The Remains of the Day: Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (Vintage International)
4.4 | 26,722 ratings
Price: 12.99
Last update: 03-09-2026
Product details
- ASIN : B003VPWX6K
- Publisher : Vintage
- Accessibility :
- Publication date : July 14, 2010
- Edition : 1st
- Language : English
- File size : 4.0 MB
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 258 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780307576187
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307576187
- Page Flip : Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank:#38 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Contemporary Literary Fiction
- Romance Literary Fiction
- Historical Literary Fiction
- Customer Reviews:4.44.4 out of 5 stars(26,722)
Top reviews from the United States
- artemis 1291as is the king, so are the subjectsAsk anyone and you will find everyone has something to talk about life with natural octaves from the highest note to the lowest and best registrar recorded over the vicissitudes of life as if living an ordinary life without a material curriculum vitae were a sign of defeatism synonymous with rootlessness. More often than not, a straightforwardly elliptical, honest-to-goodness narrative is not considered a smashing subject matter for a bestseller that merits an entire aisle of any bookseller, but the story of English butler Stevens shoehorns his ordinary work experience into a suitably fashionable stance for a modern-day memoir that reads like a continual fugue of flattering hopes, misguided beliefs, despotic self-denials, cruel disappointments, and smothered pleasures, all elegantly interwoven into a polyphony of life in The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.
The Moment of Reckoning Stevens falls into, pace the general opinion of the mass, results not from his disillusioned loyalty toward Nazi sympathizer Lord Darlington but from his own disoriented value and belief systems in accordance with the changing zeitgeist in the wake of the two great wars. Lord Darlington epitomized what dignity and magnanimity meant to Stevens in a way that his position as a butler was as equally prestigious and sovereign as that of his aristocratic employer Lord Darlington, a figure of respectful English peerage that deserved of his dedication and devotion. It’s really a case of ‘Qualis rex, talis glex,’ meaning “As is the king, so is the people.” And it was this belief system that made Stevens endure occupational humiliation from arrogant guests of high birth, the grief of the death of his father, and tender feelings toward Ms. Kenton, a former head housekeeper at the Darlington Mansion. In fact, such belief system based on seemingly antediluvian values in the post-modern era was Stevens’ lifeline that had kept him going until he took a trip to see now married Ms. Kenton, a kind of Beatrice-like figure guiding Dante from Hell and Purgatory to Paradise.
Stevens’s existential dilemma stems from his existential vertigo in the aftermath of the wars and the subsequent social changes that upended the foundations of the collective value and belief systems of society. Stevens’s inner world was put into an existential vacuum, a void that can only be filled by a sense of purpose and new attitudes toward life in search of finding meaning therein. Rather than bemoaning his life as a boring butler, Stevens kept trying to find meaning in what he had been doing, what he was still doing, and what he would do by asking himself the question of his own life to which only he could answer; that is, to a life he could only respond by being responsible. And it was not a reactionary response with his fists clenched in bitterness and a sprit of French Revolution against the privileged few, but his own examination of his life that felt a void in a sense of direction in life.
Kazuo Ishiguro created a character whose existential dilemma is relatable and pitiable with his mastery of characterization, the wealth of imaginations, and study of human nature, in his signature elliptical narrative skills laced with nuanced emotions that never lay the whole character bare to the eyes of the public. He’s a fantastic writer who shows readers that a good writer is capable of travel and metamorphoses no matter where he was born or what he looks like. I wonder how many writers tried to break free from their biological planes and even dreamed about being whom they wanted to be, confidently and naturally crossing the boundaries of culture and race just as Ishiguro did without branding his Japanese cultural and Asian traits as a convenient foundation for suitably fashionable “ethnic” literature. All in all, this is a fascinating book to observe how social changes can affect an individual and how one copes with such historic and cultural juggernauts in search of meaning in life. This book is a testament to the magical craft of writing that a writer should be all that he is capable of becoming no matter who he is. For a writer is also a magician of words, a wondrous sort of shapeshifter in letters. - RegisA Pleasure to ReadThe Remains of the Day is a really great movie but strangely enough I never had the desire to read the novel (which I did when I watched Never Let Me Go). But since NLMG I've grown increasingly interested in Kazuo Ishiguro's work, and finally found the time to go over this that is still his most famous novel. What a good surprise. Although the novel does not sound fresh and new for those as myself who know the movie well (I've watched it many times and many scenes in the movie were quite faithfully transcribed from the book), the novel certainly goes much deeper into the whole circumstances of the story of Mr Stevens and Miss Kenton and is, above all, a pleasure to read.
Indeed, there is something much more tragic in the figure of the butler/narrator Stevens in the novel than in the movie because of his permanent self-denial (and some say this is a key difference between the novel and the movie: the book talks about self-denial and the movie is about emotional repression). Stevens' efforts to preserve his "dignity as a butler" (according to the rules of the Hayes Society, as he explains) no matter what makes him much more of a pathetic, tragic figure imho. He strives to encapsulate his emotions and keep serving his employer under extremely tense and emotionally challenging circumstances around him and feels proud and happy with it. That made me think of him as a kind of Mersault in Camus' L'Estranger. Of course, Mersault is truly and deeply indifferent to everything around him and it is not that Stevens is not suffering when he finds himself in deep waters, but when Stevens takes pride of being able to sustain his 'dignity' even under these stressful conditions, he seemed to me as tragic as Mersault's hoping that the audience would cheer up at his execution. That was what I also what I felt when Stevens after all decides to practice his bantering skills to please Mr Faraday, his new employer--as if there is nothing left for him except keep pleasing his employers (although Ishiguro believes that reveals Stevens' desire to change.)
'Dignity' is a central theme in the novel, both as Stevens sees it and digress about it ("I suspect it comes down to not removing one’s clothing in public," he concludes at a certain moment of the novel) and under a more modern, post-WWII view of self-command: the ability to express your opinion freely and to exert political rights by voting representatives in and out. And that is exactly what Ishiguro commented in an interview for TIFF Originals in 2017. There, he made an interesting comment about what he had in mind when he wrote ROTD. He thought he could use "this international stereotype of the English butler" to express that part of all of us that is afraid to get emotionally engaged, that is afraid of the dangers of love, and hide behind a professional role instead. But he also thought he could use that same figure to suggest that, in a political and moral way, all of us are 'butlers', in the sense that even in democratic countries we find ourselves far removed from power. We learn our jobs and strive to be good at them, but more often than not we offer our services to employers that may or not make our efforts worthwhile, morally speaking. So as Stevens, we as employees are never in control of what is made of our own work, and may end up, as Stevens, eventually learning that we lost our lives working for the wrong, regrettable objectives of companies and governments.
The novel is extremely fluid, even more than other of Ishiguro's works. The transitions from present time (when Stevens travels to meet Miss Kenton after many years) and the glorious days at Darlington Hall (when both worked together) are so seamless and fluid that it is really a pleasure to go through then. It really flows as a river, or better, a road, as Stevens goes from one city to the next, from Oxford to Salisbury, to Dorset, to Taunton, to Tavistock, to Cornwall, and back to Dorset, when the novel ends. Stevens' account of his trip is really interesting and I was impressed with how fast and unnoticeably I could move through the chapters to the last page. It is one of those books you want to keep going because of the pleasure of reading it.