The Remains of the Day
He will not say he regrets it. You can feel him not saying it on every single page. Ishiguro's most quietly devastating novel.
A Dignified Life
Kazuo Ishiguro's 1989 Booker Prize winner is narrated by Stevens, the impeccably proper English butler of Darlington Hall, who takes a motoring holiday through the English countryside to visit a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton. During the drive he reflects on his long years of service, his professional ideal of dignity, and the choices he made in the service of a lord who turned out to have sided with Nazi Germany. What Stevens will not say about Miss Kenton, about lost chances, about a life spent in perfect service to a flawed cause, is the most eloquent silence in modern fiction.
Reading The Remains of the Day
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"It is possible my great desire to make my father's final years happy coloured my judgment.
"Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro wrote the novel in four weeks during what he called a crash-write, working twelve-hour days to get the first draft down before he lost the voice. He barely edited the first draft before submission.
The 1993 film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson was nominated for eight Academy Awards. Ishiguro has said the film captures the novel's emotional atmosphere perfectly, which rarely happens with adaptations.