Ishiguro, Kazuo (1954-), japonês radicado na Inglaterra:Luz Pálida sobre a Colina (1982);
Vestígios do Dia (1989);
O Inconsolado (1995).
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954; he came to England when he was five years old and now lives in London. His first four novels are: A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989) and The Unconsoled (1995).
The Remains of the Day is an enthralling novel that has to be read twice. The web of words is too complicated to penetrate at first sight, and emotion is very hard to unveil. Once you find out it exists, you retrace your steps, and point the finger questioningly at the sore spots.
On the one hand, the book is an essay on the idea of a ‘great’ butler: the person in question, we are told, should be characterized by dignity above all, and should be attached to a distinguished employer, who in this case is Lord Darlington, a key figure – or so the butler thinks – for the destiny of humanity.
The butler – whose only name seems to be Stevens, as nobody uses his first name – must have been born a butler. He has no personal belongings or wishes other than to serve his master. He has no childhood memories that he sees fit to mention, and he gives up life for the sake of his profession, in which he is indeed unsurpassed. His dissertation on how to be unsurpassed is interspersed with a limited range of memories, incidents and two major feelings, which remain forever unuttered: love for his master and love for the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. Within the space of the novel, Lord Darlington dies – he is already dead when the story, Stevens’ motoring trip, begins – and Miss Kenton is already Mrs. Benn. What is left of the butler’s great expectations is the remains of the day.
Apparently unemotional and perfectly matter-of-fact, the story Stevens tells stresses decency and restraint, major ways of life and utmost boundaries to our possible desire of trespassing into the realm of the main character’s sensibility, even deeper psychology. The whole novel is built upon the rock of a huge understatement. Stevens seems arrested in the hieratic posture of Japanese art. Movement of any kind is banned to the surface, although we ultimately become very much aware that a stream of incandescent lava flows passionately underground, like a river which strats from the sun, which rages till the sun is exhausted into a mere sunset – and then we can at last catch a glimpse of what it might have been.
The ‘might have been’ is a mood characteristic of T.S. Eliot’s sensibility, and so is Stevens’ unwillingness to admit he is and why he is so deeply unhappy, to talk about himself. As an objective correlative – though Eliot himself discarded the term in later life, the day is spent as a butler, and in the evening, which is stated at the very end of the book to be the ‘best part of the day,’ the butler turns into a might-have-been prince, whose beloved has grown old, apart and, as a matter of fact, has left the scenario altogether.
The novel starts with the announcement in the first person, ‘the expedition has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.’ The first character mentioned is Mr. Farraday, the new American owner of Darlington Hall. Unlike Henry James’ Americans, blinded by the lights of Europe before the two world wars, Ishiguro’s American is mastered by a downright complex of superiority. The story begins in 1956. Two wars have changed England and the rest of the continent. Mr. Farraday has bought Darlington Hall, hoping it would turn out to be the ‘real thing,’ and Stevens the butler comes, as somebody says on the last pages, as ‘part of the package.’
