Book completed
Jun. 26th, 2021 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeKlara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. An excellent book; I can see why he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In this book, Klara is an Artificial Friend, waiting in a shop window for a child to come and take her home to be their companion. Unlike many other AFs, though, Klara is exceptionally observant, and when the child in her life becomes very ill, Klara has a plan.
The book is at the same time a very readable story, from a likeable perspective, of a near-future version of humanity, and also an exploration of the philosophical ideal of essentialism, the apparently universal human belief that each of us has an "essence" that's consistent throughout our lives. I also can't help but think that the author has encountered the ideas of anthropologist Pascal Boyer, who believes that human ideas about gods come from our propensity to make inferences from patterns.
The book is at the same time a very readable story, from a likeable perspective, of a near-future version of humanity, and also an exploration of the philosophical ideal of essentialism, the apparently universal human belief that each of us has an "essence" that's consistent throughout our lives. I also can't help but think that the author has encountered the ideas of anthropologist Pascal Boyer, who believes that human ideas about gods come from our propensity to make inferences from patterns.