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Title: Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0-316-92611-6 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.73 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Masterpiece about the Absurdity of Man
Comment: In Mr. Waugh's second novel, the absurdity of humankind is explored. The reader is allowed to follow a brief period in the lives of the "Bright Young People." They are young Londoners of the early 1930's who are well educated and from good families. Through the trials of the protagonist, Adam Fenwick-Symes, the reader is able to see the silliness of human existence. The "Bright Young People" spends their days and nights avoiding all real human experiences, especially love. Mr. Waugh chronicles a time in England when the motto "eat, drink and be merry" was embraced as a spiritual philosophy. At times, passages in this book are very amusing, but it never fails to recognize how life can be wasted when people are just "vile bodies."
Rating: 5
Summary: Sophisticated Humor for the Young
Comment: This book will appeal most to the more sophisticated collegiate crowd. Rappers, don't bother. But anyone with a heightened sense of sensibility and a lowered sense of the brute callousness with which the young are sometimes forced to face the travails of the world will find this a funny, original and even retroactively trend-setting gem. The language still crops up at parties of 'darling young things' in Georgetown, Boston, elsewhere: "How tired-making you're being," or "That's very scare-making." It's paradoxically a book about the world-weary young for youth with a fresh sense of humour. A great classic of humour and a good initiation to Waugh.
Rating: 5
Summary: Wry, wonderful, witty Waugh!
Comment: One of the wittiest, and ultimately saddest, novels about the "lost generation" of the early 20th century. Waugh writes about arrogant, self-centered, wealthy, vapid, young socialites in the period of The Great War, when social mores and traditions were being reexamined and reconstructed or, in some cases, summarily destroyed. Waugh was one of the great chroniclers of the decline and fall of the aristocracy in the 20th century. Like Ronald Firbank, Waugh often gave his characters the most absurd names, such as Mrs. Melrose Ape, Lottie Crump, Judge Skimp, The Honourable Miles Malpractice, Mary Mouse, etc. Having done this, he has to work that much harder to make us identify and empathize with the characters, if indeed we ever really can. Waugh also has his characters spout the most inane, banal dialogue, even in their moments of greatest conflict and turmoil. It is difficult, for instance, to fathom Adam Fenwick-Symes' emotional distress from his thrice-broken engagement to Nina Blount from her comment: "It is a bore, isn't it?" (83). Despite the richness and abundance of the humour, there is an underlying tension, a darkness, which permeates the work from the opening sentence: "It was clearly going to be a bad crossing" (9). The beauty of this novel is in the juxtaposition of comical imagery and dialogue with the spectre of death and destruction looming large. There is a constant negotiation between personal "crises" and a burgeoning global catastrophe. We are often shocked by the intrusion of the real and violent into the placid, literate meta-world of the characters. Thus we read, for instance, the hilarious tabloid journalism of Simon Balcairn/Mr. Chatterbox interspersed with the grisply details of his desperate suicide (106). Or Agnes Runcible's attempt at car-racing, which ends with a crash and a nurse assuring the suffering Agnes: There's nothing to worry about, dear . . . nothing at all . . . nothing" (200). The words are delivered just as Agnes is slipping into a fatal coma, into nothingness. Despite the fact that the narrative is a string of wild parties ("Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John's wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths . . . all that succession and repetition of massed humanity . . . Those vile bodies" [123]), these heady days end with "the most terrible and unexpected thing -- War has been declared" (219). Waugh then adds a brief, ironically-titled "Happy Ending" chapter set in "the biggest battlefield in the history of the world" (220), with Adam literally in the trenches fighting for his life. He encounters a young girl known as "Chastity" in the earlier part of the narrative. Sold into prostitution in South America and now living the wretched existence of "comfort girl" during the war, hers is the worst fate of the Bright Young Things of Mayfair. Easy to dismiss because of its brevity and its wit, this is a brilliant and important novel.
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Title: Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926078 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926051 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Scoop by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926108 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316917338 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 15 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926345 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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