However, she also warns,Ĭhildren make promises all the time. Manager assures Klara that even if nobody has chosen her yet, there are many children who would choose her. Robots take turns in the glass window “representing” the store to the outside world. The novel starts out in a store where Klara is trotted out by Manager to customers along with her friend Rosa as a potential friend for lonely children. However, the simplicity and transparency of the prose is deceptive - what happens in the novel is psychologically deep, an attempt to dive all the way down to the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench. The voice is so nonintrusive, so endearing in its transparency and simplicity, it works without interference.
Ishiguro is not so much a stylist as he is supremely gifted at constructing dramatic events, both reveals and turns. We know something horrifying is going to be uncovered, but we don’t know when.įrom the start, a reader is fully immersed in the first-person perspective of a robot, an Artificial Friend, Klara. The novel cannily uses delay and withheld information to ratchet up our worry, taking time to disclose the source of the menace. In his dystopian novel, Klara and the Sun, a sorrowful but elegant exploration of the human heart and his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize, Kazuo Ishiguro makes use of a bomb under the table. If Hitchcock’s audience were simply watching quaint events - a bored teenage girl, two small town men talking about the best way to murder someone, a tennis star who wants to marry the daughter of a senator - they might be surprised by the detonation of the bomb, but they might also have a lesser degree of involvement. Knowing of the bomb under the table, the audience longs to warn the two people talking, longs to participate in the events occurring. In Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and Shadow of a Doubt, an odd veneer of innocence masks dread of a danger to come, a danger that is announced well in advance, not only in dialogue, but also the way the camera moves around with a kind of suspicion. A film in which the audience knows there’s a bomb under the table while two people are innocently chatting is more suspenseful and tense than one in which the scene has been entirely ordinary, with no knowledge of the bomb. IN AN INTERVIEW with French director François Truffaut, director Alfred Hitchcock talked about how important it is to suspense that an audience has more knowledge than the characters do.
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