Tag: Kazuo Ishiguro

Burning to the Last – Sándor Márai’s Embers

Sándor Márai’s Embers is the second work of Hungarian literature that I’ve read after Satantango, but I’m not quite sure whether “Hungarian” is the best word for describing this short novel of ageing and decline. For though Embers was published in 1942, its attention is focused back towards the past, when Márai’s country (he was born in 1900) was Austria-Hungary and not the dislocated Hungary it became after the Treaty of Trianon. The sheer nostalgia for a Vienna that once was, for a life that once was, is unmistakable. Márai had even once considered writing in German instead of Hungarian, in the same way that Kafka, another citizen of an empire that disappeared, felt compelled to choose between Czech and German. They made different choices, but a common sensibility, a common heritage, ties them, and Hofmannsthal, and Rilke, and so many others, together. They were once all Austro-Hungarians.

Sándor Márai (1900-1989), only recently was “discovered” by the literary establishment, but his incorporation is in full swing. Embers is his most famous work, it seems.

The Plot of Embers

In the castle there lives an old general. The General (his name – Henrik – we learn later, but the sheer formality and seriousness by which he lives means that the text rarely refers to him by it) lives with his servants, chief among them Nini, a 91-year-old who once served as his nanny and wet nurse. He has lived, almost without any contact with the outside world, for many years. People come to his estate to hunt in the expansive grounds, but they stay in the hunting lodge and do not see the master. The general’s wife died young, and his only friend disappeared 41 years ago. His life is one of looking back. We are told early on that “he thought only in decades, anything more exact upset him, as if he might be reminded of things he would rather forget”.

But the things that we wish to forget are often the things that keep us going. The novel begins when the General’s peace is at last disrupted by a letter, informing him that this friend will be coming for dinner that evening. The scene is set for a walk through the past, an untangling of confused memories, and a working out of something akin to the truth. But when life is almost at its end it is precisely truth, hazy and unpredictable, that can be the most valuable thing in the world.

The original title of Embers, A gyertyák csonkig égnek, is literally translated as “Candles burn until the end”. And indeed, most of the story takes place by the fire, and each chapter mimics the slow decline of life as the red glow grows dim, before finally going out. At first the General and his friend deal with their common past in the military academy and service, both in dialogue and in reminiscences, but with time they move ever closer to the present, and to the questions that have been tormenting the General for all those years that they were parted. These questions, as he himself says, are perhaps what have been giving him the strength to stay alive all this time.

Male Friendship

It is a friendship that needs to be worked out. Konrad, the returning friend, tried – the General is sure of it – to kill the General on the day of a hunt, 41 years before the novel takes place. He tried to do this, perhaps, because of a secret relationship with the General’s wife. The day after the hunt Konrad disappeared and the General’s wife ceased talking with him. The General wants to understand what happened, and why, but as the one-sided interrogation is carried out by the fire – Konrad almost never speaks, even to defend himself – we get the strange feeling that the General is trying to save himself, just as much as he’s trying to save his friendship.

The novel is unusual in the focus it lays upon friendship, particularly male friendship. I can’t think of many other books that do so. Destructive forces, even love, always seem to take precedence over the banalities and subtleties of friendship when it comes to novels. No doubt because they’re much more dramatic. But friendship is an important topic, even if it’s one that is already in a way outdated in the way we encounter it in Embers. The two kids meet at a military academy, where they spend every day and night together. And though they have different backgrounds – Konrad is poor, while Henrik is wealthy – and share different worldviews – Henrik is martial and serious, while Konrad loves music – the friendship that springs up seems built to last forever.

The intensity of the arrangement is hard to understand for people who haven’t experienced something similar. I’m lucky, perhaps, in that I went to boarding school, and know the sort of thing Márai describes here. Of course, many of my friends were friends only through common experience, a weak bond; but for those friends who were friends for deeper reasons, the length of time we spent together means that even now, when we are all separated and scattered across the world, we remain close in a way that is hard to describe.

Friendship’s Decline

The General and his friend’s relationship is both the second sort, and not. Certainly, at first glance the friendship between the two of them seems to rely only on common experience. But that’s not true – there is a sense that they also have a shared internal world, which even though their interests are mismatched is nonetheless enough to bond them tightly. They make vows of chastity, and promise other monkish feats. The problem is that as time passes divisions between them grow, and what was once unimportant becomes unavoidable and painful.

Chief among these divisions is the problem of money. Though Konrad is at the prestigious military academy and a nobleman, he is there only because his parents are starving themselves for his sake. He says that whenever he spends money he is “expending a portion of their lives”, and though Henrik tries to understand this, their difference in backgrounds grows harder to bear. Henrik lacks the imagination for understanding – he is a military man. And once the two finish at the academy and start working, stationed near Vienna, their differing sensibilities become a further obstruction to understanding. Henrik goes carousing and lives the life of a young officer. Konrad, delicate and musical, cannot. And though he feigns indifference, “one could hear in his voice the need of a thirsty man yearning to drain life dry”. With time such feelings only get worse.

Music is also another point where the boys’ divisions are obvious. Henrik doesn’t understand music. He feels cut off from Konrad whenever the other listens. But for Konrad music is liberation: “When he listened to music, he listened with his whole body, as longingly as a condemned man in his cell aches for the sound of distant feet”. Music connects Konrad with Chopin, who is mentioned several times in the book as a figure of mixed identity, having a French father and Polish mother. Konrad and the General’s wife are both artistic and uncertain in their origins. Unsurprisingly, an affair forms, and it is for that reason that Konrad may have wanted to kill his friend.

End of an Era – Closed Spaces and the Politics of Embers

Embers takes place not long before its publication in 1942. But war is hard to hear through the castle’s walls. One thing I noticed early on is the use of space in the novel. The General’s world is one of closed spaces. He is out of touch with the times. In this he is very reminiscent of Stevens in The Remains of the Day. Just as Stevens (unknowingly) hides within Darlington Hall to avoid facing a world that has changed, so too does the General in the castle. He looks at portraits from the past and thinks of how good things were – “absolutely dedicated to honour, to the male virtues: silence, solitude, the inviolability of one’s word”. Yet he also keeps most of the castle closed down, unvisited, to avoid facing the memories locked within those rooms. And though he hunts, he never leaves the estate.

A castle from Hungary
A castle in Hungary. I liked Embers’ use of closed spaces to show both the isolation of the General, and his attempts to keep his homeland alive inside him. Photo by Puffancs CC BY-SA 2.5 HU

Like Stevens, he relies on silence to deceive himself. “Everything… had fed into his very bloodstream the tendency never to speak of whatever caused him pain but to bear it in silence”. Even his friendship with Konrad is described as “hermetic”. For Henrik the Austro-Hungarian Empire has not ended because within his own person – in the values he chooses to embrace – he can keep it alive, and because within his castle he can believe it still is safe. As much as he wants answers from the past, it’s seems more to complete a picture of it than to change the present.

Konrad is almost the exact opposite of the General in all this. His music serves to break down barriers. Music, of course, is a universal language. It connects him first to the General’s mother, herself a Frenchwoman, and then to the General’s wife. Only the General and his father cannot understand it – their focus is on the physical, rather than the sublime. When Konrad disappeared, he moved to England, and from there to the tropics to serve in the Empire. He doesn’t seem to have any loyalty to his past country. But he has come back. The General says this is because their friendship has remained strong, even through the years of separation. That’s true. But it’s also true that Konrad is just as trouble as the General is by the past. In his case, by the failure of his relationship with the General’s wife.

For both men, the evening is a way of working out what happened – both are old, and both are ready for the peace that can only, perhaps, be attained by resolving a lasting uncertainty.

Conclusion

Embers is not a long novel. Forty-one years of separation take up little time if all that time is spent in waiting. But though it’s short, it’s densely and beautifully written – hence why I’ve tried to include plenty of quotes. The ideas of friendship, of trying to hold onto the past, are just as relevant today as they were when the book was written, and leave plenty of food for thought. If you can find yourself a copy, it’s well worth the short time it will take you to read it.

The conclusion to Embers is also especially worth pondering. If you’ve read the novel, please do leave a comment, as I’d like to see what others made of it.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day – A Review

My friend James almost always brings up The Remains of the Day when we talk about literature. He’s a huge fan of Kazuo Ishiguro and rather thought the book would be my cup of tea. Well, at long last I’ve read the book and I have to admit that he was right. The Remains of the Day is a fascinating and sad story about the passage of time, and what we can salvage from the end of our lives, when it might seem that so much has passed us by. At my advanced age of twenty-two, it seems perfectly suited for me.

A photo of Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017
Kazuo Ishiguro is among the most celebrated authors writing in the UK now, and The Remains of the Day is probably his most famous work. He won the Nobel Prize in 2017. Photo by Frankie Fouganthin (CC BY-SA 4.0)

It tells the story of the life of a butler, Mr Stevens, who works in a great English country house, Darlington Hall, and the challenges he faces when he comes to look back on his past in his twilight years. For me the book is particularly poignant because of my own experience of the topics dealt within it, as my grandmother lives in a castle that is still served by staff (though they don’t live on site). Although it was published in 1989 and the action takes place in 1956, the questions and concerns of The Remains of the Day all remain vital and interesting now, and stretch far beyond the secret world of British upper classes it takes as its setting.

The Story

Mr Stevens, the aging butler of Darlington Hall, is presented with his greatest challenge yet when his new American employer suggests he goes for a car ride to get himself out of the house. The American is returning for a few weeks to his homeland and thinks that Stevens could use the fresh air. Stevens himself is not altogether for the idea, but he manages to convince himself. He has begun to notice certain mistakes in the running of the household, which he attributes to a lack of staff employed since Lord Darlington, the original owner, left. The trip can therefore be justified as a business one, for Stevens has recently received a letter from a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, and he decides to end his trip with a visit to her home, hoping she will rejoin the household.

Though Stevens travels around the countryside, most of The Remains of the Day comes as memories Stevens reconsiders with age. The central tension in Remains of the Day becomes the one between what Stevens is willing to admit to himself, and what out of fear, or cowardice, or pride, he does not accept. The decline and death of his own father, the rise of fascism, and Stevens’ relations with Miss Kenton and Lord Darlington are all replayed to the reader, but only by looking at what is not said can we appreciate their significance.

The Style and Form of The Remains of the Day

The first-person narration of The Remains of the Day is deceptively simple. It certainly is deceptive. Stevens has been plucked perfectly from his upper-class milieu, and like the English upper-class, he rarely says what he means. It is only thanks to the vividness of his memories, in particular through remembered dialogue, that we come to see what is really going on in the past and in the present. To take one example, when Stevens finds that his father has died, he decides to continue working at an important international conference instead of taking a break. In the narration there is no hint that Stevens is suffering. The recollection is explained by Stevens as the apotheosis of his career as a butler, his ultimate mastery of dignity. But then we reach the dialogue of his waiting, and his desired impression comes under attack.

“Stevens, are you all right?”

“Yes, sir. Perfectly.”

“You look as though you’re crying.” I laughed and taking out a handkerchief, quickly wiped my face.

“I’m very sorry, sir. The strains of a hard day.”

Without narration to interrupt and reinterpret this exchange, we are presented with a direct glimpse of Stevens’ pain. But when the chapter ends he tries once more to control our interpretation of the recollection. “For all its sad associations, whenever I recall that evening today, I find I do so with a large sense of triumph.” Language is a tool for the expression of our selves, for communication. But it can just as easily be used for creating a false picture of the world. Stevens, as if to save himself from the truth of that day, from the rejection of his father on his death bed, uses language to justify his cold-heartedness, to turn defeat into a kind of triumph. “You see, I know my father would have wishes me to carry on just now.” He says. But we aren’t so easily fooled.

Love and Deceit

The language of The Remains of the Day, instead of revealing, conceals the true nature of what has passed. Through verbiage and excessive reasoning Stevens tries to fool himself and the reader. Miss Kenton and her attempts to flirt with Stevens are concealed in the narration by Stevens’ refusal to ascribe any kind of romantic meaning to them. They appear only as words, and we need to divine their hidden depths for ourselves. Likewise, Stevens structures his trip to Miss Kenton – he initially “forgets” that she’s married and now Mrs Benn – as a business trip. But to the reader it’s clear enough that there is a romantic interest involved too.

We would be forgiven for thinking that Stevens does not realise what he is doing, that he is deceiving himself. The truth is much more sad. As the book draws to a close we find Stevens, at the end of the day, sitting by the beach. As he talks with a stranger it becomes clear that he knows that his life has been filled with mistakes, and that he’s trying desperately to find something good in all of them. The ending at least gives us a glimmer of hope, that though Stevens is old, still he might yet change, and find joy in what remains to him, and what has passed him by.

A photo of an English country house, located in front of a pond
An English country house, of the sort that Mr Stevens spends his life in. But is there something missing in that world and that life? photo by Ronald Searle (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Great Butler and the Stiff Upper Lip

We English tend not to talk about our feelings, not even among friends. Stevens, one can tell, has never confided a thing to anybody. But though he has survived, The Remains of the Day raises the question of how far our English taciturnity is cause for celebration. Stevens is preoccupied with the question of “what is a great butler”, a question he explores with almost academic rigour. A large part of it is the stiff upper lip, what Stevens terms dignity. It is the decision never to let one’s feelings either show or affect one’s work. Stevens, in his own description of himself, asks the reader to consider whether he himself might be such a butler. For anybody who has been reading, his loyalty to Lord Darlington and his dignity in the face of his father’s death, are all compelling evidence of his “greatness”.

But Stevens never asks us at what cost this greatness has been attained. The Remains of the Day doesn’t just undermine Stevens’ narrative, it also challenges the very values he holds dear. What we see, even if he doesn’t, is that being a great butler attacks Stevens’ own humanity. The coldness, the dedication to one’s craft that Stevens practices, dehumanises him. He is unable to “banter”, to engage in the world and form non-professional relationships with other people. He suffers especially harshly at the hands of his new American employer, Mr Farraday, for whom bantering is second nature.

But Stevens also doesn’t appreciate beauty either. Although he claims to live in one of the most magical places in England, he rarely shows it. Whether the portraits on the wall or silver on the table, the beauty in objects simply becomes part of Stevens’ job – he must keep things clean and shiny. It is only extremely infrequently, and often in the company of Miss Kenton, that Stevens’ narration is forced, for a moment, to acknowledge the beauty of the sun setting or the grounds of the manor house. Stevens is a great butler, but for all that he’s lost his friends, he’s failed to find love, and he cannot even appreciate the beauty that lies in front of him. Truth be told, the cost of his excellence seems far too high.

The Glory of the Past

The common note in The Remains of the Day, even before Stevens’ personal failures are explored, is melancholy and decline. It is the gentle melancholy of Chekhov, seeing the world fall apart but not wishing to intervene. In Ishiguro’s novel this decline is primarily a decline of the worldview and corresponding world of the British upper class. We see this immediately at the novel’s beginning. Stevens has remained in the employ of the owners of Darlington Hall, but the Darlingtons are nowhere to be seen. Instead, an outsider – and American – has arrived, and most of the original staff have left. Americans in The Remains of the Day represent the future. Lord Darlington, dismayed by the cruel treatment of Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, hopes to change the treaty’s contents.

To this end, Darlington eventually organises a conference with major figures from all across Europe. The goal is to pressure their respective governments to ease the reparations demanded of Germany. It is a noble goal, motivated by honour and respect for the First World War’s defeated countries. However, it is a goal from a bygone age. An American in attendance stands and gives a speech where he attacks all of the Europeans for their foolish idealism, for their useless values and amateurism. What they need to succeed is cunning and professionalism. He is booed out of the conference. But Hitler succeeds precisely because he knew how to manipulate this idealism, how to appeal to the values of the British classes when encouraging appeasement. In the end, of course, the American is proved right.

The glorious past that Stevens loves is revealed, over the course of The Remains of the Day, to be ultimately an illusion. Darlington, with his conference a failure, dabbles in fascism and dies a disgrace. Antisemitism leads to the unfair dismissal of two maids, and Stevens – ever the professional – refuses even to comfort them as he removes them from their positions. Stevens is also a terrible elitist and snob without ever, really, justifying these views. As easy as it is to begin The Remains of the Day with a sense of nostalgia, it’s equally hard not to end the book with a feeling of disappointment in the world that lies behind us. Of course, there was a lot to value in some of the old British values – but there was far more that really isn’t worth our time.

Conclusion

It was interesting as I read The Remains of the Day to see how my attitude to Stevens himself changed. At first I thought of him as something of a buffoon. But then as time went on that bemusement morphed into sadness, disappointment, and finally a kind of anger. I was angry that Stevens was so obsessed about being a great butler that he came to neglect everything else in the world. I was angry that he spends the entire book lying to himself. It’s only at the very end that there’s a brief hint that all that might change. But I was glad of it, just as I was glad for Stevens. In truth, I pitied him.

the original cover of The Remains of the Day, showing a pocket watch on a black background
The book’s original cover.

The Remains of the Day is a lovely book. Its story of decline hidden under the façade of class glory rings true with my own experience of the declining position of old elites. It is wonderfully written – it is not beautiful, but it is the perfect blend of form and content. Stevens feels incredibly real, and his self-delusion seems strikingly real too. There are many of us who go through life trying to tell ourselves that our own course is the right one. But sooner or later the time comes when we must face the truth of our error. Even if we are already in the remains of our own days upon this earth, there is still great value in taking the step towards self-knowledge. In that sense, for all its melancholy, the message of The Remains of the Day remains an uplifting one. Check it out.

For more delicate treatment of the past, consider Salvatore Satta’s tale of the coming of modernity in Sardinia, The Day of Judgement, reviewed here; and also Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time, presenting in an interview format the collapse of the Soviet Union from those who experienced it, reviewed here.