How to Read a Novel: V, Irony — The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

Do you want to read more classic fiction? Do you want to know more about how novels work, their technique? Do you want to do this in a low pressure bookclub-style setting? Join Henry Oliver, who writes The Common Reader for this series on How to Read a Novel.

In this series, we will learn how novels work: the clues that novelists leave us. Each book is a tapestry. All the threads work together. Nothing is there for no good reason. As we learn more, we become better readers.

This month’s novel is The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro’s hit novel about a butler that doesn’t understand the world. What is irony? How can it work for moral as well as comedic purposes?

The rest of the books for the series are:

Persuasion, Jane Austen
Silas Marner, George Eliot
A Room with a View, E. M. Forster
The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
The Gate of Angels, Penelope Fitzgerald

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