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Peter Britz

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A poignant thought experiment

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-06-22

Klara and the Sun
By Kazuo Ishiguro

What a surprise and a delight! I am hesitant to share anything but the barest information about this gift waiting to be unwrapped.

The narrator is Klara, a sentient robot called an AF (Artificial Friend) designed to be a companion to teenagers. The dystopian setting is not that much different to the world we know, except that social inequalities have been amplified by policies such as genetic editing to improve children, with those choosing not to undergo the procedure being excluded from educational institutions (echoes of COVID vaccination debates).

The book opens with Klara sitting in a store window waiting to be purchased, all the while beginning to populate her ‘tabula rasa’ consciousness with images of the world in the street before her. She is fascinated by human behavior and interactions which she is programmed to observe and analyse. And so her cognitive ability and intuition begins to grow in an iterative way. She is particularly taken with the sun, which she experiences as nourishing and healing - following her witnessing a street person and his dog, who had been lying in front of the store presumably dead, revive when the sun’s rays bathe them. In the store she has a bonding experience with a teenage girl, Josie, who returns with her Mum to buy Klara. Josie suffers from a degenerative disease, and so begins Klara’s adventure of negotiating the increasingly complex world of human relationships and emotions. Through her ‘life’ experience Klara intuitively discovers the power of belief, supplication and sacrifice. There are some wonderful story twists and surprises that follow. The book is a poignant and cleverly crafted thought experiment touching on issues such as the nature of the human experience and soul.

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An immersion in Tasmanian collective unconscious

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 09-10-21

Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan

The narration of Richard Flanagan’s 1994 debut novel on Audible, in Australian vernacular made the book wonderfully three dimensional. The entire book is a narration of a river guide Aljaz Cosini’s life and ancestral being through a series of visions as he lies drowning beneath a waterfall. It is in essence a history of the collective unconscious of Tasmania, forged in the violent meeting of colonial and indigenous culture and manifest in the life and fate of an individual with aboriginal and convict ancestry, largely pushed into the shadows. In our hyper-rational western culture, we live largely unaware of how our psyche and emotional body has been shaped by our ancestors' lives, lived and unlived.

Flanagan through Aljaz Cosini’s final moments shows how we are not separate, and these unconscious forces largely determine our fate. We see Cosini’s life reviewed through his dying eyes like a branch on the maelstrom through a gorge in the Franklin River, as he is carried forward by the dark depth of inter-generational trauma anchored only by the intuitive survival instinct of family cohesion regardless of dysfunction.

“And now I am being washed into the Ho family past. Without wishing it, I should add, for frankly I have no desire to see any of it - but this newly acquired capacity of mine to witness the past means that the stories of the dead weigh like a nightmare on my still-living brain.”

Like his raft on the swollen river current shooting the rapids, he is only able to influence his destiny with slight nudges of his paddle.

“And I am not pleased about that, about the way the river is shoving my mind and heart about, pushing my body, forcing open parts that I thought closed forever.”

He intuitively understands the river, he can read it, but cannot overcome the terrible fear that has been passed down through his Tasmanian lineage. In his final moments in a magical realist scene with all his Tasmanian ancestors assembled he understands the love and humanity that they share. I have visited Tasmania and found the descriptions of environment, its people past and present rich and engaging and a horrific reminder of the genocide of an indigenous people and the brutal penal system that was ‘Van Diemen’s Land’.

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