Kazuo Ishiguro on Klara and the Sun

uh the direction clara and the sun came from was it was a completely different direction it was the world of uh um small children's books um and i i literally had a little story for young children um you know there was an editor at faber who kept encouraging me to write for children and i thought oh i've got a little story here for very young children um and if that story is more or less the kernel of of clara and the sun but i ran this little children's story which i thought would work very well with picture you know pictures and illustrations and stuff you know um uh past my daughter who who's she's not a child you know she's uh she was then in her mid-twenties um which is naomi shikura who's a novelist um herself and uh she she was then working at in an independent bookstore and uh she stared at me and said that there's no way you can go anywhere near young children with that story yeah that's kind of just traumatized so i thought oh right but i thought it was a rather good story so i thought i'd use it in a in a in an adult book and i had actually then quite separately and for its own sake i've been interested in ai gene editing and gene editing those two areas had fascinated me and i've been attending um uh conversations you know with kind of experts as the kind of the non-expert in the in the room and uh conferences and things like this where i was listening to a lot of that stuff uh and i i'd had conversations with actual kind of key leading people in that field and i've been showing around their their workplaces and things so so i had all that stuff going on anyway and i thought oh right that could be the backdrop but the novel wasn't essentially it's not supposed to be my thoughts about you know how ai gene editing all these things sort of impact on the world but it's just kind of there in the background really it's about how you like to take genre and play with it and to to try and do something different with each book this book i suppose would fit in you could say it was sort of science fiction speculative fiction something like that but i think i get the sense that you're not a great respecter or genre or you don't even really like the idea of genre definitions you're more trying to find new ways of exploring consistent themes in your work is that a fair assessment i think that is fair i don't really see many boundaries between the genres maybe you know if you're a bookseller you are more conscious of these things because you know you had to put things in shelves and and but but as a as a writer i i don't really see these boundaries very much and i take what i need and i've actually been rather passionate i've been a kind of fan of of uh different genres and what you know the kind of worlds that they open up up to to me you know so um and actually i i mean all right i have to confess i mean it's also a kind of a ploy on my part because actually i i i usually repeat myself quite a lot in my novels yeah um some some novel novels are just kind of rewrites of the previous book because i wanted to revisit that same terrain and explore it a little bit more or slightly differently or there was something not quite right about the last book and i wanted to do it again but people don't really notice this very much because uh i i i do it in a different genre or different setting you know and people think oh he's moved on you know isn't he he's quite brave he keeps he keeps moving on uh so it's a good disguise because people are very literal-minded it's sort of um and and so so yes i mean it might look like clara and the sun is a companion book to never let me go and it is in many ways you know and there is a relationship between those two books but um the genre that i was really conscious of what is is the one i taught you about the the one of the the picture books for young children that fascinated me not not just because of it gave me an idea for a kind of a a narrator like that you know a non-human narrator which is very common in that kind of those kinds of books you have teddy bears and soft toys and dolls you know and animals as you often as your protagonist but not but it's not just at that level i find those books for children the illustrations as much as the uh stories quite poignant you know you can see the because you can see the wish on the part of adults to to shelter the children who'll be reading these books from what's coming up you know so the world has presented us this kind of much kinder place but at the same time you can see a kind of tension there because you can see that often the adults who've created that book don't want to lie to the children and they feel a kind of need to drop little hints about particularly about sadness and death or you know something dark that might be awaiting them um without without really you know rubbing it in their faces so you often see this um in the drawings and in the stories themselves these so i wanted that a lot of that to go into clara in the sun you know i wanted that spirit i wanted that kind of small child's logic i even you know visually i wanted the thing to have the atmosphere of those kind of illustrations you know the bright sun the the field and the you know um these big sky the colors you know uh and clara to some extent has the has the understanding and the vision of a young you know a young child who doesn't understand very much about the world but is learning really fast i mean that's how she is at the beginning um then she starts to change you know she learns more i'm so pleased to he said that because i was going to ask about clara's world view i suppose or how she sees the world because despite the sophistication of her as an object that she is this incredibly sophisticated robot her view of the world is incredibly naive at the beginning she observes she's watching human behavior she doesn't quite understand human motivation and as you say through the book she begins to learn more and more about how humans work and operate and communicate to each other and was that simply born out of the fact that it was initially a sort of an idea for a children's book or did it also allow you i suppose to to take the reader themselves on a journey of discovery along with clara i i think i think that that's a very much i mean my children's story was you know it's just the children so it ended very quickly you know um when i when i saw that option of of having the protagonist as an ai person but it just it just opened all these doors all these doors for me uh if you have an outsider narrator like that paradoxically it does allow you to focus very sharply on on specific aspects of the human world um and and it feels very natural so it feels quite natural for clara because she's she's created to prevent teenagers from being lonely becoming lonely i mean that's a commercial purpose that's why people like her are manufactured she sees everything um certainly initially through the lens of human loneliness and she looks out of the shop window at the street going past and she tries to decode it in terms of loneliness you know largely you know she she tries to spot loneliness how people are trying to avoid loneliness and you know when she goes to live with the family and she realizes that there's um there's kind of impending heartbreak that and she in this family and she wants to try and stop that i mean it becomes quite natural for her to ask questions like so what you know what does it mean to love what do human beings mean when they say they love somebody and if they lose that person that person is irreplaceable i mean what does does that make sense so um having a a narrator that is so outside um like her i think is a way of actually really um allowing us you know both me and the readers to can really focus in on some aspects of our lives but from a fresh perspective

Channel: Waterstones

Views: 27,314

Rating: 4.9492755 out of 5

Keywords: Waterstones, Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, Nobel Prize, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Robots, Gene editing

Id: 6GJ7mrqo9nQ

Length: 8min 33sec (513 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021