[.ca] Brideshead Revisited (ISBN 0679423001)

From Amazon.com:
A departure from Evelyn Waugh's normally comic theater, Brideshead Revisited concerns the tale of Charles Ryder, a captain in the British Army in post-World War I England. Unlike Waugh's previous narrators, Ryder is an intelligent man, looking back on much of his life from his current post in Oxford. He strikes a special friendship with Lord Sebastian Flyte as the setting moves to the Brideshead estate and a baroque castle that recalls England's prior standing in the world. Ryder falls for Flyte's sister while families, politics and religions collide. What makes the book extraordinary is Waugh's sharp, vivid style and his use of dialect and minor characters. This is one of Waugh's finest accomplishments and a superb book.

Beautiful story.:
This is a story of an aristocratic, very Catholic family in Protestant England, and of the narrator, a well to do friend of the family who we meet as he enters Oxford, and leave as a middle aged establishment artist. It is a novel of character, but also of class, religion, and beauty. It is beautifully written, and is moving, sad and sometimes funny. Part of the genius of this novel is that not only do the characters evolve, but your understanding deepens, so that there is a cumulative impact. It is a book in which you cannot always take what the characters, including the narrator, say at face value, not because they are dissimulating, but because they don't have complete insight into themselves. Extending this idea, I would suggest that Catholicism is not quite as dominant an influence as the book seems to suggest, and that disfunctional parenting plays a major role that the narrator (not to be confused with Waugh) is not sufficiently developed as a human being to appreciate.

Picture of salvation.:
This book is not written in accordance with current literary tastes. It is descriptive to the point where it is florid sometimes; the writer's politics and elitism can easily offend(he is thoughtlessly snobbish towards characters such as Hooper); and he is describing a vanished world that can be difficult to understand--the sort of aristocrats he describes do not exist anymore and maybe they shouldn't exist (one could reasonably call them parasites). However, the same things could be said about many of the novels that are most worth reading (think of novels from nineteenth century Russia for example). The sensitive reader will soon realize that Waugh is talking about the human condition in this book and showing the necessity of faith, as all that they have materially cannot satisfy these people. They still have a void that can only be filled by God and God pulls them, no matter how much they try to run away from this fact. These are real human beings who are involved in definite sins such as adultery; homosexuality (though it is unclear whether Sebastian and Charles have a physical relationship, the homoerotic undertones in their relationship are very strong, and there are several other openly homosexual characters);alcoholism runs rampant; the narrator has the sin of pride. However, God has grace to handle all of it, and Waugh brilliantly uses Dante's philosophy of human love (including the sinful love such as the adultery and that with the homoerotic element) leading human beings towards the divine love which it is a mirror of. He will make you uncomfortable and challenge your late twentieth/early twenty-first century ideas of moral relativism as he is very uncompromising about what is right and what is wrong and believes in such unstylish things as 'sin', 'redemption', 'duty' and 'sacrifice'. However, he NEVER preaches. The depiction of Sebastian in his later years is one of the most moving things, I think, in all literature, as he describes the destruction of his beauty and his grace in the alcoholism, shows what a total wreck he has made of his life by worldly standards, and yet lets you feel that he has achieved something else with his pain, which is the salvation of his soul. And so there is hope for Julia, for Charles and for all of the other extremely flawed people in this novel. In a world that seems to be dying (one of the best things about the book is its depiction of the world at war). Maybe some of us could use some of this message in a world in which so many more people, not just the 'aristocrats' but also the 'Hoopers' of the world (at least in Europe and America) have so much financially, and are spiritually so miserable. And don't even realise that our disease is spiritual, or if we do, try to salve it with easy, patched-together counterfeits of religion that can do nothing for us, like people taking pleasant-tasting placebos instead of real medicine.

Great novel:
I could go on and on about how fantastic this novel is but that has been done already. This novel probably won't appeal to everyone, but certainly worth checking out. One of my personal favorites.

Epic story told with beautiful writing:
The quintesssential story of the years between the wars, full of rich detail, emotional understatement, a terrific story, a bitter-sweet romance. I'm a writer myself, and I copy memorable bits of the writing of others (especially classic authors) into journals. I listened to this book while driving CA Route 1 along the coast and kept having to pull into a turnout to write stuff down. After that trip, I bought a small purse-sized tape recorder! This book is lush and gorgeous, like a bouquet of orchids.

A work of remarkable beauty:
Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead, revisited" is a masterpiece of twentieth century literature. Spanning a period of twenty years, Waugh paints a most extraordinary picture of idyllic life fraught with undertones of deep sadness. Charles Ryder serves as the incarnate narrator of Waugh's halcyon brush strokes as Ryder emerges as the most critcal character in the book. The women of "Brideshead" are either self-absorbed or flitty and the men are sillier yet. In fact, the second half of Waugh's work is more important than the first. In the latter half, Charles matures....the only person to do so. It is as if Charles is holding a movie camera throughout as the characters rotate in slow motion. They rarely move forward....just on to other locations. Waugh's greatest contribution is, however, his soft hintings of sexuality. These connections are largely left open to the reader's imagination and are gently manipulated by the feel of a warm breeze, the sight of a flower-filled field or the scent of spring. A question I often asked myself while reading "Brideshead" was "are these people really connecting in any way?" My answer was "yes", but at a distance more relevant to the times and to the country. Charles's denouement was a curtain being pulled down on a dysfunctional family that had little real understanding of how to hold themselves together, but did so, anyway. "Brideshead, revisited" can be read in a short time but, like an afternoon tea, should be consumed in small sips. The refreshment of Evelyn Waugh's descriptive prose evinces a master mind at work...the author turned painter. His canvas is a tour de force.