>writes a novel full of nonsense in the 80s because "there wasn't much material on butlers/housekeeping back then"
>there are literally five hundred million billion commonly available housekeeping manuals from the 19th century that explain the jobs of everybody from footman to butler in excruciating detail
what did he mean by this
Japs have autism, OP.
so do the anglos he simps
a man who writes a novel about them should
what
I do not know how to make that statement any more clear.
Who gives a shit what the helps job is?
Manuals and novels are very different forms of writing.
As a human who has written today, writing is not the same as reading and searching for material. Maybe he just had to make do with the materials available to him, not much of which seemed to be materials on butlers/housekeeping material. I don't know Ishiguro's circumstances regarding materials on butlers/housekeeping being available to him in his time-space position at the time of writing. Also take note that there can have been a translator in the works, and an editor, and the quote may have been taken out of context.
no translator required, he was born in japan but grew up in the UK. he is a effectively a bongoloid with all the gay sensibilities that entails. and this material was not unobtainable in the 80s.
The politics in that novel are absolute garbage. "It's the English Gentlemen's fault for the Nazis because they didn't want to obliterate Germany even harder after WW1". It basically advocates for the kind of NeoLiberal politics of today where soulless, ghoulish politicians make the worst possible decisions but are allowed to since they are the professionals and well meaning citizens are just too dumb to be able to contribute anything.. Very disappointing because the other aspects of the novel are good.
Where in the novel does it imply that? While the novel does implicitly critique the germanophile Lord, I feel like it doesn't necessarily mean that it condones the opposing viewpoint that post ww1 Germany should've been even more thoroughly obliterated. It's been a while since I've read it though so I might be mistaken
The lord loses the manor and is so disgraced that the butler even denies ever having worked for him, and the American who stood up at his conference to call him a well meaning idiot ends up owning the manor and hiring the butler!
In the novel the American who buys the manor is some random businessman; the movie made the senator buy the manor.
I'd have to look it up, but I'm pretty sure the text straight up refers to the rise of the Nazis as being a direct result of the meddling English Gentlemen with their misguided sense of honor to "let the other chap up off the mat"
Also, it occurs to me as I consider it that the novel is fundamentally anti-democracy, painting the peasantry as too dumb to know or care about geopolitics and that things would be better off for everyone if they didn't have a say. There are two scenes I'm thinking of directly, one when the butler is in the countryside talking to a political activist that no one likes or cares about and another when the butler's lord has company which asks the butler his opinion on the specifics of some political minutia which the butler can't answer (deliberately made to illustrate the ignorance of the lower classes)
That's just the classic English caste system.
>deliberately made to illustrate the ignorance of the lower classes
Yes, but you have to remember that this book is written by someone from the “new left” in London in the 80s, that is writing an archaic attitude in light of what actually happened afterwards which is mass-literacy, news print media, democratic referendums etc.
The book is not anti democracy. If you think the butler or the politicians or the Americans in this are any point of view but their own, then you misread
Ishiguro.
It’s about portraying the humanity of a man who gave his life to a now dead world and system of honour, much like a knight is constantly the subject of a novel but his chivalric code would quite literally be impossible in this day and age.
Before Ishiguro wrote this book, he’d had a seemingly irreconcilable argument with a friend over politics that ruined their dinner and possibly their friendship for good (on the other party’s end) and this was something he was tired of, having friends and life being so politicised and the everyday relationships be read as the machinations of big worldly ideals.
If you read the prior novel, Artist of the Floating world, it is essentially this theme in Japan after the war, a man being held to his war effort propaganda, and even when he isn’t, still interpreting the world through that political time period.
It isn’t healthy and neither is being so clueless about the world you obsess with your job, like being a butler in this one, because you have no friends and family and may find yourself in a world that no longer values your skill set.
The fact this middle of the road book garners so much extreme interpretation would be baffling to him.
Is that a real cover?
I would imagine all those Nazi guests in the house would remark on the butler's race.
It's the new standard undergrad lit edition
Damn. Why didn't they put a Jap butler?
They made stevens black in the new edition to be more inclusive. The dialogue is mostly the same, just sprinkled with aave phrases every now and then (all written by ishiguro).
Ishiguro means that he could get away with writing about butlers in a way that is purely imaginative because the audience would likely have less knowledge that would contradict it.
He explicitly says this was his reason for setting his first novel in Japan, despite having not been there since he was a small boy at the time.
The comprehension of this board astounds me.
When we were Orphans is also a novel about a detective that has no care for the procedures of a detective. It’s Ishiguro’s intention to use these characters specific roles in the world as a pretext to write more generally about people and what we think and feel.
Any examples of nonsense? What do you mean exactly?