I read Brideshead Revisited a while back (2002, I think - third year) and fell in love with it ...
Speaking of books, [Hugo] mentioned that he'd also read The Loved One (which I knew was coming up for book club), and called it, amongst other things, a great America-bashing book. Having now read it myself, I have to agree, but actually Waugh also gives the Brits a pretty good kicking, too. In fact, he really has the knives out for everything in his sights, but it's touched with that faint sense of mortality and a grounding reality which I remember so clearly from Brideshead, even now, with many of the details of that latter novel having fled my memory, and it deftly leaves its mark on the reader almost as if in passing.
So I enjoyed The Loved One muchly. It has a sharp, sharp edge and the humour is bound up with that, so that every throwaway line or passage builds upon and is informed by the whole. Dennis, Aimée, Joyboy and the rest are finely and cruelly drawn and wonderful to spend time with - Dennis so opaque and casually callous, Aimée so vacuous, Joyboy just so utterly wet and pitiable, and yet all somehow sketched in such a way that we feel something approaching affection for them. Aimée Thanatogenos, especially - that 'decadent', her name already redolent of death - is a source of much of the humour but there's a sweetness and a pathos to her which makes her fate quite terribly sad rather than merely ridiculous.
The novel's sub-headed 'An Anglo-American Tragedy', and Henry James is invoked in its pages at least twice, once explicitly (now, didn't James have some kind of connection with the English decadents - early writings published in the Yellow Book or whatever it was called, or something along those lines?); the tragedy with which Waugh's primarily concerned (and which he dramatises through the perambulations and prevarications, overt and otherwise, of his characters and settings), I think, is that of society at large, English and American, and its attendant hypocrisies and ludicrousnesses (to probably coin a phrase)...I don't know which is more absurd, Whispering Glades with its overblown cant or its animal-disposal imitator, the Happier Hunting Grounds ("Your little Arthur is thinking of you in heaven today and wagging his tail"!)...not to mention the wonderful Mr Slump or the dreadful Sir Ambrose...
Also, happily, my (Penguin) edition has a Magritte on the front (by coincidence, I've been winnowing my way through a book on the painter's works and life over the last week, too).
[Edits in the front end of this one to remove some autobiography: 6/9/17]
Speaking of books, [Hugo] mentioned that he'd also read The Loved One (which I knew was coming up for book club), and called it, amongst other things, a great America-bashing book. Having now read it myself, I have to agree, but actually Waugh also gives the Brits a pretty good kicking, too. In fact, he really has the knives out for everything in his sights, but it's touched with that faint sense of mortality and a grounding reality which I remember so clearly from Brideshead, even now, with many of the details of that latter novel having fled my memory, and it deftly leaves its mark on the reader almost as if in passing.
So I enjoyed The Loved One muchly. It has a sharp, sharp edge and the humour is bound up with that, so that every throwaway line or passage builds upon and is informed by the whole. Dennis, Aimée, Joyboy and the rest are finely and cruelly drawn and wonderful to spend time with - Dennis so opaque and casually callous, Aimée so vacuous, Joyboy just so utterly wet and pitiable, and yet all somehow sketched in such a way that we feel something approaching affection for them. Aimée Thanatogenos, especially - that 'decadent', her name already redolent of death - is a source of much of the humour but there's a sweetness and a pathos to her which makes her fate quite terribly sad rather than merely ridiculous.
The novel's sub-headed 'An Anglo-American Tragedy', and Henry James is invoked in its pages at least twice, once explicitly (now, didn't James have some kind of connection with the English decadents - early writings published in the Yellow Book or whatever it was called, or something along those lines?); the tragedy with which Waugh's primarily concerned (and which he dramatises through the perambulations and prevarications, overt and otherwise, of his characters and settings), I think, is that of society at large, English and American, and its attendant hypocrisies and ludicrousnesses (to probably coin a phrase)...I don't know which is more absurd, Whispering Glades with its overblown cant or its animal-disposal imitator, the Happier Hunting Grounds ("Your little Arthur is thinking of you in heaven today and wagging his tail"!)...not to mention the wonderful Mr Slump or the dreadful Sir Ambrose...
Also, happily, my (Penguin) edition has a Magritte on the front (by coincidence, I've been winnowing my way through a book on the painter's works and life over the last week, too).
[Edits in the front end of this one to remove some autobiography: 6/9/17]
