A novel about regret dressed up as a novel about dignity. Stevens the butler spends 30 years perfecting professional service and suppressing every human impulse — and Ishiguro makes you feel the full weight of that choice in quiet, devastating sentences.
What stays with you is not the plot but the prose. Stevens narrating his own self-deception with complete sincerity is one of the great literary tricks. You understand what he refuses to understand about himself. That gap is where the novel lives.
Read it slowly. It rewards attention.