Kazuo Ishiguro: Les vestiges du jour (French language, 1990, Presses de la renaissance)
Idioma French
Publicado el 16 de Diciembre de 1990 por Presses de la renaissance.
In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.
There's so much in here. It bears another read, and I'm very curious how they managed the film adaptation.
I didn't start getting into the story until around the 40% mark and even then, I felt like I had to make myself read it. If it hadn't been a book club pick, it'd probably be a DNF. I'm glad I stuck with it until the end. It was worth it from a literary and historical standpoint. But that ending felt incredibly depressing to me and I'm not sure it was meant to be? Was there meant to be little to no growth of the main character? Did he grow, but my own views are just so vastly different I can't see it? I have a lot of feelings to think about before my book club's discussion.
I read this book in Spanish a very long time ago. I'm curious about Ishiguro's real style, as I don't trust translations very much.
As far as my translation went, I can tell that the book is deceptively easy and "soft". It describes a few sad and wasted lives through the eyes of a narrator who was too fooled by his own preconceptions; I love books in which the narrator knows a lot less than what the reader can infer and this is the best example I know of that narrative device.
