Cari Luna: I loved that Part 1 of No One Is Talking About This so perfectly mirrors the fragmented and often ridiculous nature of social media and how it shapes our lives, and that Part 2 then explodes that, using the same fragmented structure to toss social media aside and dive into the heartbreaking mess of human life. Klara and the Sun also pits technology against the human heart, but does so in an immersive narrative with deeply considered characters. I enjoyed both of these books very much, but Klara and the Sun captured my imagination more.

Crystal Hana Kim: What I loved most about this pairing was how both books explore love and grief in the face of illness in such drastically different ways. I’m choosing Klara and the Sun as my winner because in a personally difficult month, I needed a more traditionally plotted novel to hold my attention. I lost myself too easily in No One Is Talking About This’s white spaces. In all honesty, the grief scared me so much I found myself detaching. In contrast, Klara and the Sun’s curiosity about human behavior felt like the philosophical questioning I needed right now. In a different time, No One Is Talking About This could have been the winner, but that’s the beauty of this game. Today, I choose Klara and the Sun.

Jennifer Murphy: I fell into “the portal” with Patricia Lockwood’s unnamed narrator in No One Is Talking About This before spending time with Klara, the Artificial Friend in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Both novels are sublime, unsettling meditations on the future, on virtual life, on the fate of ill children. No One Is Talking About This captured my attention from the get-go and the second movement of the book was an emotional dazzler. Klara and the Sun was a slower burn, and while I enjoyed walking alongside Artificial Klara and her suffering friend Josie, No One Is Talking About This ultimately won me over, bowled me over, and broke my heart.

Lynn Steger Strong: I read both of these books very quickly, one after the other. I read No One Is Talking About This first. Lockwood is a stunning sentence maker, an extraordinary observer and documenter of the strange slipperiness of the internet. The second half is much more solid and devastating than the first. I closed the book and opened the other. It was strange how differently and immediately Klara and the Sun held me, the way it was a world instead of paragraphs, the way I stopped thinking about the ways it felt familiar and just let myself be immersed in what it was. I loved No One Is Talking About This, but for all of its gorgeous sentences, funny outtakes, and incredibly felt revelations, it didn’t hold me in its grasp the way that Klara and the Sun did.

Megan Giddings: While there are lines and moments from No One Is Talking About This that I’ve considered since I read it earlier, Klara and the Sun is the book I can’t shake. Ishiguro writes about loneliness, the mixture of menace and love that can come from people’s closest ties, class stratifications, the desire to be close, and the animosity that comes from feeling overperceived that I’ve been considering for months now. Yeah, sometimes it’s too slow. Sometimes, I hated everyone! My melted pandemic brain had me reading AF as its more colloquial meaning. But Ishiguro is a master of scene writing, of trusting a reader to feel and understand his exact meaning.

Anita Felicelli: I was awed by the artistic choices Patricia Lockwood makes in No One Is Talking About This to shape the book’s form and style to mirror the way we think now. Through near-aimless shifts from the funny to the stirring to the tragic, our lives are displayed as ungodly junk piles of information, accumulations of technologically mediated detritus that are nevertheless lives. Yet, through the first half, I found myself more interested than smitten. Notwithstanding Lockwood’s sublime command of language, the first half’s quippy observations were curiously performative —designed, like social media and stand-up, for likes, for applause—even though her autofiction does move, eventually, toward a genuine grappling with the real. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, meanwhile, is old-fashioned storytelling, a moody elegy for a vanishing world. It’s The Remains of the Day with robots. From start to finish, it was suspenseful and dark and humane. It did not take structural risks, but it made promises and then, to my relief, kept them. Both books featured loneliness, one the very-online loneliness of this moment, the other a lonely future to come, but the timelessness of Ishiguro’s novel gave it an edge. I was moved by its melancholy reminder that yes, our world is vanishing, but century after century, people have watched what they cherished most vanish—the horse giving way to the horseless carriage, giving way to the car—and they will again, no doubt.

Fernando A. Flores: Klara and the Sun was a read very reminiscent of earlier work by Ishiguro (i.e., Never Let Me Go). I enjoyed the voices, the world, the vision. I am choosing No One Is Talking About This as the winner, however. Its originality and force are completely new compared to Klara and the Sun. The idea of choosing a book by a Nobel Laureate as the winner here seems a tad absurd, too. One is the author’s first novel; the other is the latest in a string of mighty successful books for the author. Sorry, but this was an easy decision.

Olivia Craighead: The experience of reading No One Is Talking About This is like having every thought I’ve never been able to articulate about the internet laid out in front of me as if it was completely obvious the entire time. The fact that Lockwood could do that while also creating something that made me IRL LOL? Well, that’s just the cherry on top. Catch me on the right day and I’ll call it a masterpiece; it’s an obvious winner to me.

Alex Barasch: What a time to be forced to choose between two stories about love and the ever-present possibility of loss! Klara and the Sun explores these themes through sci-fi motifs that, although masterfully executed, feel familiar. No One Is Talking About This, a fragmentary account of an extremely online life, is stranger and more daring—particularly once Lockwood pulls us back into the “real world,” to startling effect. As someone who is certifiably internet-poisoned, I found her examination of the way these platforms have warped us by turns funny and profound. Both authors cultivate a dystopian vibe through invented terminology: Lockwood dubs Twitter “the portal;” kids in Ishiguro’s text learn from “oblongs.” But Klara’s schematic vision of the future pales in comparison to No One’s vivid portrait of the hellscape that’s already here.

Jenny Bhatt: When I heard about No One Is Talking About This, I sat up and paid attention because I’m a huge fan of Lockwood’s literary criticism. Then, critics I’ve respected over the years raved about it too. I admire the cool innovativeness and aphoristic wit of this book. But that dissonant, disjunctive narrative style wore off pretty quickly. Yes, the book is a commentary on how we use social media and what it does to us. Well, when I want that, I go to… social media. I come to a book for entirely different reasons; primarily, for an immersive experience. Not that I’m against fragmented novels. Like Ted Gioia, however, I want fragments that aren’t shrapnel but more like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, pointing toward a brilliant pattern of wholeness. Or, like Ariadne’s labyrinth: a confusing maze of winding, twisting pathways leading to who-knows-where, but with an unbroken thread running all the way through. So, given the choice between No One Is Talking About This and Klara and the Sun, I pick the latter. As I wrote earlier, in these times, I’m drawn more to the indefiniteness and searchingness of Klara.

Matthew Schneier: Here we have two takes on our digital digestion, both how we digest our soft- and hardware, and how it digests us. Klara and the Sun is a hypnotic, deceptively plainspoken novel set in a not-too-distant future, when human loneliness is assuaged by Artificial Friends, solar-powered robot companions whose programming allows them to learn our ways, if not our essential, organic weirdness. Who is its true hero, AF Klara or Josie, the human teenager she is the best friend and/or property of? A burning world sparks at the edge of Klara’s perception (complete with fascist camps and a genetically engineered meritocracy), but her computations and their inevitable limits keep it chillingly at bay. There is no such arm’s length in, and nothing plain spoken about, No One Is Talking About This, in which, in the “portal” (what you or I might call the internet) everyone is talking about this, and everything else, cacophonously, inescapably, and all at once. Lockwood has a poet’s ear for our jokey, jargony Twitterese, and she thrills to its dizzy possibilities until a new arrival, late in the novel, forces her to weigh, as Klara does, which matters more: the algorithm or the flesh. Each book unsettled me, and each will stick with me. But one’s a prognosis and one’s a diagnosis, and now scares me more than later. I saw myself reflected in Lockwood’s screens. I can’t stop talking about this.

Blair McClendon: No One Is Talking About This and Klara and the Sun are both books about slightly unreal worlds. They’re at their most alien when they’re describing things I already recognize (“oblongs” and Twitter’s discursive patterns). The section that opens Klara and the Sun, which describes the daily routine of an artificial friend waiting to be purchased in a store, tipped the competition in its favor. The anxiety of waiting to be chosen, the fear of being passed over for something better, the politics of placement nearer or further from a window were all great. I found myself hoping Klara would never be picked, not as a comeuppance, but to stay in the store.

Maria Dahvana Headley: Klara and the Sun felt like robots had materialized in a 19th-century plot wherein an enslaved person sacrifices themselves to save the ailing daughter of a plantation owner—a maudlin romanticization of exploitation. Perhaps this is the point: to undermine old ideas about hierarchies’ requiring the last dram from the dispossessed—but it seems to celebrate as much as interrogate. My vote is for No One Is Talking About This, which also deals in giving everything, but not as Constructed Noble Innocent—instead, as a bewildered human burdened with the costs of life and love in the 21st century.

Rosa Lyster: This was difficult! I went back and forth on this, because these books are so different, and I could have made a really compelling case for either one of them were I called to do so in some kind of debating competition. I chose Klara and the Sun in the end, though, because while No One Is Talking About This is sort of transcendently funny in bits, just uniquely brilliant and strange, I really admired Klara’s deliberation and control, its confidence in the reader, and its expansiveness. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time, which comes as a great surprise to me, as someone who doesn’t really like thinking about robots.

Fiona Dourif: What a matchup this was! I love how totally different these novels felt, even though they deal with such similar themes. I’ve never read a novel like No One Is Talking About This. The book is structured in discursive, bite-sized paragraphs, giving me the impression of scrolling through the most poetic Twitter thread of all time. It was exquisite and hilarious prose acrobatics, yet it still managed to tell a human story about a woman’s search for meaning. Klara and the Sun, on the other hand, used simple, elegant language to draw me into a traditional fable about an AI’s search for humanity. There was nothing particularly new here, yet the characters felt so honest and real—I cried at the end for the discarded robot. Both novels made me think about what technology means, but it was Klara that drew me in and found my heart.

Carole V. Bell: I loved both No One Is Talking About This and Klara and the Sun. Emotionally and intellectually they’re both hits. Lockwood’s novel is poetic, heart-wrenching and raw. But Klara and the Sun, a subdued novel about the line between humanity and technology, stuck with me the longest. It was more complex, and more seamless in structure, and, on a gut level, it felt more personally relevant. Philosophical, near-future sci-fi parables that make me confront my own humanity, mortality, and the nature of love make me swoon.

Atom Atkinson: Lockwood’s prose and Ishiguro’s point of view held my attention in a vice grip—a particular accomplishment for Lockwood’s meandering narrative. But it was Klara and the Sun that spoke directly to the heart of a reader who’s been alive the past few years (in this case, me). Regardless of whether or how a prayer is ever answered, Klara is willing to dwell in the further question of whether prayers represent a higher order of consciousness or the language of desperation. In this novel, where parental love and institutional benevolence are so cruel in their effects that they serve as little balm to a cruel world, a prayer can be both.

Rosecrans Baldwin (he/him): With thanks to all of our judges, we want to wish big, big congratulations to Klara and the Sun and Kazuo Ishiguro for winning the 2022 Tournament of Books.

We reached out to inform Ishiguro of Klara’s win and received this reply by email:

I’m absolutely delighted to have finished on top of the heap at the end of this entertaining, comically framed, but deeply serious tournament. It’s a true privilege to have one’s work considered and debated by one’s peers. I’ll pass on the rooster in physical form—but there’ll be a metaphorical one crowing proudly in my heart for years to come.

We couldn’t be more pleased, especially since that means the 18-year streak of ToB winners refusing our offer of a live rooster continues. (TMN will make a donation to a literacy organization instead.)

The first Field Notes Limited Edition for 2022 is the “Signs of Spring” Edition.

Bright and warm, the covers of these Memo Books are heavily debossed with graphic patterns based on flowers that are among the very first to appear each spring, and then stamped with three luscious, reflective foils. The dot-graph insides are made from a superb paper from Strathmore.

Available now in 3-Packs and as part of a year-long subscription.

Andrew Womack (he/him): Very exciting! And congratulations also to Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, which—after falling to Klara and the Sun in last summer’s Camp ToB final—marched through this year’s Tournament, only to again face Klara today. Given how many Rooster judges and readers have shown their love for these two books, both are absolutely worth your reading time.

Meave Gallagher (she/her): Sweet and merciful heaven, dear Commentariat, you all really went through it this year. So much passion, so much raging against the Zombie machine. I’m as always proud of you for working out your disagreements on your own, suggesting more titles for future—and retrospective?—more ToBs than anyone could possibly run (which is to say, my, you’re ambitious readers), and treating each book, judge, and commentator with all due consideration and respect. Keep it up. Invite your friends to play next year. Better yet, your enemies. Oh, and get ready for more Weird Books. What does that mean? Oho, you’ll find out. Kevin, your thoughts on this year’s collection?

Kevin Guilfoile (he/him): Well Klara and the Sun kind of snuck up on everybody, didn’t it? Any Ishiguro novel would have to be considered one of the pre-Tournament favorites, but after losing its opening-round match to Nervous System, it became something of an afterthought. But there it was, never far off, lurking in the Zombie green room for the entire duration.

John Warner (he/him): I mean this as no slight to No One Is Talking About This, which was one of my favorite books of last year, and would’ve been my choice in this matchup, but Klara and the Sun rising up to take out The Trees in the Zombie Round felt a bit like a March Madness basketball tournament where the two favorites meet in the semis.

As the judges’ comments indicate, it can be a tough matchup for the unconventional to overtake the more conventional. I think we’re just more wired for the type of narrative that Klara delivers, and when it’s delivered by someone as skilled as Ishiguro, the unconventional is swimming upstream.

Some are thinking that The Trees is pretty unconventional itself, but for all the bravura inventiveness of that book, its component parts are all easily identifiable. The first part of No One Is Talking About This is written in a new vernacular that connects strongly for those who are immersed in the portal, but is maybe a stretch for others. I’m impressed it carried as many votes as it did.

Kevin: For sure. John, we’ve talked quite a bit this year about discovering novels that seem “new.” But The Trees is really a prestige trick in the way that it feels completely different and yet also accessible. Because No One Is Talking About This plays more with style and form, some readers might find it to be a steeper climb. I thought it was a pleasure to read. Many books get labeled “prose poems,” but most of those I consider much more like poetry than prose. This novel really captured the provocative imagery and economy of a poem with language that is clearly the stuff of literary fiction. And Lockwood perfectly marries style and subject. I was thrilled and embarrassed to catch repeated glimpses of my own post-portal self in those pages.

Speaking of joy when reading, I’ve spoken earlier about my admiration for Klara and the Sun, but there was also something about the book that was physically pleasing. The quality of the paper was exceptional. I noticed it every time I turned a page.

John: I would love to know more about the inside scoop on the ins and outs of book production that results in some of these seemingly small but significant differences in the physical object: paper quality, cover texture, font size/white space, deckled edges, etc. Is it like when you go to the car wash and the different choices are like: Super, Deluxe, Emperor, Super Deluxe, Deluxe Emperor, Super Emperor Deluxe?

Whatever is going on, I’m pretty sure that Kazuo Ishiguro gets the full works.

Kevin: I liked this line in the above judgment from Atom Atkinson: “Regardless of whether or how a prayer is ever answered, Klara is willing to dwell in the further question of whether prayers represent a higher order of consciousness or the language of desperation.” That is wonderfully phrased, and has me thinking about Klara and the Sun in new ways.

John: Another one in the books, Kevin, which means it’s time to start looking forward. My ToB reading extended deeper into 2022 than usual, so I haven’t had a chance to read too many new books, but as I mentioned earlier in the Tournament, I was really taken by John Darnielle’s Devil House, and new novels from Emily St. John Mandel (Sea of Tranquility) and Jennifer Egan (The Candy House) come out next week. I’ve also got Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers waiting in my TBR pile, and Michelle Huneven, one of my favorite working novelists, has a new one (Search) coming next month. Oh, and Percival Everett will be releasing Dr. No, described as “a sly, madcap novel about villains and nothing, really…”

Thanks, as always, to everyone involved for coming together to create such a fun and enlightening month together, talking books. Folks should feel free to stop by The Biblioracle Recommends if they ever need a recommendation on what to read next.

Kevin: As always, please leave a mention of any books that have you excited in 2022 in the comments below. John’s and my personal big thanks to Andrew, Meave, Rosecrans, and to all the treasured members of the Commentariat who make this event such a pleasure for us every year. You guys are the best.

And speaking of Meave being the best, here she is.

Meave: That is very kind of you to say, though unless I’ve suddenly turned into a satire about lynching or a saga about chilly nuns, I don’t know about best. I am not the most literary minded these days; I like queer anarchy in space and redefining personhood and mutual respect and care. And detective novels. So I’m reading Jane Pek’s The Verifiers for book club, and then maybe Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers to take the edge off all the school stuff. It looks like everyone’s on the John Darnielle train (those of you who sing “No Children” in the shower, I see you), which seems very promising. And those are all my “published in 2022” book plans so far, because do I plan ahead? Absolutely not. Wait, no: The Yanagihara moratorium continues. But I do have five library cards, so, you know, anyone’s got a spreadsheet they want to share for extra favorability points? HMU. In the meantime, be generous, whatever that means to you. And please, donate your old phone. Klara would appreciate it.

Rosecrans: As ever, we are so grateful to Field Notes for being once again the ToB’s presenting sponsor. Field Notes has been a terrific partner through the ages, and we love their special ToB notebooks—which, once again, sold out, with all the profits going to 826 National. Thanks to everybody who bought one for supporting such a good cause.

And then our great thanks to the team at Bookshop.org for being this year’s Tournament book sponsor. Since it started, Bookshop.org has raised nearly $20 million for local bookstores—a wonderful online partner for our indie inclinations.

Andrew: Before we sign off, we also want to thank our supporters for making another Tournament happen. Planning and preparation for the ToB is now a year-round effort, and your support fuels that work. So whether you become a Sustaining Member or send us a one-time donation or purchase items from the TMN Store, you make our work possible. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

With today’s final, it’s also time to announce the winners of this year’s Commentariat pool, selected by random drawing: Eric Schleder and bb. Congratulations! Please email your contact info to [email protected] and you can look forward to receiving a ToB 2022 prize package, which includes a one-year subscription from Field Notes to their Quarterly Limited Editions ($120 value); a $25 gift card from Bookshop.org; and a piece of ToB merch of your choice.

And that’s it for this year’s Tournament. To stay up to date with the Rooster, including announcements about this summer’s upcoming Camp ToB—and who knows what else?—make sure you’re signed up for the Rooster newsletter. Over and out!

New 2022 Tournament of Books merch is now available at the TMN Store. As a reminder, Sustaining Members receive 50 percent off everything in our store. To find out why we’re asking for your support and how you can become a Sustaining Member, please visit our Membership page. Thank you.

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