Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is a quiet novel about an English butler taking a six day motoring trip through the West Country in the summer of 1956. On a first read it is a gentle, faintly comic book about a formal man who is bad at conversation, and it ends by breaking your heart in a way you did not see coming. On a second read it is a different novel entirely, and it is better. Not because you notice a few extra details, but because the mechanism the whole thing runs on is invisible the first time and impossible to miss afterwards.
The mechanism is that Stevens is not telling you what happened. He is telling you a version he can live with, and the book is constructed so that the truth leaks around the edges of his account. He describes a professional triumph and you eventually work out you have just read about the night his father died in an upstairs room while he carried on serving drinks. He explains a decision about two dismissed maids in the calm language of duty and only later, in a sentence he almost throws away, admits what he thought of it. First time through you follow the narrator. Second time you watch him, which is a completely different reading experience.
This is why rereading pays here in a way it does not for most novels. The usual argument for a second read is that you catch things you missed, which is true and mildly interesting. With an unreliable narrator, the second read is not a more detailed version of the first; it is the negative of it. Every scene where you took Stevens at his word becomes a scene where you can see the effort of the telling, and the comedy of the first read turns into something much sadder without a single word on the page having changed. Few books convert so completely.
Watch what he does with the word bantering. Stevens's new American employer likes to banter, and Stevens, unable to do it naturally, decides to study it as a professional skill, practising in the evenings and rehearsing lines. First time round it reads as an endearing running joke about an old-fashioned man. Second time it is a man in his sixties setting out to learn, from scratch and much too late, how to speak to another person as a person rather than as a servant, and the joke stops being funny somewhere around the third attempt.
Watch the appeasement years without deciding too early what you think. Lord Darlington, the employer Stevens gave his life to serving, hosted meetings in the nineteen thirties in support of accommodating Germany, and Stevens's loyalty to him is the thing he most needs to justify. On a first read many people arrive at a verdict quickly. On a second, what is striking is not Darlington's politics but the structure of Stevens's defence, and how the moments he chooses to describe are exactly the ones that support the version he needs. The book is less about a bad political judgement than about the labour of not looking at one.
Notice how much the novel tells you through what Miss Kenton does. She is the housekeeper, and the reason for the trip, and the only person in the book who tries repeatedly to reach him. Because Stevens narrates, we get her mostly as an inconvenience or a professional colleague, and it takes a second pass to see how clearly the scenes report her intent even while he is reporting his own incomprehension. The evening she comes into his pantry to see what he is reading is one of the most painful scenes in modern fiction, and on a first read it is possible to miss what is happening in it altogether.
So make the second read easier for yourself by leaving something behind on the first. This is the practical argument for taking notes on a novel you suspect you will return to. You do not need much: a note on the page where you first felt Stevens was skating past something, a note on where the tone shifted, a note on what you believed about Darlington at the halfway point. Reading those a year later, next to what you now know, is the whole point. In Chaptra those entries stay attached to the book and in date order, so the record of your first read is sitting there when you open it again, which is exactly when it is worth something.
Reread it sooner than you would think. There is a common instinct to leave years between readings so the book feels fresh, and for plot-driven novels that is sound. Here it works against you, because the second read depends on remembering what you originally believed. Come back within a year or two, while your first impressions are still available for comparison, and the effect is much stronger. Wait fifteen years and you will simply have a good first read again, with better prose noticed.
Read the last twenty pages twice in a row when you get there. The scene on the pier at Weymouth, where Stevens talks to a stranger as the evening lights come on, is where the entire architecture of the book resolves. It is short, and it is easy to read through it at the pace you have built up over the previous three hundred pages. Slow down. The line about the evening being the best part of the day is the load-bearing sentence of the novel, and everything that has been withheld for the whole book arrives in the two or three sentences around it.
Treat a reread as a real read when you record it. People routinely leave second readings out of their logs, on some instinct that it does not count, which is a shame given rereading is where much of the actual understanding happens. Log it, and write the second entry without looking at the first, then compare. Two entries on the same book from two different years is one of the more revealing things you can have in a reading record, and this novel produces a bigger gap between them than almost any other.
Use it as an argument for rereading in general. The Remains of the Day is the clearest demonstration available of a thing that is true of a lot of good fiction: that a book has more than one reading in it, and that a first read is not a complete one. Once you have felt how much was sitting in plain sight the first time, the idea of returning to other novels stops feeling like a failure to move on to new ones. It starts feeling like the obvious way to actually finish a book.
Read it once for Stevens, and once for what Stevens is not saying. Come back within a year or two while you can still remember what you believed. Leave notes the first time on where you trusted him and what you thought of Darlington at the midpoint. Watch the bantering, watch Miss Kenton, slow down on the pier. And log the second read as its own read, because the difference between the two entries is the book's real achievement, and it exists nowhere except in your own record of it.