The Remains of the Day is a novel set in England during the 1950s and narrated by a proper English butler, Mr. Stevens. Winner of the latest Booker Award, it was written by a young man of multicultural background, Kazuo Ishiguro.
"The writer is an original and so is the book, which is very funny and one of the saddest I can remember. I like it very much," says novelist Doris Lessing. Alison Lurie calls it "a brilliant and subtle novel, which says far more than it seems to about social politics and the destructive influence of public selves on private lives."
This month THE WORLD & I features the first three chapters of The Remains of the Day. These evoke life in a great English house and portray Mr. Steven's inner conflict and devotion to discipline.
Author Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954, moved to England with his family as a child, and grew up in the small Japanese community there. His novel about Japan, An Artist of the Floating World, was widely praised by critics and won England's prestigious Whitbread Prize in 1986.
Ishiguro's thoughts about his recently published The Remains of the Day are conveyed by scholar John Treat in a commentary following the excerpt. Treat also analyzes the components of this "perfect story," comparing Ishiguro's work with that of Salman Rushdie and other British writers of foreign background.
Literary critic Ihab Hassan, developer of the theory of postmodernism, offers another commentary. He proposes
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