:INFO
The Novel That Made Me Grieve a Stranger's Wasted Years
The Remains of the Day does not announce its sadness. Kazuo Ishiguro's narrator is a butler named Stevens who has devoted his life to serving a man he believed was admirable. The revelation of that belief's foundation arrives so quietly that you almost miss the moment when Stevens understands what he gave up. I finished it on a Saturday morning and sat with the book closed for a long time afterward.


:NOTE
Stevens's narration is the most unreliable I have read without a single lie.


:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Kazuo Ishiguro]
What is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to alter the past?


:JOURNEY
Reading The Remains of the Day
4 Patient voice
5 Emotional core
4 Earns its place
5 Most devastating

:NOTE
If you are the kind of reader who needs things to happen, this book will frustrate you. If you are the kind who reads for what goes unsaid, it is perfect.