Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Knopf (1989), Edition: 1st American ed, 245 pages
Description
Fiction. Literature. HTML: From Kazuo Ishiguro, a tragic, spiritual portrait of the perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England..
Subjects
Original publication date
1989
Media reviews
The Remains of the Day is too much a roman à thèse, and a judgmental one besides. Compared to his astounding narrative sophistication, Ishiguro's message seems quite banal: Be less Japanese, less bent on dignity, less false to yourself and others, less restrained and controlled. The irony is that
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it is precisely Ishiguro's beautiful restraint and control that one admires, and, in the case of the last novel [The Remains of the Day], his nerve in setting up such a high-wire act for himself. Show Less
Kazuo Ishiguro's tonal control of Stevens' repressive yet continually reverberating first-person voice is dazzling. So is his ability to present the butler from every point on the compass: with affectionate humor, tart irony, criticism, compassion and full understanding. It is remarkable, too, that
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as we read along in this strikingly original novel, we continue to think not only about the old butler, but about his country, its politics and its culture. Show Less