I had high hopes on Klara and the Sun as I saw it everywhere in the Booker predictions. I was waiting around for the hype to subside to pick this one but alas, it did make into the list, didn't it?

Set in a dystopian society, Klara and the Sun offers us a narrative of different dimensions of love. Yes! Love is very much in the air. The kind of love that makes you go crazy. We have two different dynamics here. The love expressed by Josie's mother and the love expressed by Klara. The love of the mother is selfish. The type of love that is innate to every mother to keep their little ones close. To do anything under the sun to save their kids. The type of love that refuses to let go. Josie's mother plans many things to save Josie and as a wartime plan, she has Klara.

Klara, the AF, has something that's not often seen in humans. A sacrificial love that doesn't expect anything in return. I say not often because we humans are complicated animals with feelings and thoughts and expectations and whatnot. But Klara is a machine and she shows so much emotion than I ever can and there is something quite unsettling about her innocent love. We do see at one point she was ready to sacrifice herself to do things that she believes in to save her human.

Even when she was discarded in the scrapyard, Klara remains optimistic. She is happy about the life she had with her human. Of course, humans outgrow things and discard things as if we have never had them in the first place, my stomach gave a lurch on reading the last part of this book. Klara felt so human to me and I felt that she didn't deserve that ending in her last days.

In this dystopian society, humans undergo some genetic alteration process to get 'lifted into some upper-class society. We are not given specifics and are left to fill in the blanks. Humans have to survive this lifting process to enjoy the pleasures like education and all that. And I think that was shitty. Education should be available to everyone irrespective of their status. But we are currently living in a dystopia with similar issues, so I'll let that pass.

On the outlook, Klara and the Sun is a simple book about a girl and her AF. But after finishing it, you will be pushed into the black hole that is your thoughts. There is so much to unpack here. @bernie.lombardi in his review says that it is a critique of human individualism. And I think that forms one of the multifaceted themes here. We think we are unique individuals, when in fact we are a manifestation of everything and everyone around us.

Klara, like a human, learns the people around her. She studies the scene and detects the mood quite quickly. Like humans, she also gets sensory overload and when she is overloaded she sees things in partitions. She is not human but I couldn't shake the feeling there's so much more to her than that. Her childlike innocence and thoughts get creepier as it goes. There are so many emotions but a detachment that makes the narrative cold and distant. The dialogue between organic and inorganic has made Klara's thoughts empathetic but aloof.

I expected this book to be dark. I was turning page after page and waiting for the sun to shine. But let me tell you, the sun didn't shine on me as it did on Josie and I was devastated. I do think that this book will hit different with an intellectual audience or a more empathetic audience. But to me, it felt incomplete and that's on me, isn't it? There are so many things going on here but my brain is a jelly to think anything more than this. I may visit this on some other day and revamp this one.