Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by clare_tan_wenhui
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
3.0
Strictly speaking a 3.5
I was struggling for a while before rating this read. Likable, no. Enjoyable? Grudgingly yes... Harrowing? Also reluctantly yes. Finally, relevant? Resounding yes!
Then it struck it, about it's similarity in form and tone to the recent Academy Best Picture winner Parasite, though having been from an earlier era and different setting, and an unique story of its own.
Yes all the elements of savage satire are there, and literature has been at this, way before cinema had it's dabbling until this recent darling of a film.
"It is for your own good that I am telling you... I know you are friends of my wife and that is why you will not listen to me. But be careful. She will say nothing cruel, she will not raise her voice, there will be no 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... Listen to me. I know I am not clever but that is no reason why we should forget all courtesy. Let us kill in the gentlest manner. I will tell you what I have learned in the forest, where time is different. There is no City."
Unfortunately, it seems that fawning over this groundbreaking epiphany about life dies down eventually, we are destined to forget all the unpredictability, harshness and wicked critique, rendering it obsolete, till the next awakening all over again...
I was struggling for a while before rating this read. Likable, no. Enjoyable? Grudgingly yes... Harrowing? Also reluctantly yes. Finally, relevant? Resounding yes!
Then it struck it, about it's similarity in form and tone to the recent Academy Best Picture winner Parasite, though having been from an earlier era and different setting, and an unique story of its own.
Yes all the elements of savage satire are there, and literature has been at this, way before cinema had it's dabbling until this recent darling of a film.
"It is for your own good that I am telling you... I know you are friends of my wife and that is why you will not listen to me. But be careful. She will say nothing cruel, she will not raise her voice, there will be no 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... Listen to me. I know I am not clever but that is no reason why we should forget all courtesy. Let us kill in the gentlest manner. I will tell you what I have learned in the forest, where time is different. There is no City."
Unfortunately, it seems that fawning over this groundbreaking epiphany about life dies down eventually, we are destined to forget all the unpredictability, harshness and wicked critique, rendering it obsolete, till the next awakening all over again...