Remains of the Day (Faber Library)

No cover — Kazuo Ishiguro: Remains of the Day (Faber Library) (Hardcover, 1996, Faber Faber Inc)

Hardcover, 256 pages

Published Aug. 12, 1996 by Faber Faber Inc.

ISBN:: 978-0-571-17781-3

(2 reviews)

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

65 editions

Jim Brown reviewed Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

mundanity and tedium made dramatic

No rating

This is the second of Ishiguro's I've read (the other was Klara and the Sun), and I'm struck with how much his characters love to revel in tedium. In this book, it's done to comedic effect often (since the narrator is obsessed with the details of what makes a "good butler" or what counts as "dignity"). But it then surprisingly dips into a love story and Nazi sympathizers. The book is deep in the weeds of something that seems ridiculous while all of these other more important things are happening around the edges. In the end, it works.

Shauna reviewed The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (FF Classics)

A deeply sad character study

5 stars

Content warning spoilers for the ending

This book is not a love story but a character study. It's a meditation on professional dignity, and what happens when you sacrifice everything - every opportunity, every chance for connection, for human emotion - on the altar of that dignity. It's a book about misleading yourself. It's a book about giving in to sunk costs.

The last few pages are what made this story work for me. Because Stevens is a sympathetic, if deeply frustrating, narrator. I was rooting for him to have some kind of growth, to leave him ready to grasp the remains of the day. And it seemed like Ishiguro was leading him there, showing him reconsidering the value of bantering (and thus, human connection). But the very last thing Stevens thinks is how this will make him a better butler. Because in the end, he is too scared to be anything but what he has always been.

Superbly done by Ishiguro.

Subjects

Modern fiction