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I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in the mid-90s, just before the Merchant-Ivory movie came out. I may have speed-read it and missed many of its subtleties, and it is the sort of novel where the most devastating revelations are purposely unsaid.

Every time I read Ishiguro I am lulled by the tranquillity of the language, only to be whacked upside the head by a sudden emotional upheaval. Here are my notes on re-reading The Remains of the Day. (Spoilers abound.) Please join the discussion in Comments or send me your notes at saffron.safin@gmail.com.

– The protagonist is Stevens, a butler, and his entire life is summed up by that one word, “butler”. His manner is formal, very careful not to give offense, sometimes pompous. This is a man who never forgets his place in the class hierarchy.

– We see the gap between what Steven knows and doesn’t know—the situation gives him away. Note how Faraday quickly guesses Stevens’s feelings towards the former Miss Kenton, and how flustered Stevens becomes.

– All this ruminating on “greatness”, Stevens really is a snob. Then he spends a lot of time defining “dignity” and stresses that it requires emotional restraint. Haha, he’s not so much restrained as sealed-in.

– Wincing at his very formal relationship with his father, who was also a butler.

– Stevens attempts to explain sex to his employer’s godson. Comedy ensues. In the movie the godson is played by Hugh Grant. There is much hilarity.

– Like St Peter, he denies his beloved Lord Darlington to the villagers.

– Ribbentrop the Nazi foreign minister was a frequent guest. Granted, most people had no idea what the Nazis were at the time, but it never even occurs to Stevens to ask questions. To him, Lord D can do no wrong, even after the matter of the Jewish maids.

– Stevens’s defensiveness when he is caught reading a romance novel. He is so trapped in proprieties he even discontinues the daily meetings that give him so much pleasure. Not that he admits his pleasure.

– Similarities to An Artist of the Floating World and Never Let Me Go: Intelligent, thoughtful narrator/protagonists who are clueless about themselves: one because he can’t deal with the truth, one because the truth is kept from her, and Stevens because he is willfully obtuse.

– Stevens is somewhat alarmed at the farmers who “do not know their place”. The place he has chosen for himself is ignorance—his employers’ guests use him as an example of why the masses cannot have power. The perfect butler has no opinion; he exists to smooth edges.

– When Miss Kenton makes that announcement, I yell at Stevens.

– “Today’s world is too foul a place for such fine and noble instincts” = Um, yes he was a fascist sympathizer, but he had good qualities.

– When I read it for the first time, I thought Stevens a tragic figure. Now I think he is a clod, a self-important buffoon, a man to be pitied.

– When the emotion is too huge, simplicity works. “…at that moment, my heart was breaking.”

– “I can’t even say I made my own mistakes…what dignity is there in that?” A moment of self-awareness.