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Adult Books - Fiction - Historical Fiction
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The Remains of the Day.
Ishiguro, Kazuo (author).
Oct. 1989. 256p. Knopf, hardcover, $18.95 (0-394-57343-9).
REVIEW.
First published October 15, 1989 (Booklist).
Salman Rushdie’s view (expressed when the novel came out in England) that this little masterpiece subverts the tradition out of which it seems to grow is only half right: postmodernism’s discovery—the value of suppressing all traces of irony—allows it to subvert and honor at the same time. So, in the beginning, we think that Ishiguro, a Japanese-born Englishman, is trying to pull the novel back to the time before Lawrence and Joyce with his amusing story of a gentle, aging butler reflecting on his service before World War I and ruminating on the subjects of greatness and dignity. But this radical suppression of feelings, leading at first to insensitivity and at last to a suppression of values—Is this really necessary for the mastery to which the butler aspires? In the end, our butler becomes an image of the tyrant in the slave, the grotesque in the smooth, the idealism that turned the samurai into a fascist and the quiet German into the Nazi—and all this in the England of Ford Maddox Ford. But without the gentle, delicate prose and the tender side of Ishiguro’s compassion, this extraordinary novel wouldn’t have caused the sensation it did in England. It has a beauty that has nothing to do with subversion and a mastery that creeps up slowly.— Stuart Whitwell
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