Finished #19

 18 - Dial A For Aunties - Jesse Q. Sutanto

Meddelin Chan is a wedding photographer for her close-knit family's wedding business.  The night before a lavish wedding set on an an island off the coast of California, she accidently kills the date her mother set her up with from a dating website.  A Chinese-Indonesian rom-com with a lavish wedding, first love, lost love, found love...and a dead body.  What could possibly go wrong?

19 - Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

Since I first became aware of this novel, it has been the one I was most looking forward to reading; a story told from the perspective of Klara. The Klara of the title is an "artificial friend" or AF, meant to keep children from becoming lonely.  In some future time, somewhat similar to our own, children are separated into those "uplifted" and those not (fates chosen by their parents), and learn through tutors and computers at home, no longer in the classroom (which has been the experience of so many children across the world over the past year-and-a-half.)

Klara is a unique AF, in that she is observant, curious, and takes an interest in understanding humans, in particular their emotional states and reasons, as well as the world around her.

Ishiguro novels have an overarching sense of melancholy to me, though I find them engaging, thought-provoking, and page-turning.  They deal with a stratification of society, there are outsiders who will never find a place in society. Society deems them as separate, undeserving of equal treatment.  In "Remains of the Day" (sorry, I read the novel a few years ago and can't recall the characters' names, but I remember the movie) the Anthony Hopkins character no longer has a place, while the Emma Thompson character has adapted to a different world. "Never Let Me Go" where people are bred to be used for organ donation, unable to reproduce, and kept apart from society, and with a stigma that makes other people fear them.

And the thing is, they are naive about what they do not understand.  They have been kept so separate, isolated from the "outside" world, that they do not understand how things "work".  I could call it "fish out of water" but that usually implies a comedy, and these are lives deemed unnecessary, to be used and discarded.  They never win, the world had been constructed such that there was never any chance for that.  I think of the Anthony Hopkins butler when he is driving in the country and his overconfident belief that he understands the world, but he's been sequestered on an estate for his whole life, while the world outside has drastically altered, he might as well of woken on a different planet.

Klara creates her own religion.  A supreme being to please and appeal to, in order to assist someone she has grown to love.  And holds her conviction so strongly that she convinces others to help her in her scheme, even without being able to tell them her secret promises.  Shades of "Never Let Me Go" here, though with Klara she chooses, while the donors in the other have no agency in their fates.

There's also something interesting in how the two mothers made different choices for their children, but on the same trip to the city, make desperate choices to hedge their bets, second-guessing what can't be undone.