Customer Reviews

Modern Classics Brideshead Revisited Centennial Edition

5 star:		(27)
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2 star:		(1)
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A classic on memory and remembering. It pays to be read and reread. The descriptions of the aristocratic house are especially enthralling.

I had a friend who made it a point to read "Brideshead Revisited" once a year without fail. She considered it the finest book ever written. While I might quarrel with that hyperbole, I do in fact list it in my own personal top ten. I, too, re-read it, in my case, every few years. And of course I was riveted to the brilliant BBC production starring Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder.

Imagine my delight, then, when I found this unabridged reading by Irons himself! My delight was rewarded. Irons' perfect reading of this book opened up a whole new world for me. This time, I heard and felt the absolute poetry of Waugh's words--his ability to take his reader from sultry ... summertime to the slums of the Casbah to a storm at sea that is the perfect metaphor for the turmoil to come. Waugh never wasted a word. Never said more than he had to say. Never helped the reader by sugarcoating the story. And the result was breathtaking.

Maybe because I was listening this time rather than reading, I paid much more attention this time to the book's main theme, religion versus humanity. Can one exist without the other? Does one destroy the other? How far can one stray when bound by the "invisible thread"? Waugh's very personal and moving tale of upper-class Catholics in a Protestant country is a brilliant affirmation of faith, and at the same time, a bitter acknowledgement of the price that faith can exact.

I cannot say enough about this recording, which brings all the best of Waugh to the fore even more so than the written word.

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.

Waugh's elegy to a passing way of life and ending era: the supposed death-throes of the English aristocracy in the years leading up to World War Two.

Waugh admitted that he wrote the book as "a panegyric preached over an empty coffin", and it certainly reads as such. Through the eyes of the narrator, Charles Ryder, the reader is taken on a nostalgia ride through Ryder's days as a student and his later connections with the aristocratic Flyte family. The main tone is regret - at lost youth, lost love, and a lost class. The future is looked forward to with dread - Ryder regards the soldiers he commands in World War Two with something approaching contempt:

"The history they taught [Hooper, an officer under Ryder's command] had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change."

Ryder (and Waugh) knows that the national effort demanded by World War Two will mean that the old order will have to change after the war ends to accommodate the aspirations of the people as a whole.

The melancholy tone of the novel will surprise readers who are familiar with Waugh's more satirical works. It reflects an enduring theme in English culture which looks back to a idyllic rural past (a very powerful, yet totally mythical past) and reflects a deep unease with the Industrial Revolution and social change. The irony of it all is that Waugh's lamentations over the demise of the aristocracy greatly underestimated the (continued) adaptability of that class, and the sustaining power of that rural myth throughout English society as a whole. The funeral rites were premature.

I first read "Brideshead Revisted" some years ago and decided to reread it, having read a lot of Waugh's other works. It suffers from familiarity: the TV series gave ample opportunity for it to become more widely-known, and one of the results was that it became the target of many satirists (in the British media at least). And I can appreciate what those satirists were getting at. The early parts of the novel, dealing with Ryder's days at Oxford and his homosexual relationship with Sebastian Flyte are almost a parody of the Oxford idyll - the nostalgia and hyperbole are laid on by the truck load.

After Sebastian fades out as an active character (though he is still referred to throughout the novel, and one is left wondering whether Charles ever ceased to love him), the novel settles into a more restrained, yet regretful tone. The redeeming factor for all the characters is religion - portrayed until just before the end as a major burden for all of the Flytes, it triumphs. You feel that for Waugh, this was the one hope left when all else fails.

The melancholic mood of the book makes it perfect ot be read under the shadow of a tree or on dark rainy afternoons. The dissapearence of a time, of a family, a class, and a love is perfectly mixed in the same story. But to feel it the book shall be read according to its inner pace. If you read it all in one night somehow you will lose part of its beauty. Also you shall not read this book if you are looking for action and fun.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Brideshead is a gloomy book but a must-read nonetheless. I am sometimes embarassed to say I liked it enough to read it twice and I'm sure that I'll read it again. I read mostly for the story- (not particularly postmodern of me) and for the pleasure of perceiving with some hard intimacy the lives and surroundings of a period and time that is no more and wouldn't have been mine anyway. The Catholic intensity would be meaningless to a younger lapsed soul, but even in my American youth, the religion as destiny- for better or worse- was certainly a part of my parents' top ten issues of life. As such, they were also for the younger me.
Waugh's own yearnings for lineage and the rest of inheritance and 'class' are transformed into a good story with details of snobbery and those horridly cold (British upperclass) childhoods. Those children became adults only having born consequences of World War, modernism and legacies of excess- religious and alcoholic. All of those were certainly bedeviling Waugh as much as any of his creations. No doubt the novel was chosen by a smart BBC producer for the very same details that made the book work for me. If you are a reader of Waugh or Nancy Mitford or any of the first half of the 20th century 'greats,' I cannot imagine that you would forego Brideshead- if only because it is certainly more serious, and in that, more silly. Even his lesser literary efforts- and God knows he had plenty of those-reflected his superstardom, his trajectory as one of the most multifaceted authors.