The play was Rossum’s Universal Robots, the last being an invented word, derived from the Slavic root rabote, to work. It is this tradition that Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun, draws from. In Ishiguro’s quietly philosophical cadence, the margin becomes the centre, asking us to judge the novel on par with any classic. Klara is an Artificial Friend, and we follow her from her days in the showroom to her purchase by a teenage girl, Josie. Far from being immortal, Klara and her kind can only survive a few years before the “slow fade” sets in.

Source: The Hindu May 08, 2021 10:30 UTC