There’s a moment in “Klara and the Sun,” Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, in which the protagonist, Klara, and another character, The Father, are discussing whether artificial intelligence may ever fully replicate what it means to be human. The Father is skeptical, and likens the human heart to a house with many rooms: “‘But then suppose you stepped into one of those rooms’ he said, ‘and discovered another room within it. And inside that room, another room still. Rooms within rooms within rooms.’” Klara — herself an AF (artificial friend) — disagrees, and thinks there must be a limit, a point where every aspect of a person can be understood.
This scene stands as a metaphor for Ishiguro’s entire approach to writing. His books are famous for all dealing, to various degrees, with the same themes: memory and the self. They do so from different angles and in different genres (this is his second foray into speculative science fiction, the first being 2005’s “Never Let Me Go”) but the journey is always the same: each book is another room in the same house.