Portrait of the Robot as a Young Woman

October 21, 2021

(New York Review of Books) – Though Ishiguro has said in more than one interview that working with the homeless influenced his fiction, he has also been careful not to write about his social work directly. This is in part because, as he admitted a few years ago, “I always felt vaguely guilty that I learned so much [then] that helped me in my fiction writing.” Yet social work is an implicit theme throughout his fiction. From his first novel to his eighth and latest, Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro considers what it means to care for and attend to others, and what happens when that attention gets abused, withdrawn, or distorted. The emotional labor of care—and care institutionalized as labor—forms a repeating central drama around which Ishiguro’s plots turn, regardless of the genre he is writing in. (Read Full Article)