Remains of the Day, by Kazue Ishiguro

This breathtakingly beautifully written novel was first published in 1989, is now reissued because its author is the 2017 Nobel laureate in Literature.  He has written  seven other novels, won several other honors, been translated into forty other languages.

In this novel, a kind of comedy of manners,  the point of view character is Stevens, who in 1956 has been for thirty years butler to the recently deceased Lord Darlington at his great country house in England.  Through the generosity of his new employer, an American businessman, Stevens embarks on a six day road trip through southwest England, something he has never done before; he calls it an expedition.  In the days leading up to the expedition and throughout it we are treated to his almost exquisitely sensitive thoughts as he reviews his career, and thus his life, searching for the significance of the thirty years he devoted to Lord Darlington. 

Stevens finds that significance in the great affairs he has witnessed as Lord Darlington plays a part in the aftermath of World War I, in the political tension of the 1930s  as Europe slides into World War II.   He also finds it in having been a “great” butler, for which his father is his model.

Ironically, Stevens  lives and breathes a wonderful sensitivity to the natural beauty he drives through and the people he meets.  I say “ironically” because in his devotion to being a great butler and thus serving not only Lord Darlington but also the social class structure of England of the time, he is insensitively blind to the dessicated nature of his relationship with his father and to the humanity of Miss Kenton, the woman who is housekeeper of Darlington Hall.

Ishiguro inhabits Stevens thoroughly, capturing the sense of dignity-in-servitude to which he sacrifices his life.  The reader feels the tension between what Stevens makes of his life and of what he could make of it;  at least I did, powerfully.  The book is  funny, sad, very moving.