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I first read Klara and the Sun when my child was home from preschool for Covid symptoms, without even an Artificial Friend to keep her company. I handed her an iPad and a popsicle so I could teach a Zoom class from a stool at the kitchen island鈥攖he setting of many of Josie and Klara鈥檚 tutoring sessions.

As an English professor, I urge my students to move beyond identifying with characters, emphasizing that characterization is just one literary tool that interacts with many others, including setting, symbolism, and imagery. But here I was, reading Ishiguro鈥檚 characters as cracked mirror versions of real people. In Josie I sensed both my daughter and my isolated, stressed students on the Zoom screen. I was Klara, devoted electronic teacher to a socially distanced generation. I was also the Mother, ambitious and full of parenting mistakes as I doted on a sick child sometime near the end of the world. The novel broke me open.

The of Ishiguro鈥檚 novels (to quote the Swedish Academy鈥檚 description of his Nobel Prize-winning work) always catches me off guard. Like most of Ishiguro鈥檚 earlier novels, Klara and the Sun is sparing, with simple and repetitive vocabulary that reflects the limited worldview of the narrator. The characters inhabit a thinly described world of few sensory details to stir our passions: we get stock images of a sun, a store window, a barn; even Mr. Capaldi鈥檚 art studio, presumably a visual feast, gets barely an adjective鈥檚 worth of description. Readers, seeing through Klara鈥檚 often-glitching eyes, cannot quite perceive where or when we are. We glimpse this near dystopian future at a remove.

Yet Ishiguro slays me every time with his nonhuman narrators. He did it first with (1989), probably my favorite book. That classic novel is about (wait for it) a butler. While Stevens the butler is, biologically speaking, a human, the institutions that shape his character systematically dehumanize him. Ishiguro broke my heart again with (2005), narrated by a clone waiting to have her organs harvested for naturally born humans. And Klara and the Sun packs a similar punchwith an empathic android who longs to feel connected to a broken world. But of course, the point is never about butlers, or clones, or androids. I don鈥檛 think Ishiguro is overly interested in the conventions of science fiction or the ethics of AI (though I wouldn鈥檛 be surprised if his next novel features chatbots in love). Instead, he鈥檚 interested in what a human being is鈥攁nd how horrifying the answer to that question can be.

Klara and the Sun is a haunting novel of the Covid years that also speaks beyond them. I hope students respond to the book鈥檚 depiction of an isolated, virtual high school experience and the unhealthiness of the college admissions rat race. But I also hope we can think together about the book鈥檚 bigger concerns: how the pursuit of full human potential makes monsters of us all, and how we might nonetheless care for one another, imperfectly.