Looks funnier than I remembered the book being? In the novel Ishiguro created this weird distance between the reader and Klara. Who won’t be able to connect with Jenna Ortega as their Artificial Friend? Here’s a relevant bit from Radhika Jones’ review of the book in the Times…
Klara is likable enough — as she was manufactured to be — but it’s hard to empathize with her on the page, which is maybe the point. The stilted affect that so often characterizes Ishiguro’s prose and dialogue — an incantatory flatness that belies its revelatory ability — serves its literal function. Klara’s machine-ness never recedes. Unlike most of Ishiguro’s first-person narrators, however, she seems incapable of deluding herself. Her technological essence presents some childlike limitations of expression, but are they more pronounced than the limits born of the human desire to repress, or wallow, or come across better than we are? “I believe I have many feelings,” Klara says. “The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.” This statement had the peculiar effect, on me anyway, not of persuading me of her humanness but of causing me to consider whether humans acquire nameable feelings all that differently from her description. Which is maybe also the point.
It’s been five years since the novel was published; so much has changed since then. Maybe we just wouldn’t be able to believe a future where our Artificial Friends speak in an “incantatory flatness?”