Having Read The Remains of the Day 9/29-2014

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order.. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/15/2025] 

What a dangerously simple read. That is how I think of  Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (Vintage International, 1993). In 245 pages, Ishiguro tells of a love story, of a certain sort of Englishman's response to Hitler, and the vagaries of history. All told obliquely in a certain formal prose, mostly done as one character's interior monologue. Ishiguro even omits a key encounter - the ostensible purpose for the novel - and even a whole day. We, the reader, must make some jumps, some connections on our own. Omission can be as potent as inclusion.

Ishiguro opens with these two sentences:

It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been occupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone in the comfort of Mr. Faraday's Ford; an expedition which, as I foresee it, will take me through much of the finest countryside of England to the West Country,a nd may keep me away from Darlington Hall as much as five or sex days....

I think these two sentences quite effectively and efficiently characterize the novel and its narrator. I continue working on such openings to my stories. I notice Ishiguro copyrighted this novel when he was thirty-five. That I find  almost daunting. I set my goals on getting published and giving my readers their money's worth. I have the residual craziness of writing something. Important and Worth Reading.

I do disagree with the narrator's conclusions about life:

... Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might ahve wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little chance other than to leave our fate, ultimately in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of the world who employ our services....

"Day Six - Evening Weymouth"

I can agree with the first two sentences. Yes, me who has no future sees no profit in looking back to the past only for blame. I disagree with the third sentence. I threw myself not my fate and that got me into prison. We need to be responsible for our own fates. I should raise the flag of irony here - the narrator is a blockhead. He may be substituting stoicism for mere blockheadism.

 The back page advertises Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World and A Pale View of Hills. He is only sixty. What else has he done? (And here I miss Wikipedia.)

sch

[6/15/2024: There was much else that Ishiguro had done by that time, some of what I found and read, and there is more that he has done since 2014. His Nobel Prize for Literature was one item awaiting him. As for Wikipedia, just click here. sch]