The Remains of the Day

I saw the movie years ago when it first came out, with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins, and thought it was a masterful, beautiful performance. I thought, how can the book live up to the movie?

But it does. It is interesting that the novel is told largely in retrospect, one man looking back over his life and wondering whether he made the right choices. He strove to live up to a certain standard, to inhabit a particular idea of service, and yet what did he accomplish at the end of the day; and what shall he do with the remains of the day?

The portrait of Mr. Stevens is so elegantly done; the portrait of Miss Kenton scarcely less so. These two people have chosen to serve everyone except themselves. It is in the subtext of their careers show more that their relationship lies, and that is also the tragedy.

The prose of the novel is simple and beautiful, and there is not a wasted word. POV is first person, single narrator, past tense. show less

Well written and psychologically astute. Ishiguro's portrait of the justifications surrounding service—in all senses of the word—manages to encompass the personal, political, and class anguish of a changing post-WWII England. He does a great job of building the narrator's deeply ingrained, but also furiously willed, sublimation of the self over the course of the story. That controlled pain, written with a steady hand but also compassion and a dry humor, was complex and struck a deep note for me: at what point does dedication cancel out the bearer? I'll be mulling this book over for a while, I think.

An aging butler goes for a trip in the west of England in 1956. Along the way he takes stock of his life and finds a wealth of regrets. Simple in plot, The Remains of the Day is a masterfully told, devastating story, gradually spooling out the details of a moral collapse. My only criticism is of a slight smugness about the danger of authority. It’s easy to look down on Stevens because he abdicates so much in the face of such obvious evil. Things aren’t usually so simple.

As my daughter was packing to leave after a recent visit with us, she pulled this book off the shelves in her old bedroom (where I keep much of my TBR overload), plopped it in front me and said "Read this". Of course, I've been meaning to, for years. So under direct orders, I did. I can't for the life of me figure out why this book is so compelling, or how Ishiguro made his main character so utterly real, but I couldn't put it down. I struggled through the prologue, which I found tedious and belabored, but with several high recommendations behind the book, I continued reading, and somewhere around page 30 I realized I was hooked. There is nothing obviously striking about the prose itself, and the story line is minimal...just a framework show more from which to hang Mr. Stevens' musings about himself and his past. Mr. Stevens is an English butler of the old order, and he is painfully conscious of the fact that, in the second half of the 20th century, his kind may be facing extinction. He has lived a life based on service, on suborning his own opinions and denying the existence of personal feelings. Throughout a road trip across the English countryside he wrestles with memories, defending his former employer's lapses of humanity and rationalizing his own seemingly heartless behavior. Running under it all is a glimmer of hope that a meeting with former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, may hold promise of a different sort of future for Mr. Stevens. I join the legions of LT'ers who give this book high marks. To quote my daughter, "Read this." show less

I think this is definitely Ishiguro's most readable book I've read, I had none of my complaints about the other ones (relying on gimmicks about memory, though I suppose Remains does a little it doesn't feel forced) and it made me understand why he deserved the Nobel Prize. I haven't seen the movie yet, and I'm really looking forward to it, but I'm also glad that I didn't watch it before reading the book because everything unfolded so well in this and I honestly can't imagine how a movie could tell a story this subtle and subjective.

Towards the start this book seems like a character study, but in actuality it's a really carefully constructed nonlinear narrative so I was glad that the story went somewhere instead of him just reminiscing. show more The pastoral frame story of a road trip gave the novel a very leisurely pace even though it's pretty brisk, it was very relaxing to read but it didn't put me to sleep at all! Obviously the book is mostly character-driven, by Stevens, who's super in denial about everything. The reason this is such a masterpiece is because of how believable his voice is... it was Nabokovian levels of unreliable-narrator (think Pale Fire). I am pretty familiar with Ishiguro so I caught on really soon that Stevens was in denial and super repressed the whole time, and if anything it felt too obvious. I didn't think the book lacked subtlety, except for the conversation with the guy at the end which was really on the nose. A lot of the political atmosphere and class commentary of the book reminded me of Zweig's Post Office Girl... The whole time, I was thinking "is this book supposed to be funny?" because there's some serious irony going on the whole time... so even though this is known as quite a sad story, it's honestly really funny, and surprisingly romantic. show less

I had seen the wonderful movie with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson -- must be 20 years ago. In spite of getting the usual process backwards, it did not stop me from enjoying this book at all. I think it might have gently enhanced it, actually, imagining much of Stevens' voice as if it were spoken by the indomitable Hopkins and imagining Miss Kenton having a crooked smile like Thompson.

Ishiguro has a deft, precise hand. I loved thinking the thoughts he wanted me to think, to read between the lines he wanted me to read, and to care deeply for a stuffy old butler whose only quirk is being a stuffy old butler through and through. Well, almost. And it's that slowly building, perfectly executed "almost" that makes the story something special.

A deceptively quiet and moving novel, The Remains of the Day is the story of Stevens, an English butler coming to the end of his service. And that service has been his whole life, his identity wrapped up in devotion to duty, loyalty, and dignity. It's a sad story, really. Stevens' life has not been his own, and as he makes a journey to the west of England, we learn just how empty that life may have been. The discomfort of realization, the justification for self-deception, the sense of wasted time - it's all beautifully evoked by Ishiguro in elegant, austere prose. After a slow beginning, as the layers of the story were peeled away, I settled in nicely to this thought-provoking and heartbreaking read.

4.25 stars