Remains of the Day

Paperback, 258 pages

English language

Published April 1, 2015 by Faber & Faber, Limited.

ISBN:
978-0-571-32273-2
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4 stars (2 reviews)

The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and cemented Kazuo Ishiguro's place as one of the world's greatest writers. David Lodge, chairman of the judges in 1989, said, it's 'a cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance'. This is a haunting evocation of lost causes and lost love, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change. Ishiguro's work has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.

Stevens, the long-serving butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside, but also into his own past. Reflecting on his years of service, he must re-examine his life in the face of changing Britain, and question whether his dignity and properness have come at a greater cost to himself.

61 editions

A man looks back on the worth of his life

5 stars

Like many of my contemporaries I watched the Merchant Ivory film made from this novel when it came out years ago, but I wanted to take this in as an unabridged audiobook of the Booker Prize winning novel. I was already listening to another audiobook at the same time, but once I started this one it grabbed me so completely I just wanted to listen through to the end. The evocation of the inner life of the main character, Mr. Stevens, through very precise diction is simply masterful, along with the switches between the recollections from the pre-war episodes and the narrator's present-day were deft and illuminating. Stevens is the most polished sounding unreliable narrator imaginable, voiced perfectly by Nicholas Guy Smith in the audiobook version with just enough inflection to guide the listener to the meaning that likes just behind the words. The film concentrates most on the unrequited …

Review of 'The Remains of the Day' on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

I didn't start getting into the story until around the 40% mark and even then, I felt like I had to make myself read it. If it hadn't been a book club pick, it'd probably be a DNF. I'm glad I stuck with it until the end. It was worth it from a literary and historical standpoint. But that ending felt incredibly depressing to me and I'm not sure it was meant to be? Was there meant to be little to no growth of the main character? Did he grow, but my own views are just so vastly different I can't see it? I have a lot of feelings to think about before my book club's discussion. 

Subjects

  • Man-woman relationships, fiction
  • Fiction, historical
  • British and irish fiction (fictional works by one author)
  • England, fiction