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Ishiguros futurism does not imagine a great rupture or an AI singularity.
Instead, Klaras world follows the vectors already in motion.
But she also notices the way taxicabs can fuse and diverge in her line of sight.
The way bodies and forms appear, whether human or not, conveys great meaning to her.
For Klara, looking is a kind of thinking.
Klaras visual processing can sometimes be overwhelmed when confronting something unfamiliar.
Manager explains, Sometimes … people feel a pain alongside their happiness.
Of all the lessons Klara learns, thats the one she seems to write deepest into her code.
Ishiguro is doing something quite tricky here, pointing to our own rather dysfunctional sympathy functions.
He has Klara describe her own emotions to others: I believe I have many feelings, she says.
The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.
Yet within Klaras own mind, there is often only obligation.
Still, Klara is a creature of total commitment.
At Josies house, Klara encounters unfamiliar terrain.
Why is Josie sick?
Where is her sister?
Why has Josies father gone away?
At a moment of extreme duress late in the book, her visual-processing system starts to falter.
Even after whipping through the book, I kept returning to this sequence again and again.
Are we being urged to see Klara as unreliable since she always accepts what her eyes tell her?
Or is Ishiguro describing the inside-out feeling of reading itself, in which we perceive clever shading as reality?
For those old enough and foolish enough to have seen Steven SpielbergsA.I.
Artificial Intelligence,you will notice certain … echoes.
Theyre also both meditations on new varietals of loneliness.
WhereA.I.s David believed in the Blue Fairy, Klara worships the sun.
Her thinking is already programmed for self-sacrifice; the self-abnegation of religion is only a quick step behind.
Ishiguro has written an exquisite book.
The world is always new for them; they come around each corner with their mind wiped clean.
The books first 30 or so pages, when Klaras in the shop, are perfect.
Once she goes out into the world, we see the authors unwillingness to fully imagine her existence.
Its strange, for instance, that a book about a buyable girl is so sexless.
Klara is a naif, but she never catches even a peripheral glance of humanperversion?
I cant believe it.
But then, Ishiguro isnt a futurist or even a realist.
Klaras pure, rather formal phrasing makes the book seem like a fable.
Klara shows us how gladly she lets herself be pierced to the heart.
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