Read With Welty: The Remains of the Day

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.

Week Nine: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro 

So far as I can tell, the only link between Eudora Welty and Kazuo Ishiguro is that interviews with them appear in the same issue of a 1991 Mississippi Review—though I’d like to think that a more thorough investigator other than myself would have taken a thoughtful dive into her letters, housed at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, to discover her real feelings about each of the books we’ve chosen for this reading challenge. If that thorough investigator happens to be you, please let us know what you find!

Unless there is a known link between Welty and the author—like with Willie Morris, Ross Macdonald, or Walker Percy—we’re basing a lot of assumptions on the fact that Welty happened to own these books. Did she like them? Did she even read them? If, in some bizarre twist, my books were given to an entity upon my death, and scholars tried to extrapolate meaning and connections from the books I owned, my ghost would have to step in to help those poor fools out. Never read it, meant to read it, someone gave it to me, read it and hated it, read 50 pages and hated it, hated the cover, loved it except for the end and then got very mad—these would be the spooky messages I would have to somehow deposit into my scholars’ minds. (Sidenote: I have spent way too long trying to figure out the best way for a ghost to send a message since ectoplasm is out.)

All of this is to say that we have no idea if Eudora Welty read The Remains of the Day, or if she saw the 1993 movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, but we like to think she did. It’s about a man who lives a small, constrained life as the perfect butler, devoted to the gentleman he served. But as he looks back at his decades of service, and the opportunities he has missed, he starts to doubt whether he has made the right choices. This quiet novel’s subject and themes—tradition, dignity, class, retrospection—aren’t unlike things you’d find in a Welty story or novel, and for that fact alone, we’ve added this book to our reading challenge.