I’ll be on ESPNEWS on Monday afternoon right after the Rookies of the Year are announced at 2 pm EST, and then again at 2:40 pm to talk more about those winners and the awards to come over the next week-plus.
I’ve got a short take on Dan Uggla on Rumor Central.
I’m doing a daily wrap-up/links column each weekday this week in Buster Olney’s absence, so if you see any news story, rumor, or blog item that you think is worthy of a comment, please throw a link in a comment on this or any post this week, or shoot me an email.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day
Mr. Stevens has been a butler for 30 years at Darlington Hall, most of that time serving Lord Darlington, a well-meaning nobleman who indulges his liberal worldview by dabbling in international politics between the world wars. Darlington is dead for three years at the novel’s start, but Stevens takes the reader through a series of flashbacks that gradually expose the nature and effects of his master’s efforts as well as his relationship with Miss Kenton, who oversees the female staff in the house and occasionally shocks Stevens with the strength of her will and with actions and words he can’t quite interpret. As the flashbacks deepen, helped along by some chance events on a six-day sojourn Stevens takes to visit the now-married Miss Kenton in her village, Stevens becomes more aware of what the last thirty years have truly entailed for him.
Although regret is, to my reading, the overwhelming theme of the novel, work/life balance also seems to play heavily in Ishiguro’s rendering of Stevens’ life and character. Through extraordinarily dedicated service and loyalty both to his master and to an independent ideal of “dignity” in work, Stevens has spent all of his energy on his vocation, letting it subdue or crowd out any person underneath his work-oriented exterior. This leads to the questions of regret which hang over the novel and come to the fore in the final section, but on its own, Stevens’ almost obsessive pursuit of dignity and the butlering ideal leave him out of touch with the people and actions taking place around him – sometimes deliberately, but other times inadvertently, and much to his loss in the long run.
The Remains of the Day isn’t all heaviness and sorrow, however; an English novel of manners should at least have a dose of comedy, and this one does, particularly Stevens’ inability to gel with his new American master, who expects a bit of a repartee with his head man but finds Stevens unequal to the task. Stevens recognizes that his boss wants a bit of “bantering” and applies himself to the task as if he were trying to learn to cook or to speak French, with comic effect.
I’ve previously reviewed (and loved) Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
Next up: I’ve got about 120 pages to go in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Keith,
A little off-topic from the book review, but I was hoping you could publish some of your top board games? My wife and I are sick of watching the same old shows, and are looking for a change. Thanks!
I also loved this book. Not as enamored with some of his other work however. Really nice write-up Keith.
We were assigned this novel in my law school Legal Ethics class back in 1993. The subtext we studied was the danger of subsuming your personal beliefs and ethics to those of your employer — a live issue for lawyers then and now. Stevens dimly recognizes late in the novel that he never did make any decisions according to his own preference — and that whatever mistakes Lord Darlington might have made, at least they were Darlington’s own; Stevens couldn’t say the same. Ishiguro puts paid to the still-lingering notion that a lawyer is nothing but a hired gun or mouthpiece — we (and any professional in a service role) can’t escape our responsibility that easily. It’s a novel about regret, but regret for a conscience never asserted and a will never exercised:
“Lord Darlington wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t a bad man at all. And at least he had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he made his own mistakes. His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?”
I found it to be about regret, yes. But also powerfully, it struck me as an argument for balance. Stevens notion of duty and frankly his view of the world was so constricted by his profession that nothing else had a chance to get in.
Keith,
Glad you like Remains of the Day. I became enamored with Ishiguro after reading that one. If you have the ambition and enjoy surreal fiction, try The Unconsoled. He takes his theme of the deluded self to an extreme in that novel. It is darkly comical, and at times frustrating, but I felt it well worth the time.