Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro: A review

 

In Kazuo Ishiguro's latest book, we are at some point in the not too distant future when technology is able to create androids that are meant to be Artificial Friends, AFs in the shorthand employed in the book. Klara is an AF. Her primary source of energy is solar, thus her special relationship with the sun. Since the sun "heals" Klara, she believes that it can do the same for others and that belief plays a major role in this quite wonderful book.

Klara is described as having short dark hair and kind eyes. Her most outstanding characteristic seems to be her exceptional powers of observation. We meet her when she is still on display in the store waiting for a buyer. She resides there with other Artificial Friends and while they wait they form their own relationships. When Josie and her mother come into the store, Klara is immediately interested in her. Could she be the one, the teenager for whom Klara will get to be a friend? Almost as quickly, Josie is attracted to her and she tells her mother that Klara is the one she wants. Her mother is skeptical, but eventually, on a second visit, Josie gets her way and they take Klara home. 

Klara's role with Josie will be to help her get through some lonely and difficult years until college. In this world, the kids do not go to school but are taught remotely at home through the use of "oblongs" which are apparently like iPhones or iPads. They get individual attention from teachers and relay their completed assignments to them. Thus, Josie doesn't really have contact with many kids her age and is almost friendless. She does have one very good friend who lives next door. His name is Rick and they are very close but other than that she must depend on her mother to arrange something like play dates with other teenagers. These often do not go well.

We soon learn that all is not well with Josie - literally. She is ill with some unspecified disease that may prove fatal. Her mother is consumed with guilt about this, although it isn't at first clear why. Josie's parents are separated and she only sees her father infrequently. We also learn that Josie had an older sister who died very young.

We see and hear all of this through Klara's eyes and ears. She is our narrator and our understanding is limited by her ability to interpret and convey events to us. Through her, we learn that some children are marked to be "lifted" a process that means they have a greater chance for success in life. Josie it seems is among these privileged ones. Rick, on the other hand, is not. Also, elite workers are now being replaced by machines. This is called being "substituted." Josie's father, an engineer, has been substituted. The machines are resented and so, at least in some quarters, are the Artificial Friends. Klara catches the brunt of some of this resentment.

When Josie becomes gravely ill, Klara seeks a way to help her. She turns to the sun and attempts to make a deal for Josie's life. In essence, she prays to the sun for its help. Klara may be a machine but she has true feelings for this young girl. Her friendship is in no way artificial; it is real.

So, how does it end? Are Klara's "prayers" answered? Do we get a happily ever after? That's not mine to disclose; you'll have to read the book. 

I liked Klara quite a lot. She never lets us forget that she is not human; she is a machine and yet she embodies the best of human characteristics. I found it easy to empathize with her. I would like to have her as my friend.

I have not read a lot of Ishiguro. I've never read his masterpiece, Remains of the Day. I saw the movie long ago and thought it was excellent, but now I am eager to read that book and all the others I've missed along the way. I like his style of writing, the unadorned prose that tells his stories in a straightforward manner. It is very affecting and has a way of reaching straight through to the heart. The Nobel Committee did not make a mistake when they gave him that prize.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars   

Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh: A review

Well, that was something completely different. I don't usually read graphic novels. I'm a word person and I prefer stories told with words rather than illustrations. But this one was recommended to me for its humor and in the interest of broadening my reading horizons, I decided to give it a try. 

I don't really know how typical this is of graphic novels. The drawings have an unfinished look about them and they leave a lot to the imagination. They illustrate anecdotes from the author's life, so this is in a sense a graphic memoir. That makes it a twofer for me: I don't usually read memoirs and I don't usually read graphic novels, so I'm breaking into whole new territory here.

The book comprises a series of essays relating the author's anecdotes. These start when she is three years old. She tells us that she became obsessed with her next-door neighbor, a middle-aged man, and she essentially began stalking him. Yes, I know. A three-year-old stalker boggles the mind a bit, but I'm not sure how else I can describe it. She stands in the driveway of her home staring at her neighbor while he is out and about in his yard. 

While her parents are away at work, her babysitter locks the doors of the house so that her charge will not accidentally get outside, but little Allie discovers that she can escape the house by going through the doggie door and she's off to the races! At first, she contents herself with merely observing her neighbor, but then she finds that his house has a cat door and that she can enter the house through that door. She visits the house both during the day and at night and she starts taking small items from there and hiding them in her drawer. (Again I remind you this is a three-year-old doing all this.) Eventually, she is discovered and must face consequences.

She tells us that she gains a baby sister who she hates at first. But the sister grows on her. They become allies and friends and Allie ends up adoring her. As adults, when tragedy strikes that sister it is completely devastating to Allie and causes her own life to go off the rails. She suffers from depression. Her marriage falls apart. She becomes self-destructive, dabbling in various drugs and considering ending it all. 

For a book that I was told would be humorous, very many of the stories it contained just seemed terribly sad to me. I got the impression in some instances that the writer/illustrator was striving to laugh at herself and her experiences and to get us to laugh at them but she might have been better served by simply acknowledging the sadness that she felt rather than trying to laugh it away. 

That being said, there are moments of pure humor but they don't occur that frequently for me in this 520-page book. Looking at some of the Goodreads readers' reviews of the book reveals that many of them would disagree with me and found the book quite funny. Perhaps my sense of humor is deficient.

So, my foray into reading graphic novels was somewhat less than successful. That's not an indictment of the genre and I may try again at some point, but I freely admit that I am prejudiced and my prejudice is for words. Describe your story with words and let me draw my own mind pictures.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars 

Poetry Sunday: Auguries of Innocence by William Blake

William Blake, he of "Tyger tyger, burning bright in the forests of the night..." fame, seems to have had a particular empathy for the things of Nature and especially for the animals of Nature as he expressed in this poem. He leaves little doubt as to what he felt for those who would abuse them. As someone else once told his followers, "If you have done it to one of the least of these..." 

Auguries of Innocence

by William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thr’ all its regions
A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State
A Horse misusd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood
…
The Owl that calls upon the Night
Speaks the Unbelievers fright
He who shall hurt the little Wren
Shall never be belovd by Men
He who the Ox to wrath has movd
Shall never be by Woman lovd
…
It is right it should be so
Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go

This week in birds - #444

 A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

A male Wood Duck enjoys its swim among the reeds of a wetland.

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Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan has removed more than 40 outside experts appointed under the previous administration from two key advisory panels, a move he says will help restore the role of science at the agency and reduce the heavy influence of industry over environmental regulations.

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When we moved to our present home some thirty-three years ago, one of our first acts was to plant oak trees in what was then a pretty bare yard. Honestly, we didn't really know what we were doing, but it turns out our instinct was correct. Oak trees support more life forms than any other trees in North America. Moreover, they are long-lived, essentially trouble-free, and magnificent.

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Australia which last year suffered the harshest wildfires in its history is now suffering from historic floods that have caused nearly 20,000 people to have to be evacuated.

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The 1960s have been mythologized, but the counterculture that thrived during that decade did change the world in some important ways. One of those ways was the study of whales and learning an appreciation of that unique species. That appreciation has helped to engender an effort to protect and preserve them and offers some hope for their future survival. 

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The Biden administration is moving to sharply increase offshore wind energy along the East Coast. It is taking initial steps toward approving a huge wind farm off the New Jersey coast as part of an effort to generate electricity for more than 10 million homes nationwide by 2030.

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The endangered California Condor once soared the skies from British Columbia to Mexico before habitat loss, overhunting, and poisoning from hunting ammunition almost drove them to extinction. But they will soon be returning to the skies of the Pacific Northwest with an assist from the Yurok Tribe whose ancestral lands encompass large swaths of the forest there. The Yurok people are creating a captive breeding program that will prepare condors for release into the wild as early as this fall.

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Fossil fuel industries in this country have a long history of supporting white supremacy and that has helped to skew their policies toward minority communities, including their hiring practices which often have discriminated against people of color.

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Based on Christmas Bird Count data, it appears that waterfowl are staying farther north in winter as that season gets warmer. Populations of waterfowl in the South are proportionately dwindling as many birds that would normally be there are choosing to stay in more northerly climes.

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Data recently released by the University of Maryland shows that the planet lost an area of tree cover larger than the size of the United Kingdom in the past year. Tree cover loss rose in both the tropics and temperate regions, but the rate of increase in loss was greatest in primary tropical forests, led by rising deforestation and incidence of fire in the Amazon, Earth’s largest rainforest.

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In another sign of the effects of climate change, the city of Kyoto had its earliest peak of cherry blossoming in 1,200 years. Peak bloom came on March 26 this year beating the previous record by one day. 

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Although the use of pesticides has fallen in recent years, a study shows that the effect of pesticides on bees and other pollinators has doubled in the past decade, contradicting claims that the toxic damage done to the environment by pesticides is declining.

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Here's an interesting story from the world of prehistory about a wooden sculpture that has been found and dated to 12,500 years ago. It is the earliest known work of ritual art that has ever been found.

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The massive infrastructure plan announced by the Biden administration this week is about a lot more than just roads. It also seeks to address the existential threats of climate change and of racial inequality and other problems that impact infrastructure in sometimes unacknowledged ways.

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Marbled Murrelets' choice of breeding location is influenced, it seems, by the sounds that they hear. If they can hear other murrelets calling in the area, they are more likely to select the spot for their nest.

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A new study theorizes that perhaps 80% of species that are presently unknown to science are likely to be found in the tropical forests in countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Madagascar, and Colombia.

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Anecdotal evidence has pointed to a decline in firefly species in North America. Now a new scientific assessment of the extinction risk for firefly species in Canada and the U.S. reveals that 11% are threatened with extinction, 2% are near threatened, 33% are categorized as least concern, and more than half are data deficient and their status is unknown. 

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Beset by a number of problems, the kelp forests of northern California have collapsed and scientists say they may not be able to recover anytime soon. 

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Egyptian Vultures face greater dangers in southeastern Europe and in the Middle East than they do in Sub-Saharan Africa. The causes of their mortality in those areas are primarily human.

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Grizzly bears like the same kinds of trails that are typically made for humans to hike in parks which may increase the likelihood of the two species coming in contact with each other.

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A sick Bald Eagle rescued on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina turned out to have a serious case of lead poisoning from the lead shot used by hunters who do not heed the warnings about the dangers of such ammunition.

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There was a boom in gardening last year as people stuck at home because of the pandemic had more time for such activities. The boom seems to be continuing into the present year. Perhaps a new generation has been converted to the joys of gardening. 

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The native plant versus nonnative plant debate continues. It is complicated by the fact that we have cultivated some nonnative plants for so long that we no longer recognize them as nonnative and they are often some of our favorite plants.

Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard: A review

 

Ever since reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as a young adult, I have been enamored of Annie Dillard's style of writing about Nature. Teaching a Stone to Talk first came out in 1982 and it feels like I have been intending to read it almost since that time. An e-book edition was published in 2019. At long last, I have fulfilled my intention to read and I'm very glad that I did. Better late than never.

The book comprises fourteen essays, most if not all of which have been published elsewhere but here they are in one collection. The essays are broadly about Nature but they also cover themes of time and memory, as well as touching on religion.

The first essay in the book tells of Dillard's and her husband's experience in viewing a total solar eclipse. She describes the feelings of awe and even fear that she had, in spite of the fact that she understood what was happening. Imagine the feelings of those who have experienced such an event without knowing that it will soon end and their sun will still be there in the sky. I suspect that terror is not too strong a word to apply.

The second essay in the collection is one of my favorites. It is called "An Expedition to the Pole" and it compares the experiences of polar explorers to her own experience of seeking the "pole" of religious practice; specifically, she speaks of her attempts to search for the divine in the Catholic mass. The essay goes back and forth between these two ideas as she juxtaposes the obstacles she must overcome in her search with the sometimes unfathomable decisions made by polar explorers. She finds that they actually have more in common than one might at first think.

Another favorite of mine is the essay called "Living Like Weasels" in which she describes a chance encounter with a weasel at a pond which leads her to ponder what it would be like to live a human life like a weasel.

Perhaps my overall favorites are the essays that describe her experiences in the Galapagos Islands. Those islands have always held a fascination for me partly because of their connection to Charles Darwin and to the important insights he gained there that helped him to formulate his understanding of evolution, but mainly, I think, just because they seem such a magical place with animals that have never been persecuted by humans and so have never learned fear of them. Dillard tells us of the wonder of her experiences with these animals.

The title essay of the collection, "Teaching a Stone to Talk," speaks of a neighbor of hers who actually attempts such a feat. The joke is on him because of course stones and all of Nature do talk if only we have ears to hear.

All of these essays are thought-provoking and they shine through with Dillard's care and concern for Nature. They are easily up to the standard that she set with her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Yes, I am glad I finally got around to reading them.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars 

Who is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews: A review

 

Who is Maud Dixon? She is a fabulously successful writer, author of the book world's newest sensation, a coming-of-age story about two teenage girls and a murder in a small town in Mississippi. But who is she really? No one knows except her one contact at her publishing house because Maud Dixon is her nom de plume. She chooses to ferociously guard her anonymity.  

But never mind Maud. Our main protagonist here is Florence Darrow who at age 26 is an assistant at a publishing house in New York. (Not the one that publishes Maud Dixon.) Florence is from Florida, a graduate of the University of Florida at Gainesville and she feels decidedly inferior alongside all the well-connected Ivy Leaguers that she works with. Florence is devious, amoral, and resentful. She wants to divorce herself from her past and grab hold of the life which she believes that she is meant for and deserves, namely that of a brilliant writer. The only thing that is stopping her is that she can't seem to write anything.

Florence's bad attitude seems evident in all of her relationships and that extends to her one-night stand with the manager at the publishing house where she works. She expects the relationship to be more than that and when the man makes clear to her that it was a one-off and that he's a happily married man and doesn't want anything further from her, her resentment takes a creepy form. She starts stalking the man's school-age daughters and takes pictures of them and of his wife picking them up from school. She sends those pictures to the man as a kind of threat. The result is that she is called into HR the next day and summarily fired. She is also served with a restraining order that forbids her from getting anywhere close to the family.  

Now jobless, Florence sends out feelers and applications to other publishing houses, and eventually, she gets a call. It seems that a famous writer is in need of a research assistant but the person who takes the job must be able to keep a secret and must sign a non-disclosure agreement. I'll bet you can guess who that famous writer is.

Up to this point, the book has been a straightforward character study of a conniving and unprincipled young woman; with the beginning of Florence and Maud's (real name Helen Wilcox) relationship, it becomes a battle of wits and a plot-twisting thriller. The two travel to Morocco, supposedly to research the new book that Helen/Maud is writing and this is where the real fun begins.

This is Alexandra Andrews' debut novel and she is masterful in employing misdirection, feints, and counterfeits in her complicated plot. The unsuspecting reader innocently follows the writer where she steers us, expecting one outcome and suddenly being brought up short when she realizes that things are not at all as she had been led to believe. Clever writer! She has constructed a delicious thriller that is great fun to read with only a few draggy points along the way. It is a formidable start for this writer.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars 

Poetry Sunday: Poem to the First Generation of People to Exist After the Death of the English Language by Billy Collins

English a dead language? Well, perhaps in a world where people increasingly seem to communicate by emoji or by a series of letters which one has to consult Google's Urban Dictionary in order to understand what they mean, it may not be too far a stretch of the imagination. Certainly, Billy Collins' imagination stretches that far.

Poem to the First Generation of People to Exist After the Death of the English Language

by Billy Collins

I’m not going to put a lot of work into this
because you won’t be able to read it anyway,
and I’ve got more important things to do
this morning, not the least of which
is to try to write a fairly decent poem
for the people who can still read English.

Who could have foreseen English finding
a place in the cemetery of dead languages?

I once imagined English placing flowers
at the tombstones of its parents, Latin and Anglo-Saxon,
but you people can actually visit its grave
on a Sunday afternoon if you still have days of the week.

I remember the story of the last speaker,
of Dalmatian being tape-recorded in his hut
as he was dying under a horse-hair blanket.
But English? English seemed for so many of us
the only true way to describe the world
as if reality itself were English
and Adam and Eve spoke it in the garden
using words like snake, apple, and perdition.

Of course, there are other words for things
but what could be better than boat,
pool, swallow (both the noun and the verb),
statuette, tractor, squiggly, surf, and underbelly?

I’m sorry.
I’ve wasted too much time on this already.
You carry on however you do
without the help of English, communicating
with dots in the air or hologram hats or whatever.
You’re just like all the ones who say
they can’t understand poetry
but at least you poor creatures have an excuse.

So I’m going to turn the page
and not think about you and your impoverishment.
Instead, I’m going to write a poem about red poppies
waving by the side of the railroad tracks,
and you people will never even know what you’re missing.