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sam_bizar_wilcox's review against another edition
3.0
I think this book is primed for a reparative reading that emphasizes how the book skewers the British elite and the academy. I watched Triangle of Sadness recently, and I think this Edwardian satire could be read as a forebear to the eat-the-rich cinema that has been popping up as of late. Zuleika herself This is a novel that I think could be tackled or adapted for contemporary audiences.
The novel, which follows Zuleika, a counterfeit conjurer who is, in some ways, a fin-de-siecle influencer, casts this femme fatale as a harbinger of destruction. No one can help but fall in love with her, and she cannot help but feel disinterested in anyone who reciprocates her affections. Poisonous stew.
And poison is the right word for the arrogance and self-destruction of the young men in her wake. Zuleika is like a Helen of Troy; her beauty inspires men to commit sacrifice. Unlike Helen, Zuleika's men just commit suicide. In so doing, Beerbohm eviscerates the young, pompous chauvinist who studies at Oxford. His primary target is the Duke, a vain and egomaniacal man who cannot imagine not getting what he wants (and so dies in retaliation to Zuleika's rejection).
There's a lot here that works in the present: it speaks to the image and status-obsessed culture of the online world, the decadence of the 1% (it's fitting, for example, that Zuleika books a ticket to Cambridge by the novel's end; the book takes shots at the denizens of England's most elite institutions because Beerbohm seems to intuit that these are mere houses of pageantry.
Is Zuleika Dobson timeless, or even well-written? Hardly. But it's a smart farce that aims it arrows at the hoarders of power, and there's something gleefully wonderful about seeing an entire city destroyed because of one woman. Is Zuleika Dobson a "good for her" novel? This honor, we should grant it.
TLDR: They fell in love with her; she felled a whole city.
The novel, which follows Zuleika, a counterfeit conjurer who is, in some ways, a fin-de-siecle influencer, casts this femme fatale as a harbinger of destruction. No one can help but fall in love with her, and she cannot help but feel disinterested in anyone who reciprocates her affections. Poisonous stew.
And poison is the right word for the arrogance and self-destruction of the young men in her wake. Zuleika is like a Helen of Troy; her beauty inspires men to commit sacrifice. Unlike Helen, Zuleika's men just commit suicide. In so doing, Beerbohm eviscerates the young, pompous chauvinist who studies at Oxford. His primary target is the Duke, a vain and egomaniacal man who cannot imagine not getting what he wants (and so dies in retaliation to Zuleika's rejection).
There's a lot here that works in the present: it speaks to the image and status-obsessed culture of the online world, the decadence of the 1% (it's fitting, for example, that Zuleika books a ticket to Cambridge by the novel's end; the book takes shots at the denizens of England's most elite institutions because Beerbohm seems to intuit that these are mere houses of pageantry.
Is Zuleika Dobson timeless, or even well-written? Hardly. But it's a smart farce that aims it arrows at the hoarders of power, and there's something gleefully wonderful about seeing an entire city destroyed because of one woman. Is Zuleika Dobson a "good for her" novel? This honor, we should grant it.
TLDR: They fell in love with her; she felled a whole city.
rtherese's review against another edition
funny
lighthearted
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Brilliant concept of story and character, but falters at points throughout the book
Content Warnings
Moderate: Suicidal thoughts, Death, and Suicide
alisonjfields's review against another edition
3.0
This is a very funny book about a literal femme fatale. A droll trifle best enjoyed over a couple of hours (and maybe a G&T)on a warm afternoon.
jetia13's review against another edition
4.0
so ridiculous - i liked it a lot. not sure if that's me being weird. there is a break in the middle where the narrator talks directly to the reader which was weird, but that's my only real complaint.
hrlukz's review against another edition
« The Americans were, to a sensitive observer, the most troublesome- as being the most troubled- of the whole lot. The Duke was not one of those Englishmen who fling, or care to hear flung, cheap sneers at America. Whenever anyone in his presence said that America was not large in area, he would firmly maintain that it was. He held too, in his enlightened way, that Americans have a perfect right to exist. But he did often find himself wishing Mr. Rhodes had not enabled them to exercise that right in Oxford. »
izumen's review against another edition
Досадна на места, но пък си заслужава заради портрета на Зюлейка (поне до средата).
ajreader's review against another edition
3.0
Read my full thoughts on this book and hundreds more over at Read.Write.Repeat.
A satirical look at Edwardian love and fame - a fun diversion and absurd storyline.
A satirical look at Edwardian love and fame - a fun diversion and absurd storyline.
sperks's review against another edition
5.0
Decendent. Has the same self-indulgent writing that I adore Wilde for.
blackbird27's review against another edition
5.0
I've been a fan of Max Beerbohm's sedulous prose for twenty years, and of British comic fiction as a genre for even longer, so why it took me this long to read his only novel, a celebrated classic of comic fiction, is unaccountable. I can only guess that I like having things in reserve, something to get around to; and while my appetite for information in the abstract is wolfish, taking up specific works (especially if they've acquired any kind of patina in my mental library) is fraught. What if the spell doesn't work?
It works.
I tried to parcel this out, one chapter a night, all week, but over the weekend I fell too deeply in love and just charged through. It's an extraordinary achievement, a work of high irony and filigreed texture, a Wildean fairy-tale set in the world of one of Wilde's society plays but with all of Wilde's wild hope expunged. The entirety of the plot could be contained in an anecdote, and I wouldn't be surprised to find its outline somewhere in the back chapters of Ovid or the Arabian Nights; but while there are absolutely grounds for considering it misogynistic, I prefer to think of it as expressing (with faultlessly unctuous irony) a scholarly, asexual* horror at the violence and egotism of heterosexual passion.
But pulling too hard at the lacy web to extract any themes would be foolish; for all its black humor, Zuleika Dobson is too delicate and balanced for the heavy machinery of analysis, whether Marxist or feminist or any other I'd happily apply to a sturdier text. Granted that the entirety of the late Victorian or Edwardian Oxford world Beerbohm writes about (or imagines, and then writes about) is a criminal enterprise for maintaining wealth and power at the expense of the other 9/10ths of the world, the fact doesn't make it one scintilla less beautiful, or hilarious.
*The first time I can remember seeing the word asexual applied to a person was in a biographical sketch of Max Beerbohm; whose, I can no longer guess.
It works.
I tried to parcel this out, one chapter a night, all week, but over the weekend I fell too deeply in love and just charged through. It's an extraordinary achievement, a work of high irony and filigreed texture, a Wildean fairy-tale set in the world of one of Wilde's society plays but with all of Wilde's wild hope expunged. The entirety of the plot could be contained in an anecdote, and I wouldn't be surprised to find its outline somewhere in the back chapters of Ovid or the Arabian Nights; but while there are absolutely grounds for considering it misogynistic, I prefer to think of it as expressing (with faultlessly unctuous irony) a scholarly, asexual* horror at the violence and egotism of heterosexual passion.
But pulling too hard at the lacy web to extract any themes would be foolish; for all its black humor, Zuleika Dobson is too delicate and balanced for the heavy machinery of analysis, whether Marxist or feminist or any other I'd happily apply to a sturdier text. Granted that the entirety of the late Victorian or Edwardian Oxford world Beerbohm writes about (or imagines, and then writes about) is a criminal enterprise for maintaining wealth and power at the expense of the other 9/10ths of the world, the fact doesn't make it one scintilla less beautiful, or hilarious.
*The first time I can remember seeing the word asexual applied to a person was in a biographical sketch of Max Beerbohm; whose, I can no longer guess.