Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play Music | How to listen
Kazuo Ishigruo’s eighth novel, “Klara and the Sun”, is the first since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. It is narrated by Klara, an artificial friend – a humanoid machine that acts as a companion for a 14-year-old boy kid. Radhika Jones, the editor of Vanity Fair, talks about the novel and where it fits into Ishiguro’s august body of work in this week’s podcast.
“How human can Klara be? What are the limits of humanity in terms of transferring it to the machine? It is one of the many questions that animate this book, ”says Jones. “It is not a very simplified thing, but I find it very moving because the truth is that Klara is our narrator. So, as far as we are concerned, she is the person whose inner life we come to understand. And the question of what limits there are in this, for a being that is artificial, is an interesting one. “
Mark Harris visits the podcast to discuss “Mike Nichols: A Life”, his new biography of the writer, director and performer, whose many credits include “The Graduate” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
“He was incredibly open,” says Harris on the subject. “There are few bigger success stories for a director to look back on than ‘The Graduate’, and I was asking Mike about it 40 years ago and probably 40,000 questions after it happened. But I was very impressed by his willingness to approach the subject from new angles, to reexamine things he hadn’t thought of in a while, to tell stories that frankly were not flattering to him. I’ve never heard harder stories about Mike’s behavior over the years than I’ve heard from Mike himself. He was an extraordinary interview subject. “
Also in this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter brings news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.
Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What are we reading”:
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode and the Book Review podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].