6. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
I don't read many novels, and those I read are usually SF/F, so this was a departure for me. I haven't seen the movie either, so I didn't know much going in, but I thought I'd give it a chance.
Does everyone already know the premise? It's about an aging butler in 1950s England going on a motoring trip to visit a former colleague with whom he has much unfinished personal business. It seems to be written as a letter either to the reader or to an unnamed friend, describing the journey and interspersed with reminiscences of his former life in the employ of a gentleman who greatly influenced the course of foreign policy after the Great War, and reflections on the meaning of it all.
Today this is the kind of writing you might expect from a particularly literary and performative blog, combining travelogue with personal narratives and confessions. Occasionally the narrator refers to "you" -- the reader who is presumed to have some familiarity with the things he speaks of, but who is in some sense absent, theoretical... Stevens knows (hopes?) his words may be read, so the style is not that of a diary, but he is nonetheless ultimately writing to himself.
The narration is highly formal in tone, with many convoluted sentences and nested clauses, almost to the point of being funny at first -- practically a stereotype of how an old English butler should write. But we quickly learn that the author is smarter than that. He knows acutely what he is doing, and has never-wavering control of it.
Whenever there is dialogue, the narration becomes quiet and telegraphic, more so the more emotionally charged the situation. At peaks of what must be overwhelming feeling for the characters, the narrator is nearly mute. 'Are you all right, Stevens?' characters ask on multiple occasions. He reports his answer: that he is only tired. But tells us nothing more.
Who is this character, this Stevens, who has words -- endless words -- for everything else, but for whom emotions are like rising waters, leaving him as silent and adrift as a drowning man? He speaks of the dignity of his position, of how he admires men like his father, who truly *inhabit* the role of the stoic servant, rather than only wearing it as a mask.
But I think it is a mask, in a different sense. If anything, his character reads to me like someone on the autism spectrum, who is constantly baffled by such concepts as "banter", and lets us in on his worried attempts to learn them, listening to a comedy show on the radio and mentally practicing coming up with "witticisms". He lets us in on the incredible anxiety of trying to relate to people socially, especially strangers -- and all the strangers in this book are unfailingly kind to him. Yet he fears them, their unpredictability. When they ask him to stay for dinner and talk to more strangers, you'd think they were asking him to enter a lion's den. It terrifies and exhausts him.
The role of the ever-proper butler seems to be his means of existing in the world, indeed of excelling in the world. What he masks is the fact that it comes naturally to him, as all other ways of being with people do not. The other characters imagine that at some point he is going to shed the role and act "normal". I don't think it's that he won't, I think it's that he can't.
It's a short novel, and in some ways has the feel of a short story. Despite the initial illusion of meandering, it's actually quite focused, and was probably edited fiercely by the author. There is nothing out of place. As a writer, I admire the craft of this book very much.
If that seems like damning with faint praise, it may be a little. It's a good novel and I can't think of anything it did wrong, but it didn't quite "speak to me". I enjoyed it, but I didn't have trouble putting it down when it was time to go to bed. Just not my genre, maybe. I may give the author's other books a try.
(tags: a: ishiguro kazuo, japanese-english, england)
Does everyone already know the premise? It's about an aging butler in 1950s England going on a motoring trip to visit a former colleague with whom he has much unfinished personal business. It seems to be written as a letter either to the reader or to an unnamed friend, describing the journey and interspersed with reminiscences of his former life in the employ of a gentleman who greatly influenced the course of foreign policy after the Great War, and reflections on the meaning of it all.
Today this is the kind of writing you might expect from a particularly literary and performative blog, combining travelogue with personal narratives and confessions. Occasionally the narrator refers to "you" -- the reader who is presumed to have some familiarity with the things he speaks of, but who is in some sense absent, theoretical... Stevens knows (hopes?) his words may be read, so the style is not that of a diary, but he is nonetheless ultimately writing to himself.
The narration is highly formal in tone, with many convoluted sentences and nested clauses, almost to the point of being funny at first -- practically a stereotype of how an old English butler should write. But we quickly learn that the author is smarter than that. He knows acutely what he is doing, and has never-wavering control of it.
Whenever there is dialogue, the narration becomes quiet and telegraphic, more so the more emotionally charged the situation. At peaks of what must be overwhelming feeling for the characters, the narrator is nearly mute. 'Are you all right, Stevens?' characters ask on multiple occasions. He reports his answer: that he is only tired. But tells us nothing more.
Who is this character, this Stevens, who has words -- endless words -- for everything else, but for whom emotions are like rising waters, leaving him as silent and adrift as a drowning man? He speaks of the dignity of his position, of how he admires men like his father, who truly *inhabit* the role of the stoic servant, rather than only wearing it as a mask.
But I think it is a mask, in a different sense. If anything, his character reads to me like someone on the autism spectrum, who is constantly baffled by such concepts as "banter", and lets us in on his worried attempts to learn them, listening to a comedy show on the radio and mentally practicing coming up with "witticisms". He lets us in on the incredible anxiety of trying to relate to people socially, especially strangers -- and all the strangers in this book are unfailingly kind to him. Yet he fears them, their unpredictability. When they ask him to stay for dinner and talk to more strangers, you'd think they were asking him to enter a lion's den. It terrifies and exhausts him.
The role of the ever-proper butler seems to be his means of existing in the world, indeed of excelling in the world. What he masks is the fact that it comes naturally to him, as all other ways of being with people do not. The other characters imagine that at some point he is going to shed the role and act "normal". I don't think it's that he won't, I think it's that he can't.
It's a short novel, and in some ways has the feel of a short story. Despite the initial illusion of meandering, it's actually quite focused, and was probably edited fiercely by the author. There is nothing out of place. As a writer, I admire the craft of this book very much.
If that seems like damning with faint praise, it may be a little. It's a good novel and I can't think of anything it did wrong, but it didn't quite "speak to me". I enjoyed it, but I didn't have trouble putting it down when it was time to go to bed. Just not my genre, maybe. I may give the author's other books a try.
(tags: a: ishiguro kazuo, japanese-english, england)