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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
A Handful of Dust is a difficult book to characterize, for me. I started very slowly but picked up interest at about the halfway point.
I had the feeling the book was about the trivial and superficial concerns of the English gentry. There seems to be considerable importance in going to posh parties. This is especially true of Bever, the son of Mrs. Bever who supports her son with earnings from her business of decorating homes, etc. Early in the book Bever advises us that he saves 5 pounds per week in rent by staying with his mother. a significant part of his uncertain income which hovers about 6 pounds per week.
The story becomes very complicated when Brenda, Tony Last's wife, decides to go to London to study economics. She gets connected with Beaver and, well, you can see where this might be taking you. At any rate, Tony eventually agrees to divorce Brenda, making Brenda look like the abused party. This also gets complicated because of alimony concerns and attorneys. Tony leaves on an adventure and one of two endings occur. I won't go into the details, but it's an interesting read.
Don't neglect to read the Book Club additions.
All in all, it's an interesting read.
I had the feeling the book was about the trivial and superficial concerns of the English gentry. There seems to be considerable importance in going to posh parties. This is especially true of Bever, the son of Mrs. Bever who supports her son with earnings from her business of decorating homes, etc. Early in the book Bever advises us that he saves 5 pounds per week in rent by staying with his mother. a significant part of his uncertain income which hovers about 6 pounds per week.
The story becomes very complicated when Brenda, Tony Last's wife, decides to go to London to study economics. She gets connected with Beaver and, well, you can see where this might be taking you. At any rate, Tony eventually agrees to divorce Brenda, making Brenda look like the abused party. This also gets complicated because of alimony concerns and attorneys. Tony leaves on an adventure and one of two endings occur. I won't go into the details, but it's an interesting read.
Don't neglect to read the Book Club additions.
All in all, it's an interesting read.
Grim, sad and unpleasant. Really well written, but odd.
dark
emotional
funny
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
A wonderfully heartbreaking, bizarre comedy of errors
FUCK BRENDA I'M SO GLAD THERE'S AN ALTERNATE ENDING. This book tore me up. It made me so upset and frustrated I had to vent to my mum who probably had no idea what I was talking about and probably didn't care either. But I had to talk to someone about the torture Evelyn Waugh put me through. He's the first person I would want to speak to if there is a heaven. This book starts out seeming like a cosy little English novel about posh people and parties, but becomes more unbearable as you go through, the more you start to sympathize with Tony. Waugh uses a clever technique of contrasting Tony's journey and that of his unfaithful wife Brenda, which results in an extraordinary and again, painful, irony. I suggest you take the alternate ending as the true one as the original ending is far from happy.
adventurous
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Darkly comic tale with an abrupt shift in focus midway through the book. There is likely some analogy that has gone over my head that would have made the plot more meaningful to me, but Waugh's writing is always a pleasure.
The brutality of the final third of this book is something to behold. It felt fitting that I finished it the day after the American people chose to elect Donald Trump for a second term. We are all just being held against our will and tortured—Just like Tony Last.
Waugh’s novel makes me think of a curious little pen knife kept under plate glass display at an antique shop: a decorative little handle, perhaps delicately wrought in chrome, looking charmingly innocuous nestled among the moldering paste jewelry and assorted tchotchkes. But then, with the flick of a finger, the blade appears—unexpectedly sharp, dazzlingly shiny, potentially cruel. Careful now: Waugh might cut you.
A Handful of Dust is perhaps similarly deceptive, especially when read today. Like an alluring little relic of another age, it satirizes the values and behaviors of an era that today feel quite distant and removed. And yet, despite their obvious foibles I actually liked both Brenda and Tony Last, Downton Abbey-esque minor aristocracy whose happy-seeming seven year marriage suddenly but somewhat understandably begins to spiral. Quietly and unobtrusively things for the Lasts run off the rails, even if neither partner seems particularly discontent with their current situation. Instead each drifts about in a cloud of their own preoccupations and unvoiced concerns, making them oblivious to the fact that there is, in fact, quite a bit amiss. It’s a chilling indictment of how quiet enervation can be just destructive as fiery confrontation.
Which perhaps gives a misleading description of a novel which remains on the whole quite jaunty. Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, the humor is instead incredibly dry—and perhaps a bit brittle—employing wordplay and double entendre (ie “Lady Cockpurse”) and acerbic caricature (the failed, faux-oriental vamp “Princess” Julie Abdul Akbar). But stealthily the glamor of London society rituals give way to an underlying despair—it’s not for nothing that the title and opening epigraph are plucked from Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
Invoking that great landmark of literary modernism is apt for other reasons as well: though not as obviously experimental as Eliot’s poem, I was consistently impressed by the novel’s elegantly economical style. The reliance on dialogue and verbal interchange to convey meaning is almost cinematic, also emphasized in the way scenes are cut into small little snippets that skip around like so many jump cuts. Given the obvious technical mastery on display, I should have had more confidence in authorial control when the last third of the novel juts out into unexpected territory; I admit that for a while I was worried the story had gone irremediably awry just like the Last’s marriage. I need not have worried though, as everything plays itself out with a brutal efficiency and shocking force.
The Penguin Classics (UK edition) I own includes an alternate ending as an appendix, originally attached to an American serialized version of the novel for legal reasons. It’s certainly a much more conventional resolution, but even if it doesn’t contain the same jolt as the intended conclusion there’s still something deeply haunting about it. Perhaps, it seems to ask, reconciliation was indeed possible for the Lasts via roads not taken. But for how long? At the very last moment a turn is taken, and the entire cycle seems to snap back into place, poised to begin yet again.
A Handful of Dust is perhaps similarly deceptive, especially when read today. Like an alluring little relic of another age, it satirizes the values and behaviors of an era that today feel quite distant and removed. And yet, despite their obvious foibles I actually liked both Brenda and Tony Last, Downton Abbey-esque minor aristocracy whose happy-seeming seven year marriage suddenly but somewhat understandably begins to spiral. Quietly and unobtrusively things for the Lasts run off the rails, even if neither partner seems particularly discontent with their current situation. Instead each drifts about in a cloud of their own preoccupations and unvoiced concerns, making them oblivious to the fact that there is, in fact, quite a bit amiss. It’s a chilling indictment of how quiet enervation can be just destructive as fiery confrontation.
Which perhaps gives a misleading description of a novel which remains on the whole quite jaunty. Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, the humor is instead incredibly dry—and perhaps a bit brittle—employing wordplay and double entendre (ie “Lady Cockpurse”) and acerbic caricature (the failed, faux-oriental vamp “Princess” Julie Abdul Akbar). But stealthily the glamor of London society rituals give way to an underlying despair—it’s not for nothing that the title and opening epigraph are plucked from Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
Invoking that great landmark of literary modernism is apt for other reasons as well: though not as obviously experimental as Eliot’s poem, I was consistently impressed by the novel’s elegantly economical style. The reliance on dialogue and verbal interchange to convey meaning is almost cinematic, also emphasized in the way scenes are cut into small little snippets that skip around like so many jump cuts. Given the obvious technical mastery on display, I should have had more confidence in authorial control when the last third of the novel juts out into unexpected territory; I admit that for a while I was worried the story had gone irremediably awry just like the Last’s marriage. I need not have worried though, as everything plays itself out with a brutal efficiency and shocking force.
The Penguin Classics (UK edition) I own includes an alternate ending as an appendix, originally attached to an American serialized version of the novel for legal reasons. It’s certainly a much more conventional resolution, but even if it doesn’t contain the same jolt as the intended conclusion there’s still something deeply haunting about it. Perhaps, it seems to ask, reconciliation was indeed possible for the Lasts via roads not taken. But for how long? At the very last moment a turn is taken, and the entire cycle seems to snap back into place, poised to begin yet again.
I might come back to it, but I'm just not able to maintain a focus on the material right now.