patterns, observing objects and vistas as something less than the whole of their parts -- describing the world instead as a series of colliding geometries; it often takes time for her to reconcile those geometries into a rough understanding of who, or what, she might be seeing. In reverse fashion, she takes a series of observations and coincidences -- as well as her own body's particular needs -- to fashion a likeness of religious faith, treating the Sun as a deity endowed with its own consciousness of its own. In both cases, Klara never quite sees a thing for what it is.

And yet, a miracle happens. 

Or does it? The medical crisis at the center of the book is resolved, seemingly by divine intervention. But we're also told that other people who have suffered the same sickness have sometimes -- sometimes -- gotten better for good after experiencing the same condition. Maybe what looks like a faith healing is in fact something a bit more random.

But the faith version of the story gives Klara a way to organize everything she's seen -- a way to "place her memories in the right order," as she says at the end of the book.

There are many ideas going on in "Klara." Thoughts about how elites treat those below them as disposable. How those "lesser" people find meaning in a world not built for them. Ishiguro's prose is as elegant as ever -- and his themes as large, and unsettling, as they've always been.