The Remains of the Day
A butler on a motoring holiday reviewing a life given entirely to service. Repression narrated by the man doing it.
Kazuo Ishiguro's tonal control of Stevens' repressive yet continually reverberating first-person voice is dazzling.
Stevens, an English butler, drives west across 1956 England to visit a former colleague, and narrates the trip as an account of his own life in service. The prose stays inside his idiom, and the reader learns to read past it: the events he reports and the construction he places on them keep coming apart. He recalls his years under Lord Darlington, an aristocrat drawn into appeasement and antisemitism, and the housekeeper whose feeling for him he registers only as a lapse in professional standards.
Ishiguro builds a narrator who cannot say what he means and often cannot know it. His commitment to duty and restraint operates as a defence, and the reader watches it hold even as the losses it has cost him surface at the edges of his sentences. The final pages record a recognition that arrives too late to change anything.
Faber published it in 1989; it won the Booker Prize that year.
About the author
Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro, born in 1954, is a British novelist. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to England with his family as a young child, settling into a life in Britain where he built his writing career. In 2017 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for novels including The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, works marked by quiet, reflective narrators and themes of memory, loss, and self-understanding.
Details
- 1989
- Faber and Faber
- Faber and Faber