The Remains of the Day

Stevens is the perfect butler. He has devoted his entire life to serving Lord Darlington at Darlington Hall, and he has done so with a commitment to "dignity" and "greatness" that has shaped every decision he has ever made — including the decision not to love Miss Kenton, the housekeeper who was, for years, clearly and painfully in love with him.

Now it is 1956. Lord Darlington is dead, the house has been purchased by an American, and Stevens is driving through the English countryside on a short motoring trip to visit Miss Kenton — now Mrs. Benn — ostensibly to discuss her possible return to service. Along the way, he remembers. And in remembering, he begins to understand what he has lost.

Ishiguro's masterpiece is a novel about repression so complete that the narrator cannot even recognize it in himself. Stevens speaks in elaborate, formal circumlocutions that circle around his feelings without ever touching them directly. The reader must decode what Stevens cannot say — that he loved Miss Kenton, that Lord Darlington's Nazi sympathies compromised everything Stevens believed in, that he sacrificed his life for a version of duty that was, in the end, not worth the price.

The novel is very funny in a dry, devastating way, and it is also one of the saddest books ever written. The final scene — Stevens sitting on a pier as the lights come on — is a moment of recognition so complete and so quiet that it can make you weep.

The Remains of the Day is one of the most perfectly constructed novels in the English language. Every sentence serves the whole. Every evasion in Stevens's narration is precisely calibrated to reveal what he is hiding from himself. The gap between what Stevens says and what he means is the novel itself, and Ishiguro maintains that gap with absolute, unwavering control for 245 pages.

The book earns its place because its subject — the cost of emotional repression — is universal. Stevens is a butler, but his story is everyone's. Who among us has not sacrificed something genuine for the sake of a role we thought we had to play? Who has not looked back and seen, too late, the moments when we chose duty over feeling and lost something irretrievable?

The novel is also a quiet masterpiece of political commentary. Stevens's devotion to Lord Darlington — who hosted Nazi sympathizers and championed appeasement — mirrors the way ordinary people enable dangerous ideologies by deferring to authority and refusing to think independently. The personal and the political are fused so seamlessly that you cannot separate them, and that fusion is the mark of genuinely great fiction.

Published in 1989, The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize and cemented Kazuo Ishiguro's reputation as one of the finest writers in the English language. The novel has sold millions of copies and been translated into over 30 languages. The 1993 Merchant Ivory film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson was nominated for eight Academy Awards and is regarded as one of the finest literary adaptations ever produced. In 2017, Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Swedish Academy noting his novels' ability to uncover "the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." The Remains of the Day is consistently ranked among the greatest novels of the 20th century.