The Remains of the Day
€0,00
First published in 1989, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro follows Stevens, an ageing English butler who sets out on a motoring holiday through the West Country, having spent decades in service at Darlington Hall. As the journey unfolds, his recollections return to the years before the Second World War, when he served Lord Darlington, an aristocrat whose political sympathies carried troubling consequences, and worked alongside Miss Kenton, the housekeeper whose warmth and candour unsettled his carefully ordered world. Through Stevens’s measured narration, the grandeur of the English country house gradually gives way to a more intimate reckoning with loyalty, professional duty and the opportunities sacrificed in their name. What begins as a modest journey becomes an exploration of memory and the stories we tell ourselves to make a life seem coherent.
Written with exquisite restraint and a quiet, gathering melancholy, Ishiguro’s novel examines the distance between dignity and self-deception, private feeling and public responsibility. Stevens’s formal language, so carefully designed to keep emotion at bay, becomes the very means by which the reader perceives what he cannot readily acknowledge. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1989, The Remains of the Day established Ishiguro as one of the most distinctive novelists of his generation, bringing the traditions of the English country-house novel into conversation with the moral uncertainties of twentieth-century history. Its lasting poignancy lies in the question of what remains when a lifetime of service is measured against the love, judgement and independence it may have cost.
From the book
“What is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took?”
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
On The Remains of the Day
“A triumph of subtlety and restraint.”
— The Booker Prize