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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
Second time reading this. Reading just before going to Africa, hoping to learn from Tony's misadventures. So clever, funny, well-paced, and eccentric. I will return to this over and over.
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
dark
funny
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
so rogue. slow paced for such a short book. as per usual, i love a cast of rich, out of touch bastards making everyone around them miserable ! lost me for a bit in the second half- the whole Brazil storyline was a massive out of place tone change (quite frankly odd), and the descriptions of the native people are as expected, typically 1930s (out-dated to say the least), which put me off a fair bit. however, the insidiously creepy twisty-turvy ending did end up pulling the rating up for me. darkly hilarious, perfectly despicable irredeemable characters.
- All over England people were waking up, queasy and despondent. Tony lay for ten minutes very happily planning the renovations of his ceiling. Then he rang the bell.
- "Oh, mumsy, what's the use? I can't afford to start taking about women like Brenda Last. If I ring up she'll say, what are you doing, and I shall have to ask her to something, and it will be the same thing every say. I simply haven't the money."
- "Me? Oh, I've been behaving very badly to tell you the truth." "Buying things?" "Worse. I've been carrying on madly with young men and I've spent heaps of money and I've enjoyed it very much indeed [...]"
- For them her circumstances shed peculiar glamour; for five years she had been a legendary, almost ghostly name, the imprisoned princess of fairy story, and now that she had emerged there was more enchantment in the occurrence than in the mid-change of the circumspect wife. Her very choice of partner gave the affair an appropriate touch of fantasy; Beaver, the joke figure they had all known and despised, suddenly caught up to her among the luminous clouds of deity.
- "We must get him interested in a girl." [...] "The trouble is that I've become such a habit with him - he won't take easily to a new one... ought she to be like me or quite different?"
- "Here comes the tea at last," said Tony. "I hope you allow yourself to eat muffins. So many of our guests nowadays are on a diet. I think muffins one of the few things that make the English winter endurable."
- She was American by origin, now totally denationalized, rich, without property or possessions, except those that would pack in five vast trunks.
- The impoverished Lasts were stunned by the telegram. They lived on an extensive but unprofitable chicken farm near Princes Risborough. It did not enter the heads of any of them that now if anything happened they were the heirs to Hatton. Had it done so, their grief would have been just as keen.
- A change of clothes brought to both Tony and Millie the change of temper. She in her best evening frock, backless and vermilion, a face newly done and her bleached curls brushed out, her feet in high red shoes, some bracelets on her wrist, a dab of scent behind the large sham pearls in her ears, shook off the cares of domesticity and was once more in uniform, reporting for duty, a legionary ordered for Active Service after the innovating restraints of a winter in Barracks [...]
- Tony had bicycle along straight, white roads to visit the Chateau; he carried rolls of bread and cold vealtied to the back of the machine, and the soft dust seeped into them through the back of the paper and gritted against his teeth. There were two other English boys there, so he had learned little French. One of them fell in love and the other got drunk for the first time on sparkling Vouvray at a fair that had been held in the town [...] Cyprus and olive trees, a domed church halfway down the hill, between the villa and the harbour, a cafe where they sat out in the evening, watching the fishing boats and the lights reflected in the quiet water, waiting for the sudden agitation of sound and motion as the speedboat came in.
- ... Carpet and canopy, tapestry in velvet, portcullis and bastion, waterfowl on the moat and kingcups along its margin, peacocks trailing their finery across the lawns; high overhead in a sky of sapphire and swansdown silver bells chiming in a turret of alabaster.
- "[...]I know you are friends of my wife and that is why you will not listen to me. Be careful. She will say nothing cruel, she will not raise her voice, albino hard words. She hopes you will be great friends afterwards as before. But she will leave you. She will go away quietly during the night. She will take her hammock and her rations of farine..."
dark
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Death, Infidelity, Racial slurs, Racism, Toxic relationship, Xenophobia, Antisemitism, Grief, Gaslighting, Toxic friendship, Abandonment, Alcohol, Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail, Classism
adventurous
dark
funny
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I studied A Handful of Dust for my book club. While I recognize its merit as an example of Juvenalian satire, I really didn't enjoy it. I got Waugh's pointed, cynical mockery, but found it dismal and unpleasant. I understand that this is entirely deliberate on the part of the author. However, if asked if I'd recommend it to anyone, my answer would be no. I enjoyed Brideshead Revisited a thousand times more than this novel.
About the only thing this book made me feel was revulsion, particularly for Brenda Last. What a true villain of pedestrian mundanity she is: a self-absorbed survivor whose evil seems magnified by being so commonplace. People like Brenda Last are a dime a dozen.
This work is as ugly and sharp as a stone knife, and almost every character in it bleeds. I recognize its literary credentials, but really didn't care for it.
About the only thing this book made me feel was revulsion, particularly for Brenda Last. What a true villain of pedestrian mundanity she is: a self-absorbed survivor whose evil seems magnified by being so commonplace. People like Brenda Last are a dime a dozen.
This work is as ugly and sharp as a stone knife, and almost every character in it bleeds. I recognize its literary credentials, but really didn't care for it.
Since there was no plot summary on the jacket, I had absolutely no idea what to expect with this book. And that was probably the best way to go into this oddball novel - I enjoyed every twist and turn of this completely delightful, bitingly witty satire of the mid-war years in Britain precisely because I had no object but entertainment in mind. It has more in common with a P.G. Wodehouse novel than a F. Scott Fitzgerald one, and since I had usually placed Waugh in the latter camp for 20s fiction I was pleasantly surprised to find Waugh so adept in both genres. I hope to pick up another Waugh satire soon!
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes