He’s cutting, bordering on cruel, which contrasts sharply and disturbingly with the obsequious facade he presents to his employer. Stevens values himself according to the quality of his own work when he questions the work of someone else, he questions their value as a person. I can’t imagine working with someone who held this opinion of me and my work. While Stevens enjoyed these debates, he was probably the only one. Note that aside about those who lacked any fundamental understanding of the profession. On a deeper level, he’s an insufferable snob and it’s hard to imagine any house running smoothly under his direction:īut let me return to the question that is of genuine interest, this question we so enjoyed debating when our evenings were not spoilt by chatter from those who lacked any fundamental understanding of the profession that is to say, the question ‘ what is a great butler?’ (31) On the surface, he’s good at his job and passionate about the quality of his work. Slow explorations of regret are often tedious, but this book isn’t because Stevens has so little self awareness that it becomes the reader’s job to sort actual events from his perceptions. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.” But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness” and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served.įrom this, it sounds like a dying-person-thinks-about-dying book even though Stevens is relatively young. The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England.

If you need literary reasons to pick it up instead: The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Man Booker Prize and Ishiguro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Then I saw a snippet from the movie in an episode of The Sopranos and needed to know why Anthony Hopkins was hiding a book from Emma Thompson. I’d heard good things about Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, but thought it was a dying-person-thinks-about-dying book so I didn’t read it.

The remains of the day book