As an aspirational creative writer, I’m interested in the specificities of what makes one story work, and another fail, one hum along to a satisfying, naturally flowing rhythm, and another get stopped up by verbal dead ends. I want to know, above all, what linguistic marvels can bring the disinterested reader to tears, what can make her heart break in tandem with a character’s.
Whatever makes me cry — in fiction or nonfiction — is, of course, whatever makes me inhabit the character’s experience as my own. It seems miraculous when a writer accomplishes this feat using nothing but words on a page, where there’s nothing to see except the images she or he’s constructed using phrasing strung together just so, with exactly the right details accumulating, right up to the point of impact. What’s the magic recipe for evoking such strong feeling?
There is no standard model. There’s no craft book that can show you how to tap into the common human wellspring of regret, for example. You set up a goal for your hero, and establish high stakes for reaching it. You establish that your hero talks about his feelings like this: “One has to confess, at that moment, to being overcome by a certain sense of discouragement.” You allow what is not said to speak louder than what is. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day,” the writer evokes feeling by going to great lengths to suppress it. His hero, a butler, has made a life for himself out of perfecting the art of dignity. An exemplary butler, it turns out, is the perfect literary vehicle for damming up emotion, page by page, only to open the floodgates when we are least expecting a deluge.
Superlative descriptors for literature are, unfortunately, a dime a dozen. You can find them in most any blurb of most any published work. I’ll just call “The Remains of The Day” beautiful, and timely. I am aware that the book came out in 1989. I am also aware it was made into a very well-received movie in 1993, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. But it bears renewed attention. I found it to be the perfect summer of 2021 reading antidote to our fraught and fractious moment in history, a calming, comforting salve.
Ishiguro’s writing is patient, elegant, and humane. The story is told in the first person, in the form of flashbacks and contemporary travelogue, by Mr. Stevens, who is making his way by car across the isle from Oxfordshire to the West Country, in order to call upon Ms. Kenton, his former colleague, and, we can only assume, the great unrequited love of his life. He’d received a letter from her through which he was made to believe she was divorcing her husband, after some 20-odd years.
Unable to acknowledge aloud his hopes for romance, he insists — to himself, and to the audience to whom he seems to be justifying himself — that the trip has been undertaken for purely professional reasons, to convince Ms. Kenton to return to Darlington Hall, the Downton Abbey-esque setting of his lifelong, and her long-time, employment. There have arisen some “staffing issues” which he is certain that she, as competent a housekeeper as ever there had been, could address. (Stevens is a most wonderfully unreliable narrator. I don’t believe a word he says about himself.)
Along the way, Stevens takes plenty of time to leisurely ponder a lifetime spent in service to Lord Darlington. But Stevens’ adjacency to the most important men of his day has not induced him to look down on farmers, or simple village folk. Having apparently never before travelled any distance from Darlington Hall, he is a particularly effective tour guide, pausing to savor the charms of each pastoral view, the hospitality of a couple who take him for a “gentleman,” the serviceability of a modest bedroom.
The book is also funny, with its humor serving primarily to endear Stevens to the reader, rather than to ridicule anyone or anything. Since “dignity” is the only character trait Stevens has occasion to practice regularly, and the only one about which he feels confident, he must undertake intense study of other things a good butler ought to know how to do. Among his areas of keen study and practice are how to perform “witticisms” and how to “banter,” since he’s noticed that witticisms are a key component of bantering, and bantering seems to “hold the key to human warmth.”
In one flashback to their time working together, Ms. Kenton comes upon Stevens alone in his pantry, reading a book. She playfully prizes it out of his hands, and is delighted to discover that he’s deeply engaged in a sentimental romance that had been placed on the library’s shelves to occupy female guests. He’s more than ready to explain this potential embarrassment. “There was a simple reason for my having taken to perusing such works; it was an extremely efficient way to maintain and develop one’s command of the English language.” Right. Because one always consults the Harlequin Romance series when one wants to improve one’s grammar.
I thought I’d lost the capacity, these past few terrible years, to sit quietly with a novel, and lose myself in the concerns of a compelling character who has, superficially, nothing whatsoever in common with me. I’m so grateful to know I haven’t. I wish we were a more literate society, if only because immersing ourselves in someone else’s story is the only way to build sympathy, which is the starting place for healing.
“The Remains of the Day” has me thinking about regret, which it encapsulates in one of those dam-bursting paragraphs, when Stevens realizes his time is limited, and he’s squandered it. “…it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one’s relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
I read recently that people on their deathbeds never regret not having bought that house, or having made that killing. They regret small things. Having hurt someone’s feelings. Having failed to forgive someone. Writers help to remind us of truths like this while we’re still living. A Japanese man inhabits the spirit of an Anglo butler, and in so doing, paints me a self-portrait. One has to confess, at this moment, to being overcome by a certain sense of awe.
"book" - Google News
July 13, 2021 at 03:30AM
https://ift.tt/3xDkIu7
BOOK REVIEW: Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Remains of the Day' still beautiful, timely - theberkshireedge.com
"book" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2Yv0xQn
https://ift.tt/2zJxCxA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "BOOK REVIEW: Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Remains of the Day' still beautiful, timely - theberkshireedge.com"
Post a Comment