Came across this prowling Twitter and it was just too delicious not to share.
It seems Nick Asbury noticed a telling similarity between the prose stylings of James Comey and Kazuo Ishiguro, author of "Remains of The Day”.
For those not familiar Ishiguro's novel recounts the story of “Stevens”, an English butler who returns to his former place of employment to sift the ashes of a missed romantic relationship he had failed to kindle when he had the chance, and come to terms with the service he’d rendered to his former employer, who in 1930’s England had been a Nazi sympathizer. Upon his return Stevens meets the current owner, a somewhat brash American who is not quite his cuppa:
“The Remains of the Day is told in the first-person narration of an English butler named Stevens. In July 1956, Stevens decides to take a six- day road trip to the West Country of England—a region to the west of Darlington Hall, the house in which Stevens resides and has worked as a butler for thirty-four years. Though the house was previously owned by the now-deceased Lord Darlington, by 1956, it has come under the ownership of Mr. Farraday, an American gentleman. Stevens likes Mr. Farraday, but fails to interact well with him socially: Stevens is a circumspect, serious person and is not comfortable joking around in the manner Mr. Farraday prefers. Stevens terms this skill of casual conversation "bantering"; several times throughout the novel Stevens proclaims his desire to improve his bantering skill so that he can better please his current employer.”
Mr. Asbury set us to the task of deciding which excerpt is from Comey’s letter to the Senate and which from Ishiguro.
It is an exercise in hilarity:
1. “It turned out to be just the two of us, seated at a small oval table in the center of the Green Room. Two Navy stewards waited on us, only entering the room to serve food and drinks.”
2. “There was not a soul to be seen… apart from a hammering noise echoing from somewhere distant, and an occasional coughing in a room to the back of the house.”
3. “I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner.”
4. “The directness of the inquiry did, I admit, take me rather by surprise. ’It’s rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir,’ I said. ‘But I suspect it comes down to not removing one’s clothing in public.’”