John Constable, Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816. National Gallery of Art, Washington (CC0)
Everyman's Library
The Remains of the Day
A butler, a house, and a life in service to the wrong idea.
$25.00
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- Author
- Kazuo Ishiguro
- Publisher
- Everyman's Library
- Published
- January 2012
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Hardcover
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
Dignity, Mistaken for a Life
Stevens, butler of Darlington Hall, drives across the West Country in 1956 to visit a former housekeeper, and in six days of small recollections a whole buried life comes up: decades of perfect service to a master who dabbled in appeasement, and a love unspoken until the speaking could only wound. Ishiguro's triumph is the voice, correct to the point of heartbreak, telling us everything the narrator cannot tell himself.
The novel won the Booker Prize in 1989 and stood at the centre of the work for which Ishiguro received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017; the Merchant Ivory film carried it further still. Everyman's Library keeps it in cloth among the classics, where its subject, a life spent on dignity at the expense of living, shows no sign of dating.
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