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I could have written the same. Would also include The Name of the Rose, The Remains of the Day, Dune, the Master and Margarita, Candide. Probably others.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Amazing short fictional novel by a Nobel Prize winning author.

+ for "The Remains of the Day". Phenomenal work of literature. Truthfully, I can't believe it took it this long for Ishiguro to get the prize.

Seconding Murakami. The Remains Of The Day is the best book I read this year. It talks through a lot of ideas I see get mentioned on HN.

Your post calls to mind this passage from Ishiguro's the Remains of the Day:

"As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted his lordship's wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really--one has to ask oneself--what dignity is there in that?"

For anyone who hasn't seen the movie based on the novel, I would highly recommending watching it[0]. Superb, nuanced performances by Sir Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The movie would also serve as an introduction to the Merchant-Ivory oeuvre[1].

[0] The Remains of the Day (1993) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107943/

[1] Merchant Ivory Productions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Ivory_Productions

I just finished reading "The Remains of the Day" earlier today!

The Remains of the Day seems thematically very similar to Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, yet I haven't from my brief googling seen any comparisons. Has anyone read both and can offer a comparison? I think I would like to read this.

The Remains of the Day might be my favorite book. It does have my favorite quote, which I won’t spoil for anyone who hasn’t read the book as I think the emotional impact is lessened out of context.

This book gave me the sense that the author once felt an emotion so deeply that he needed to write an entire novel in order to convey it.

You’ll get enough non-fiction recommendations. Something fictional (barely) and a lot more relaxed: The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro. It’s a chance to think about work/life split, life accomplishments, and professional vs personal identity.

If you like that, check out Larry’s Party by Carol Shields.

It's okay to be jaded, but to present that as coming from wisdom that others are missing is both self-congratulatory and lacking in self-awareness.

I think you misrepresent startup founders. Most I've met are generally very smart people and they've read The Remains of the Day too so it's not like they're this nerd-in-the-basement fantasy you get from the movies. The Hollywood fantasy is dead.

I'm only saying this so that young fellows browsing HN from their computers at university aren't immediately discouraged. To them: The world is very exciting here. You can find a team and work happily and passionately on something you care about. You will be fine. It is probable that you will be better for it. Good luck!

I think this view is best established in The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's a fairly traditional view but well described there.

For what it's worth, I think it depends on the shape of the thing. "What actually" is not a fixed concept like that. For instance, "what makes a good vacation?". One could say "not having faeces on your nose for the whole time" since, after all, it is unlikely that having faeces on your nose the whole time is likely to make a good vacation even if you're on the most lovely beach surrounded by all you live. But that's a baseline that's easy to meet. So what _actually_ makes a good vacation? The truth is: ∄ an activity or characteristic X such that ∀ vacations V that have X, V is a good vacation.

So what "actually makes people happy"? No one knows. We know things that can make you unhappy (faeces on the nose, not having any relationships) and we know that there exists a baseline happiness we have (the Hedonic Treadmill, etc.). But really, not much more.

Kazuo Ishiguro on writing _The Remains of the Day_ (my favorite): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro...

> So Lorna and I came up with a plan. I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a “Crash”. During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. Lorna, despite her own busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one.

Interesting that this is hard to understand. For generations, craftsmen who have dedicated themselves to the art of their craft have existed. Almost all have "worked for someone else".

I saw a monk once, on his hands and knees, maintaining the grass at a temple. This is the craft he has dedicated himself to. Others have chosen other things.

It is not hard to see why many see their life's work as important to them. That isn't romanticism. That's just a different preference vector.

Personally, having read The Remains of The Day, there are certain end results I would consider failure. But clearly men such as Newton did not consider them that.

I feel like this discussion is sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. Ishiguro has a new book out and the article doesn't mention it til half way through, as if his mildly presented, fairly specific remarks about "Cancel Culture" are even notable. He mentions young writers with precarious careers, and the author of the article brings JK Rowling into it, which is about as far from what Ishiguro was talking about as can be.

Either way, I've only read The Remains of the Day, and I'm interested in reading more, but I can't say this article drew me in to Klara at all. Any suggestions for next books of his to read?

Great! Not that the Nobel prize means anything to me, but I simply love Kazuo Ishiguro. His surreal novels are always moving to me. I absolutely love how he plays with unreliable narrators, like in "The Remains of the Day", "A Pale View of Hills" and "When We Were Orphans". He shows how they are flawed, sometimes self-sabotaging, but we (or rather, I) still empathize with them.

The ending of "The Remains of the Day" always moves me, almost to tears. How the butler, having realized he threw his life away for people who were not worth it, is at it again, repeating the same mistakes and having learned (almost) nothing. And still, I root for him.

The Remains of the Day isn't just my favorite book from Ishiguro. It is my favorite book, period.

It is a book about many things, but one of the main themes is regret. As a younger person, I thought I would end up following the trajectory of Stevens. The narrative matched mine so much that I thought it was a description of an inexorable path in life that someone like me was bound to follow. As I got older, I realized the opposite: that Stevens was an anti-hero, that I did NOT have to follow the his trajectory, and that I had the agency to make different choices in life. In that way, the book's anti-message guides me today.

p.s. with regards to Ishiguro, despite liking RotD, I didn't care for any of his other works. I didn't like Never Let me Go (which was highly acclaimed), nor the Buried Giant, nor When we were Orphans. Admittedly I have not read "An Artist of the Floating World".

I submitted this 2014 essay from Ishiguro, but no point in having 2 separate threads for the same Nobel Prize news/discussion.

Thought some folks here would be interested in how a famous novelist does "crunch" weeks". In this 2014 op-ed for the Guardian, he describes how it took 4 weeks for him to create his most famous novel, "The Remains of the Day":

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro...

tl;dr

- Had the first chapter written the previous summer, but made no progress on it for about a year.

- Even though he couldn't write that year, he did a "substantial amount of 'research'" about British life/politics/servitude of that time period. This is what led to his 4-week "Crash" session being productive:

> he decision when to start the actual writing of a novel – to begin composing the story itself – always seems to me a crucial one. How much should one know before starting on the prose? It’s damaging to start too early, equally so to start too late. I think with Remains I got lucky: the Crash came just at the right point, when I knew just enough.

During the 4-week "crash", he had a dedicated study in a house he recently moved in; his previous 2 novels were written at his dining table.

His process during the 4-weeks was not at all structured (in the traditional sense):

> Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.

Note that he didn't finish the novel in 4 weeks. But he did reach the critical mass to make it a complete idea and story:

> I kept it up for the four weeks, and at the end of it I had more or less the entire novel down: though of course a lot more time would be required to write it all up properly, the vital imaginative breakthroughs had all come during the Crash.

I just finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's "The remains of the day" which portrayed the life of an over-loyal butler who devotes all his life to his lord, and realizes at the end that he's lost all his personal life along the way.

Such was the life for a lot of of the people living in the feudal period - a servant's life fully devoted to your master, without questioning right or wrong.

I've read "The Remains of the Day" and "Never Let Me Go". Enjoyed the former.

I found the latter irritating to read -- roughly, many of the characters are "not in a great situation" when it comes to the role society has assigned them -- yet they are all accepting (perhaps that is too strong) or passive. No volition to change the status quo.

That doesn't mean it is a bad book, or bad literature, but reading pages and pages of characters focusing on interpersonal drama when they are trapped in this hideous situation pissed me off!

84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

I would recommend most of the books I read this year:

* Born a Crime by Noah Trevor

* Half of a Yellow Sun by Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi

* Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Alexievich, Svetlana

* Ex-Formation by Hara, Kenya (best book I read this year)

* A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bryson, Bill

* Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human
Decisions by Brian Christian (applying algorithm theory to daily life)

* Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Voss Chris (meh)

* Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Knapp Jake (meh)

* All the Light We Cannot See by Doerr Anthony (loved it)

* The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro Kazuo (loved it)