Reconsidering What is a Modern Classic Book: Kazuo Ishiguro’s, The Remains of the Day
As Coordinator of the RVA Classic Bookclub (Richmond, Virginia), it is becoming harder for me to distinguish what a Classic Book is and what it isn’t. Our group, which has been meeting for about six years, has defined classics as those that keep speaking to us long after they are written.
I have concentrated on reading, teaching, and writing about classics authors of the nineteenth through the early to mid-twentieth century like Alexander Dumas, Mary Shelly, Edgar A. Poe, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll, The Bronte Sisters, Thomas Hardy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Willa Cather, James Joyce, F, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, J.R. R. Tolkien, John Steinbeck, Betty Smith, and Harper Lee.
In the recent major America Reads NPR survey, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Lee was voted as America’s most popular book. Note that being the most important book does not always mean that it is a classic or even an essential book. In the case of Mockingbird, it meets all of these criteria.
But what I will ask here is how should we treat literature written after the 1960s up to the present day. Even the modern-day publishers of Mockingbird consider it a “ Harper Perennial Modern Classic.” Can we consider some of the books published in the last fifty to sixty years as classics? It is likely that there have been several books written since then that weren’t well-known when they were published but will emerge as undiscovered classics in later eras. But ultimately, who will make those decisions? The publishers can call their popular works perennials or modern classics, but it’s the modern and the future generations of readers that will decide which authors and books most qualify.
When is the time that we can begin to declare books written in the last fifty to sixty years as Classics? A shortlist of 60’s authors and their books to consider could be those by Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five), Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), Joseph Heller (Catch 22), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood), Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), and Frank Herbert (Dune). How about some books from the 1970 and ’80s, such as Stephen King (The Shining), John le Carre (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Toni Morrison (Beloved), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale), Amy Tan (Joy Luck Club), and Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children)?
No need to stop in the 1980s. Some of our most memorable authors and their books have been published in the last thirty years such as Barbara Kingsolver’s, Poisonwood Bible; R.R. Martins, Game of Thrones; Elena Ferrante’s, My Brilliant Friend; J.K. Rowling’s, Harry Potter Books, Anthony Doerr’s, All the Light We Cannot See; Amor Towles; and A Gentleman in Moscow (a book we recently discussed and loved in our book club (see the review by James L. Evans). Last, but not least, is the wonderful 1989 book I most want to talk about these days, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Ishiguro was far out of my reading radar until about a year when our Book Club decided to extend our lists to include more diverse and foreign authors. Ironically, I came across Ishiguro when I was looking for a pandemic read and unexpectedly discovered Ishiguro’s futuristic book, Klara and the Sun (2021). I had heard an NPR book review of Klara where Maureen Corrigan called it a modern classic masterpiece. Her claim was certainly a challenge to my musty conception of a classic book, but I needed to consider its validity. Although I would not recommend that anyone read Klara before the other great Ishiguro books, it would be worth it if you then considered reading his other masterpieces, Never Let Me Go (2005), and The Remains of the Day (1989),
Ishiguro, in his Nobel Laurette acceptance speech in 2017(My Twentieth-Century Evening –On Kindle), said that modern readers and citizens of the world must go beyond the traditional boundaries of classic literature and read the works of foreign writers of all cultures. He and his Japanese parents were originally born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954, but they moved to Britain in 1960. He spoke about his memories of being a youth in Japan; both of hearing people talk about the atomic bomb, and of beginning to see the city rebuilt. Perhaps it’s his foreigner’s view of the eclipse of the British class system, with its layers of Lord Manors, servants, and stultified norms, that gives The Remains such as fresh perspective. In a 2017 official statement, summing up his works, the Nobel Prize Committee wrote that their “prize for literature was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro, who in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beyond our illusory connections to the world.”
A writer like this, of course, didn’t t come out of a vacuum. In his acceptance speech, he indicated that he thoroughly read many of the great classic works before he started writing. He revealed that his organization of the book in layers of non-sequential memory was inspired by his reading of Marcel Proust’s, Remembrance of All Things.
I can’t speak about all of the modern popular works we might eventually consider to be classics, but I am ready to proclaim Ishiguro as a modern classic writer. I keep reading his Remains of the Day again and again, and it keeps speaking to me, asking me to consider the decisions I have made in my life and how they may have affected other people—truly a weighty topic! By the way, the book gets added layers of meaning when you also listen to it on an Audible.com or view the interesting 1993 film adaptation with Anthony Hopkins as the Butler, Stevens.
I look forward to Ishiguro’s future works and will be moderating a discussion of The Remains of the Day at the May 6, 2022, RVA Classic Book Club Meeting.
If you have an idea of some books you consider as modern classics, or want to comment on the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, please write me in the dialogue box below. Thanks, Murray Ellison – Litchatte Editor. Also, if you would like to submit a Review or Commentary for Litchatte, please write me at ellisonms2@alumni.vcu.edu.
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