The Transatlantic Book Club discussion

I'm still working on it, but I expect to be finished tomorrow, so if you wish to start commenting, please dive in!

Ok. I enjoyed this, I feel that I might have enjoyed it more if Stevens hadn't been so cold - I might have felt a bit more involved - but clearly this wasn't going to happen! That sounds a bit stupid, but I hope you see what I mean. I gave it three stars mostly because I didn't find it as affecting as Never Let Me Go, but I can't imagine why I only gave that four. Isn't this star rating thing annoying? And all so meaningless.
I thought the book was impressively consistent in tone, everything that happened or was said fit, nothing jarred. I thought Stevens was written perfectly, his underlying feelings were utterly transparent while virtually nothing was expressed explicitly. I really enjoyed his glosses on what he had thought or what his reasons for doing things actually were. I really felt for him, especially near the end where he talks to that bloke he bumps into in Weymouth - the fact that he had sacrificed so much of himself. So many little things rang true, like his doubts over the implications of Miss Kenton's letter. And the whole business about banter - the way he was working at developing a sense of humour! I wonder if he would ever come to realise that the story about the butler and the tiger was a joke?

Yes, the star system drives me mad too. I liked it more than I expected to, although I'm somewhat baffled about the references to a "comedy of manners" that were listed on the back cover of the edition I read. I think I laughed once or twice, but on the whole I found it sad if not incredibly depressing. I didn't like Stevens, not at any point (and I am rather baffled as to why Miss Kenton loved him) but I loved Ishiguro's angle on the story, that the novel isn't the process of Stevens learning to understand himself, but showing how thoroughly Stevens doesn't understand himself, how incapable he is of enduring any threat to his value system and therefore develops this unparalleled ability to deny that his employer's actions, however honourably intended, had such terrible consequences. I couldn't feel for him, because he deliberately sacrificed his own judgement and feelings for the sake of what he felt was a great institution, which was already crumbling from within; I felt for Miss Kenton, who was so much more self-aware and so torn between her conflicting feelings. I've only seen the film of Never Let Me Go, I haven't read the book yet, so I'm on shaky ground in drawing a comparison, but it seemed to me that what the three children in Never Let Me Go endure is the inverse of what Stevens goes through psychologically--they grow up with a false perception of the world that is imposed on them, and fight for the idea that there may be some good that can be achieved under the conditions (I'm not sure those are the right words, but I can't think of how else to put it), while Stevens constructs his own false perception of the world which is not entirely imposed on him, and fights off any implication that something other than good has come of it, despite the carnage of WWII. I think I'll read it and An Artist of the Floating World again some time, just to compare the two main characters; I don't think I understood the protagonist of Floating World very well when I read it, but Stevens might be able to shed some light on him.