Im about 100 pages in and while it’s well written and enjoyable this feels like a YA book. I read The Remains of the Day and found it fantastic and so came into this kind of blind, purely off of Ishiguro’s name,I mean, honestly, this would have been better served by being a comic so far with how visual some of it is.
>>24862734OP again, just finished the end of part 2 and the sequence with the mother definitely elevated it.
>>24862734It's a bit thin.One problem is that it doesn't really know what story it's telling.Is it a basic "child befriends robot" tale? Hard to make more than a short story out of that.Or is it all about a robot trying to formulate its own philosophy / religion? The title suggests that, but it never goes anywhere.Or is it another dystopian morality tale? Children divided into HIGH and LOW, "messing with nature", etc?Or is it a psychological drama (the mother aiming to replace the child with the robot)?It can't quite decide, and in the end it goes nowhere. It just doesn't have the weight you would expect from a supposedly serious novelist. Klara is quite appealing but that's about it.
>>24863017All of the 'Is it?' items are really just some dressing to the main thrust of the book, which is that we (or Klara, at least, but based on most of Ishiguro's entire oeuvre I think we can extrapolate) can only find real meaning and happiness in helping others. Klara, who is less self-deluded and more objective than any of Ishiguro's other narrators, is happy at the end of the novel as she fades away, because she lived consciously and unselfishly.
>>24863017Did you enjoy the Buried Giant?
>>24862734I can't remember the exact sequence, but later on there are bits where the visual process breaks down which definitely benefit from being written
