The Remains of the Day

‘The evening is the best part of the day.’ This is the ultimate realisation of Mr. Stevens, the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s most famous novel. It is a delightful first-person narrative, during which Stevens, an ageing butler, looks back on his life of service while embarking on a drive through the West Country.

Ultimately, it is a love story, the most moving of love stories, the unrequited love story. It is also an atmospheric portrait of a bygone age, of a life in service before the war, in the dying moments of the aristocracy’s country estate era.

I loved the… show more.

I love this book so much, I don’t know where to start. I’ve pressed it into multiple people’s hands, and I know not everyone feels the same way. But, for me, this novel is perfect. Genuinely perfect.

I find the understated unfolding of gradual self-awareness completely devastating. Here is someone – a butler known as Stevens – who has lived with steadfast adherence to his particular vision of how to make a meaningful contribution to the world.

And slowly, in the space of a few days spent reflecting on his career and life choices, his certainty quietly unravels. The ache… show more.

I read The Remains of the Day after watching the movie, so I have a hard time separating the two in my mind. 

The most attractive part of the book (and the film) for me is the unrequited, unspoken love between Steves and Miss Kenton, the butler and the housekeeper of Darlington Hall. There have been many works that depict the pain of a love that never was, but none can hold a candle to this one. The tension is almost unbearable.

This engaging novel centers on Stevens, a most committed and loyal butler, whose life and career are unequivocally dedicated to his employer, Lord Darlington. 

Set predominately in 1930s England, The Remains of the Day is very much a character study, focusing on Stevens’ utter commitment to his work, a trade also shared by his aging father, while keeping his personal longings at bay. 

However, these feelings become tested by the arrival of Ms. Kenton, an outgoing housekeeper, who, unlike Stevens, very much needs to express herself, but restrains on the basis of Stevens’ façade, which serves to impede their mutual… show more.

The perfect Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson film Remains of the Day is faithfully based on the brilliant Booker Prize winning novel of the same name by a Japanese-British Nobel Prize winner.

Set in the English mansion of a rich American expatriate, narrated by his deluded and repressed British butler, the book tells the story of German and British influencers who gather in the late 1930s in an effort to help avert war, genuine in the case of the wishfully thinking British, pretended in the case of the calculating Germans.

Its captivating prose kept me glued to the page, its… show more.

Take everything you know about British Empire—its royal traditions, its stiff-upper-lip haughtiness, its unflappable sense of superiority—and cram it into the character of a nearly-irrelevant, self-deluded yet heartbreakingly sympathetic butler named Stevens, whose comical misadventures lead us from an outdated British manor house across the spectacular countryside of England in his search to recapture a romance that (spoiler) may never have actually been. Kazuo Ishiguro employs the ultimate “unreliable narrator” to poke fun at the British class system; in the process he creates an opera buffo that plays against the haunting rural beauty of that sceptered isle. For my money,… show more.

Unlike Briony, English butler Mr. Stephens seems to have no idea that the story he tells the reader is full of profound, tragic, life-altering holes. He is so insistent upon his version of things that, even in moments where the reader thinks Stephens is finally about to achieve some clarity, he backs away from the truth because it is simply too painful to utter. Like all the other characters on this list, Mr. Stephens’ inability to get his story straight is a matter of self-preservation. This is one of the saddest books ever written.

This novel devastated me upon first reading as I recognized the dangers of political naivete as a fatal flaw, and the extent of such naivete in Britain until Churchill came to power. The novel is set in the era of prewar “appeasement.” Stevens is butler to Lord Darlington, to whom he is unquestioningly loyal. Only in retrospect does Stevens realize that his employer was a Nazi sympathizer, and that he has wasted his life in service to such a man, to the extent that he fails to marry the woman he loves, and is absent from his father’s bedside as… show more.

Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day, is a character whose flaws make him more endearing as you continue with the novel. Fiercely loyal, Stevens is in denial that his employer, Lord Darlington, was a Nazi sympathizer, and, as starved for affection as Stevens is, he fails to acknowledge the love that his co-worker Miss Kenton extends towards him. Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017, masterfully keeps the focus tightly on Stevens, allowing us to become intimate with his musings and his rationalizations, even as the narrative gradually illuminates what’s happening in the… show more.

Unlike other titles on my list, I had a natural affinity for this material before I ever read the book. The movie adaptation is a real favorite, and I also love stories about the upstairs/downstairs world of big, staffed houses. Still, this quiet novel compelled me in ways I didn’t expect. Part of it was about Ishiguro’s gorgeous writing, for sure. But even more specifically, it was about his genius for character. I’ve always been interested in the parallels between acting and writing, and The Remains of the Day felt a bit to me like watching a great actor at… show more.