Word: butler
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Pitch yourselves," says a white man calling himself Mr. Swart, who serves as half warder, half butler. "Mr. Mandela will not be long." Swart was once a guard on Robben Island, where Mandela was imprisoned under harsh conditions for nearly two decades...
...REMAINS OF THE DAY by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf; $18.95). It is 1956, and an aging English butler looks back on his decades of service in a stately house. The meaning of his memories is not always clear to him, but it is to the reader, thanks to Japanese-born novelist Ishiguro's deadly, deadpan dissection of the British class system...
...meantime--if it is not the young who are willing to rage against the dying of the light...who is? And what are we old and mid-aged fogies out there to make of what appears to be an entire generation which, to paraphrase old, passionate William Butler Yeats, has more substance in their apathies than in their love...
...guests have gathered on Indian Island off the coast of Devon, England, ostensibly to enjoy a quiet weekend with a host whom none of the invited can clearly remember, the mysterious Mr. Owen. Their trip takes a turn for the worse when the Butler (Tom Tremoulet) plays a record in which "Mr. Owen" accuses each of the assembled company of murder and promises that they will pay for their crimes...
...Darlington, dead now three years, the gentleman whom he served for so long. He defends his late master against the initially unspecified "utter nonsense" that has been written and spoken about him since the end of World War II. And he fusses over the attributes that create a "great" butler, finally coming up with a definition that satisfies him: "And let me now posit this: 'dignity' has to do crucially with a butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits...