Reviews

KLARA AND THE SUN, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Several years have passed since I read what is probably Kazuo Ishiguro’s best-known novel, The Remains Of The Day. Based on that passing acquaintance, I hesitate to generalize about his work. However, I was left with a distinct impression about his style back then and Klara And The Sun adds to it. His approach it seems to me is that of an alien being, describing minutiae that most of us take for granted. It is as if he writes for the benefit of life forms new to our culture. Perhaps his personal circumstances – Japanese ancestry, British upbringing – have a bearing on that. I found it effective with Remains, not so much with Klara.

In this case, Klara is an android of a kind existing in a presumably not-too-distant future. She’s a puzzling being who, contrary to apocryphal robot portrayals, has a subjective and self-denying devotion to the humans in her life – even when they don’t reciprocate. She also has an obsession with the sun that is akin to religious idolatry. A pretty subjective entity then, by most standards.

Rather than the sci-fi a reader may anticipate at first, the story’s structure seems to conform more with the assumptions of a children’s story. That’s not to say that this is a children’s story, but that whys and wherefores are left to the imagination. The most apparent of these is the lack of description of Klara herself. What materials is she composed of? What are her origins? How was she programmed? For the most part, we must guess.

The futurist may find inconsistencies also in the technology people use in this period. They drive their cars through traffic while looking for parking spaces, check their watches for the time, and yet have androids as companions. What’s that offer for us to look forward to?     

The novel has been widely acclaimed, but reader may share my profound sense that the writer’s themes are left half fulfilled. Children grapple with physical ailments and an educational hierarchy, without adequate explanation or resolution. At one point, Ishiguro ventures into the well-explored but always stimulating territory of an android’s capacity to attain human characteristics. And then he lets the challenge fizzle.

Ishiguro is an accomplished writer with an admiring following. Could it be that I’ve missed an underlying meaning here? In my present state of enlightenment, I can only conclude that this story needed development.

*****

NATURE WRITINGS, by John Muir

John Muir, first president of the Sierra Club, towers over environmentalism like a dominant peak in his beloved Sierra Nevada range. If, to many of us, he has become a remote and lofty monument, this 824-page anthology (originally published in this form in 1997 by The Library of America) should breathe vitality and insight into his legacy.

Beginning with a memoir of childhood in Scotland and Wisconsin—the family’s home after emigration, the selected accounts herein abruptly transition to Muir’s love affair with the mountains of California, his subsequent adventures in Alaska, and even expeditions to Arizona’s Grand Canyon and Florida’s Cedar Keys.

Though I cannot claim expertise in the work of 19^th Century naturalists, I find it hard to believe that any writer, then or subsequently, has matched Muir in the delight he showed in every one of Nature’s facets. From the microcosms of flower petals and ice drops to vast spectacles of storm and landscape, Muir reveled in his surroundings. He prized virtually every life form he encounters, referring with anthropomorphic glee to “plant people” and “insect people.”

Be warned, some chapters are so resplendent with botanical and geological detail, it may be best for the casual reader to skip to items of more general interest. For instance, there is his celebrated tale of an Alaskan adventure with a dog named Stickeen as a companion. Many a pet lover over the years must have tensed at their travails as they negotiated glacial crevasses.

As his perspective as a writer changes over the years, Muir transitions from memoir to field guide to travelogue. With the threat to wilderness from development more apparent in the early years of the 20^th century, Muir becomes a tourism advocate in his campaigning for public lands and a public willingness to support them. A major feature in that respect was his famed and failed attempt to prevent the Hetch Hetchy Valley from becoming a reservoir for San Francisco, and predictably he dwells increasingly on desecration for the sake of development.

Throughout, one can never stop admiring Muir’s encyclopedic knowledge—although, as previously noted, I’ll leave it to the others to judge the accuracy of his observations. What cannot be contested is his dedication to preserving the essence of the areas in which he traveled, and for that matter the eloquence in his writing. As a founder of the Sierra Club, his mission continues—as does the pressing need for it.

For those mystified about how Muir acquired his knowledge, and indeed what took him from Wisconsin to California, the book ends with textual notes and a detailed chronology. This timeline is a valuable addition, providing details about his itinerant domestic and international travels, marriage and two daughters, influences on his thinking, celebrity status and meetings with political and cultural figures of note, not to mention his birth in 1838 and death in 1914.

A Postscript:

In reading Muir’s account of his first venture into the Sierra Nevada range, I was taken aback to learn that he considered the indigenous people he encountered to be dirty and by inference inferior to “civilized” beings. I must admit that I initially put that to one side in writing this review. But recent news that the Sierra Club hierarchy is reflecting negatively on Muir’s purported views of racial differences has me re-thinking too. My opinion, for what its worth, is that the current re-calibration of cultural attitudes in general is overdue. But I also note that the famous are more susceptible to revisionism, however justified, than those who transgress in anonymity.

As far as I recall, Muir’s comments about indigenous people are muted in this book and he has no aspersions for other races, even if his friendships apparently suggest otherwise. It is tempting to dismiss his errant views as those of a man of his time. But we are people of our time, and must re-assess accordingly.

The point subject to debate is that perhaps his observations of people’s appearance were accurate—as his observations typically were I believe in the botanical and geological fields. Perhaps those indigenous persons he encountered in the Sierras were dirty and gave a bad impression. On the other hand, it also prompts the consideration that Muir’s words in this case were filtered through prejudice.

It should be kept in mind too that not all Muir’s impressions of indigenous people, as expressed in these pages, were uncomplimentary. On a visit to Arizona’s Grand Canyon, later in his life, he regarded its inhabitants as “able, erect men, with commanding eyes.”

The golden rule, it seems to me, must be that one bases impressions of personality and habits on the individuals observed rather than the groups to which they appear to belong. And in addition, one must consider that norms and standards differ according to tradition and circumstances beyond one’s own. A person of any race or group may be viewed negatively, and one should be able to express that judgment without being regarded as condemning by association their entire group, religion, nationality or race.

In hindsight particularly, it’s hard to separate observation from prejudice. And of course, large as this volume is, there is plenty about John Muir that lies outside its parameters.