The Remains of the Day (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 2, 2012 by Kazuo Ishiguro (Author), Salman Rushdie (Introduction) (Everyman's Library )

I fully admit that I purchased this book only after reading that it had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I love books and I was curious, I suppose, of how such a book might read. Did it—could it—live up to the hype?

It easily surpassed it. It is a magnificent story deserving of every literary award there might be. It is, as is my personal standard for a five star rating, a truly transformative read. It’s worthy of six stars, truth be told.

It is a story of the generational change and socio-economic and political transformation that overtook England during the period between the Great World Wars. Told through the eyes of a shrinking class of English butler who had a front row seat at the changing of the guard between the landed nobility and the professional politician and businessmen of the Post-war Era.

The questions raised by the transformation are eerily relevant today. Can the institutions of democracy work in a world writ complex by technology and globalism? Is governance better left to a technocratic meritocracy that rules on behalf of the people but above their direct control?

America and Americans, and one visiting US Senator in particular, are portrayed in a predictably garish light given the time and the protagonist. The Senator is loud and uncouth and a manipulative schemer who wants to dictate to the Europeans. Even the American landscape is described as dramatic but a bit overdone.

The English “greatness,” as its described, however, is handled with British wit and aplomb. It’s the kind of classic British humor that is inevitably met with a wry smile rather than the guffaw that most comics seem to reach for today. The butler’s own loss at how to deal with the banter he suspects his eventual American employer expects from him is a humorous thread throughout the book.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the book, however, is the writing itself. It is beyond good. It is almost hallowed, using that term in a strictly descriptive rather than the religious or spiritual sense. And what makes it so, as is the case with most great literature, is the fact that the prose makes no obvious attempt to reach such heights of grandeur. There isn’t a hint of any attempt to over-achieve.

The author deals with many other themes within the confines of the primary tale. Life purpose, the plight of the lion in winter, the constant battle public figures face between public perception and reality, and the human quest for identity, all get explored with a deft literary hand that is a breeze to read, easy to enjoy, and will inevitably leave the reader with literary memories that are sure to flash back for years to come.

There is no money line per se. The book is chock full of both literary excellence and astute human insight. One of my favorites was: “A butler of any quality must be seen to inhabit his role, utterly and fully; he cannot be seen casting it aside one moment simply to don it again the next as though it were nothing more than a pantomime costume.” We often refer to it as “authenticity,” but it is key to success in all professions and, of course, all personal relationships.