The Remains of the Day

Until he sets off on a six day trip through England's West County, Stevens hadn't considered the idea that his years of dedicated "service" have left him lifeless.  His career caring for the Darlington Hall residents robbed him of family, love, individuality, humor, emotion, opinions - all things that make us human.  In a most telling scene, Stevens leaves the bedside of his dying father to tend to the needs of a group of Nazi supporters meeting at the estate.  The dying wish of the elder Stevens is to talk with his son - to get assurance that he had been a good parent.  Instead, the younger Stevens politely excuses himself, promising to return in the morning.  When his father dies soon after, it is the rest of the downstairs staff that hold vigil, sharing tears and offering prayers until Stevens finishes his butler duties.  

Fans of Downton Abbey will recognize the upstairs/downstairs dynamics as Stevens narrates his story.   But, unlike Downton, there are no fancy fashion parades, spirited dinner parties, or spicy, clandestine affairs. Instead, Stevens experiences humiliation by a group of Fascists who taunt him to reveal personal political opinions. Instead, he maintains the dignity expected of a butler, and continues to assume the position of invisible manservant.  His sad dedication to his master also results in unrealized love and the knowledge that the remains of his life will be spent in much the same way - quietly betraying his own wants for the desires of others.   

Politics figure strongly in Ishoguro's novel, but the profound story of unspoken love is a heart breaker. Funny, our book discussion group recently read The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, a fairytale like offering with a similar theme.  We all agreed that this theme has been done better, with greater significance in works including The French Lieutenant's Woman, Memoirs of a Geisha, and (to the chagrin of my friend Karen) Love in the Time of Cholera.  Now I can add The Remains of the Day to the  growing list a sad, but not sloppy love stories.

Reading this book made me wonder why so many people gravitate to heart breakers.  I suspect that people who have grown up on that genre began with Charlotte's Web, moved on to Little Women, perhaps Jane Eyre or just about anything Dickensian.  If these readers have discovered John Fowles, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there's a good change we won't find any Danielle Steele on their bookshelves.

Thanks for stopping by

LaDeDaBev

An Observation, a Rant, and a Review

Until today, I have maintained media silence concerning the Netflix docu-drama blatantly asserting wrongdoing on the part of several local law enforcements agencies and our judicial system.  While I will not pill more atop what has already been said by many and read by more, I need to say something about the sad and frightening disrespect show in numerous posts.  Hard to believe, but there are those who have taken a "Blame the victim" stance, a stance which is beyond reprehensible.  Others has taken bold and threatening shots at anyone and everyone involved.  Although these comments may be aimed at a single individual or organization, their impact reaches far beyond.  There are children, grandchildren, friends, co-workers who  will read and be affected by these illogical assumptions.  Believe what you want about what happened, but common sense, compassion and consideration of the far reaching consequences should always be considered before releasing inflammatory words into the permanent world of cyberspace.

Mini rant - After work on Saturday, I ran around with a friend collecting props and costume items for a children's play at UW-Manitowoc.  I was deposited at Goodwill while Chris went to Menard's to spend quality time on a heavy gauge wire hunt.  He apparently got sidetracked by other scintillating hardware items, and so I waited in the outer lobby of GW for him to return.  That store sure is busy.  But, here comes the rant - in the span of 20 minutes, I watched eight people push their carts through the checkout lane, load their items onto the counter, push their carts beyond the end of the counter and walk out.  Fifteen more steps to the left and they could have put the carts back where they got them.   Instead, the always cheerful, young wheelchair-bound cashier spun himself out, maneuvered into a position where he could comfortably reach the cart handle and, little by little, steered it into place.  After the first two, I took over for him until my ride arrived.  I thought about saying "Did you forget to put your cart back?" as each of these able-bodied ninnies left, but then I remembered that we now have concealed carry in Wisconsin.

You know what?  All eight of those inconsiderate shoppers were women.  Five had mullets!  I guess I shouldn't be too judgemental.  I ran around all day with one of my socks inside out.

I'm on the fence about our book discussion selection for Friday night- The Art of Hearing Heartbeats.  The Kirkis Review warned that readers who like Nicholas Sparks and Elizabeth Gilbert will like this book.  Those sweet words dripped like honeycomb, and indeed, this sappy story has all the right ingredients.  There's a bitter wife, a long-suffering (albeit brilliant and successful) husband, the chip off one of the other old block daughter, misfits in love, and plenty of philosophical questions.  The trouble is that, embedded in  rambling monologues, the author tells us what questions we are to ask ourselves as we travel through our days.

The flip side?  It's a parable and as such, it has other-worldly, and  at times, fairy-tale nuances.  I don't know how else to describe it other than to say this is a story told in whispers - gentle little moments in the lives of two unlikely protagonists.  Overtones of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha crept in, taking me back to my college days where, for a short period of three of so years, the school offered a Philosophy minor.  Those were the days when everyone discovered Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Hope for the Flowers and had an occasional brush with The Velveteen Rabbit.  Everyone was introspective. Questions were more important than answers.  But, we PH minors, all seven of us, were hard core.  We were studying Marx and Lenin, reading Plato, and measuring our goodness against standards set by Kohlberg in his Moral Reasoning thesis.  We were all dressed up in our togas and  thinking about stuff! Although I don't miss college, I miss those classes and that, I suppose, is the reason this book will land in the LIKE column of my 2016 reading list.

For those who may doubt my mission to make 2016 the "Year of the Mystery" I can assure you, there is mystery here.  We need to know why the unsettled father travels to Burma without a word of good-by to his family. Why has he been silent about the first twenty years of his life?  Why did he marry such a b%$#&?Yup, there's lots to be resolved - and I plan to finish the last frothy forty today - giving me sufficient time to ponder universal questions before going to rehearsal tonight.

Thanks for stopping by

LaDeDa Bev

Back at It

Don't go thinking that since I haven't posted for a couple Mondays, I haven't been reading.  On the contrary, the holiday weeks have been filled with some challenging books - two in particular kept me in the land of weird for while.

On the Run with Mary frequently popped up on rather obscure suggested reading lists.  I like those lists.   In this case, I think the interest stemmed more from what could have been rather than what really is. Jonathan Barrow, promising writer and artist, was killed in a car accident along with his fiance two weeks before their wedding. Barrow was 22.  In an unsettling passage in the book, the narrator witnesses a wedding turning into a funeral.

The narrator of this Catcher-in-the-Rye-Goes-to-the-Dogs story runs aways from an elite boarding school.  In a subway station he meets an unlikely companion, a trash talking dachshund named Mary.  In addition to having a colorful vocabulary, dirty Mary is an alcoholic, nymphomaniac drug addict.  Your read correctly - Mary is a dog - a talking dog with a posh British accent.  

David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas fame has given us Slade House, a Hotel California meets Escher mash-up. Honestly, this book jumped, scurried, hid and surprised too often for me.  Literary vertigo.  Like the Mary book, this takes place in an English working class neighborhood.  The hard to find Slade House beckons only those who are different - the lonely, the precocious, divorced, shy. Slade House residents invite a new person into their midst every nine years.   What happens inside at first excites, but soon the reality hits that no one ever gets to leave.

From there I moved on to a book less challenging for my pea-brain.  After the success of 2015's "Year of Hemingway" I decide to once again declare a theme.  2016 will be filled with mystery starting with Caroline Graham who created DCI Tom Barnaby, the lead detective in the PBS Midsomer Murder series.  Quite a collection of eccentrics live in and around the picture perfect English village of Badger's Drift - the bumbling local doctor, the gardening spinster, and the creepy funeral home worker As in the TV series, numerous people drop dead before the final nail is in the coffin.  Not a cozy mystery by any stretch, Graham peppers this novel with clandestine love affairs, spicy language and plenty of innuendo.  Thanks to Caroline Graham, my year of mystery is off to a jolly good start.

Next up - our book group selection, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats.