| Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, 351 pages Tony Pisarenkov 09 July 2004 A fascinating and deeply moving story of a young artist's entanglement with an eccentric family of English aristocrats, struggling to understand the world, each other and, above all, the place that religion occupies in their lives. The best novel I've read in a long, long time. | A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, 225 pages Tony Pisarenkov 05 July 2006 Brideshead Revisited did more for me, and I agree that the connection between the first and second parts of the book is strained at best (the alternate ending provided free of charge does no better), but Waugh's mastery at creating what are quite possibly the most vapid and despicable characters in all of XX-century literature with a mere flick of his pen comes through loud and clear. |
Decline and Fall (1928) by Evelyn Waugh, 293 pages James Donahue 09 July 2007 Fresh off his conversion, Waugh wrote his first novel to savage the literate 'chatocracy' among whom he had spent his 20s. Brilliant satire: See Pennyfeather mix and mingle with Lady Circumference (and her son Lord Tangent), the underworld of Capt. Grimes and Philbrick, and finally meet his end in a reformed penitentiary after he runs afoul of the League of Nations. |
Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh, 321 pages James Donahue 22 July 2007 "Adam and Nina were suffering from being sophisticated about sex before they were at all widely experienced." |
Black Mischief (1932) by Evelyn Waugh, 240 pages James Donahue 30 July 2007 |
A Handful of Dust (1934) by Evelyn Waugh, 308 pages James Donahue 07 August 2007 Waugh's first non-satirical book is enough to make me despair of modern civilization. There is depressing, and then there is Waugh. Here Brenda Last leaves her traditional husband for no conceivable reason (boredom? silliness? callousness?), beginning a process that leads a country squire family into extinction. |
Scoop (1938) by Evelyn Waugh, 254 pages James Donahue 21 August 2007 Whenever career-driven journalists descend on a rumor-filled Third World nation and have to justify their extravagent expense reports even while they have no real grasp of the country they are in, news will be made. Or at least: "news" will be reported. Here Waugh mocks a group of journalists in the fictional African nation of "Ishmaelia" as they generate the news that they need for the folks back home. Waugh again uses the journey of a straight man (here: Mr. Boot, someone who goes only so he can keep his comfy job writing the "Rural Life" column for the Megalopolitan) to wickedly satire everyone around him. Loosely based on Waugh's experience in 1935 as a foreign correspondent covering the Italo-Abyssian War. |
Put Out More Flags (1942) by Evelyn Waugh, 254 pages James Donahue 23 August 2007 After two years of slugging it out in the Mediterrean with the British Army, Waugh sat down to write a satiric update of his comic characters from previous books. The book is interesting, but seems to fall pretty flat for several reasons. First, the antics of the Bright Young Things are more sinister than comic in a time of war. But more importantly Waugh just cannot write lite anymore. A moral edge is there in the satire that wasn't before. The stories mean something now. Which means: I hope Waugh's next book is something different. Waugh has changed, and his narrative voice needs to change: from satire of the glitterati to ??? |
Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh, 351 pages James Donahue 26 August 2007 Waugh's new tone and newfound seriousness create this amazing read! This book was published on the eve of WWI (my own first edition was bought by a Lt. Col in the U.S. Army from nearby Goshen) and tells the story of a WWII officer struggling with the memories of the lost prewar Britain: pastoral, aristocratic, slightly superfluous, lamented. Waugh laments a Victorian world that "were the aborgines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures." Here Waugh also deals with his own Catholicism for the first time, though not head on like his contmporaries Greene or Chesterton, but as part of that lost world that Britain turned its back on. Waugh's Catholicism is alien, foreign, unmodern, something that Waugh seems compelled towards but not necessarily in favour of. (Read mostly in one long day waiting for the birth of Calvin Thomas Donahue.) |
The Loved One (1948) by Evelyn Waugh, 164 pages James Donahue 30 August 2007 Waugh returns to satire again, after his brief foray into "lit-era-toor," but moves his aim from the British upper class to their cross-Atlantic successors after WWII. In this short novel a British vagabond falls in love with an embalmer in southern California named Aimée Thanatogenos (named after the evangelist) and gets to see the bizarre American world of death. |
Helena (1950) by Evelyn Waugh, 247 pages James Donahue 07 September 2007 Waugh abandons his previous styles and writes a fictional account of the life of St. Helena, mother of Constantine and discoverer of the True Cross. Waugh manages to write as one of the Faithful without devolving into melodrama or hagiography. I admire the effort, but somehow I did not quite enjoy it. (And I'm sure that Waugh caught much grief for his newfound open faith, perhaps like Anne Rice or Orson Scott Card is catching right now.) This inability to enjoy this book puzzles me. Did Waugh fail when he left his satiric side? Did writing "Brideshead" or living through WWII or just getting older and more religious ruin his edge? Or: Perhaps I am too Protestant, although I'm not sure what that has to do with it. Hmmmm. |
Helena (1950) by Evelyn Waugh, 247 pages Jennifer Dear 10 October 2007 |
Sword of Honour (1952-61) by Evelyn Waugh, 796 pages James Donahue 12 October 2007 Evelyn Waugh's last novel, released slowly over a decade, is loosely based on his own WWI experiences as a forty(ish)-year old volunteer. It portrays the slow maturation of a wealthy dilenttante faced for the first time with life - and death. It begins with a romantic vow to crusade against fascism at the grave of Sir Roger Casement and ends with a desperate quest to save the life of one Jew in Yugoslavia. |
Brideshead Revisited (audio) by Evelyn Waugh, 351 pages Steve Gadd 11 September 2009 Though it was a set of ten CDs and the book read aloud by Jeremy Irons, I am counting the pages I would have clocked with the paperback. |