I read The Remains of the Day for the first time in 2002 when I was an undergraduate at Leeds University. His convoluted way of speaking (‘I venture to say, sir…’), and his preoccupation with ‘dignity in keeping with one’s position’, sounds comical today, but his narration is intimate and engaging from the novel’s first page to its last. Stevens’ story, as he reflects from 1956 on his decades of service in a large house during a journey to find the former housekeeper who he may or may not love, conveys multitudes about England. It is as though, rather than having invented his protagonist, Ishiguro recorded a real English butler’s words and put them on the page. The voice of Stevens, the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day, is so authentic and beautifully-sustained that you could believe it had always existed.
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