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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of Charles Ryder, especially his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion, Brideshead Castle. Ryder has relationships with two of the Flytes: Sebastian and Julia. The novel explores themes including Catholicism and nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy. A well-received television adaptation of the novel was produced in an 11-part miniseries by Granada Television in 1981. I had seen enough of the famous television adaptation, and thought it was alright. A story of rich people. But as a written novel? Well... Evelyn Waugh is a pretty extraordinary prose stylist and overall writer. On that level, this is a great novel. So, for me the reading (listening) experience was far richer than any dramatic adaptation could hope to equal. The book covers an enormous amount of ground. It feels very influential to many other writers of the era. Very, very impressive. Personal points off for me, being less obsessed with Catholic guilt than the author is. Either you suffer from it, or you don't. One of those books that have been lying around for ages (and where you have a vague recollection of an unwatched mini-series from 30 years ago.....). First published in 1945, this book is split into 3 sections - the first being Charles Ryder, in the army, returning to Brideshead to use it as local army headquarters. He first visited Brideshead when he was at Oxford and met up with the younger Flyte son Sebastian. This takes us into a reminiscence of Charles's interaction with the Flyte family. Sebastian comes first, and he and Charles have some form of love affair. There is some debate as to whether it was just a romantic love affair (as some young men are wont to do - think it would be called a "bromance" nowadays) or something more sexual (unlikely to be more explicit considering time it was written). Julia is Sebastian's younger sister, an unavailable female version of Sebastian as well as their rather strongly Catholic mother. Their father lives in Italy with his mistress, unable to get a divorce because his wife wont grant it. Sebastian only really appears in the first third of the book, and the relationship between Charles and the Flyte family falls apart through Sebastian's excessive drinking. Sebastian disappears onto the continent somewhere and is barely heard of again until the end, and only then by third hand. The second section of the book details Charles's relationship with Julia, where the two meet again several years later and end up living together for several years - both having married and on track to get divorces as a result. They plan to get married once both divorces come through, but over the subsequent years whilst waiting on the divorces, several large events come about. Julia's brother Brideshead, decides to get married to a hideous widow with 2 children, and now that Julia's mother has died, Julia's father decides to return to Brideshead in order to die. The last, short section of the book returns Charles to Brideshead as part of the army who have taken residence in the empty home. There are large swathes of narrative, with page long paragraphs, especially at the beginning, which would have turned me off the book had it gone on for much longer. There is also some conflict between the very Catholic Flyte family and the rather atheist Charles, which brings conflict throughout the book.
Evelyn Waugh was a marvellous writer, but one of a sort peculiarly likely to write a bad book at any moment. The worst of his, worse even than The Loved One, must be Brideshead Revisited. But long before the Granada TV serial came along it was his most enduringly popular novel; the current Penguin reprint is the nineteenth in its line. The chief reason for this success is obviously and simply that here we have a whacking, heavily romantic book about nobs... It is as if Evelyn Waugh came to believe that since about all he looked for in his companions was wealth, rank, Roman Catholicism (where possible) and beauty (where appropriate), those same attributes and no more would be sufficient for the central characters in a long novel, enough or getting on for enough, granted a bit of style thrown in, to establish them as both glamorous and morally significant. That last blurring produced a book I would rather expect a conscientious Catholic to find repulsive, but such matters are none of my concern. Certainly the author treats those characters with an almost cringing respect, implying throughout that they are important and interesting in some way over and above what we are shown of them. Brideshead Revisited fulfils the quest for certainty, though the image of a Catholic aristocracy, with its penumbra of a remote besieged chivalry, a secular hierarchy threatened by the dirty world but proudly falling back on a prepared eschatological position, has seemed over-romantic, even sentimental, to non-Catholic readers. It remains a soldier's dream, a consolation of drab days and a deprived palate, disturbingly sensuous, even slavering with gulosity, as though God were somehow made manifest in the haute cuisine. The Puritan that lurks in every English Catholic was responsible for the later redaction of the book, the pruning of the poetry of self-indulgence. Snobbery is the charge most often levelled against Brideshead; and, at first glance, it is also the least damaging. Modern critics have by now accused practically every pre-modern novelist of pacifism, or collaboration, in the class war. Such objections are often simply anachronistic, telling us more about present-day liberal anxieties than about anything else. But this line won’t quite work for Brideshead, which squarely identifies egalitarianism as its foe and proceeds to rubbish it accordingly... ‘I have been here before’: the opening refrain is from Rossetti, and much of the novel reads like a golden treasury of neo-classical clichés: phantoms, soft airs, enchanted gardens, winged hosts – the liturgical rhythms, the epic similes, the wooziness. Waugh’s conversion was a temporary one, and never again did he attempt the grand style. Certainly the prose sits oddly with the coldness and contempt at the heart of the novel, and contributes crucially to its central imbalance. "Lush and evocative ... the one Waugh which best expresses at once the profundity of change and the indomitable endurance of the human spirit." The new novel by Evelyn Waugh—Brideshead Revisited—has been a bitter blow to this critic. I have admired and praised Mr. Waugh, and when I began reading Brideshead Revisited, I was excited at finding that he had broken away from the comic vein for which he is famous and expanded into a new dimension... But this enthusiasm is to be cruelly disappointed. What happens when Evelyn Waugh abandons his comic convention—as fundamental to his previous work as that of any Restoration dramatist—turns out to be more or less disastrous... For Waugh’s snobbery, hitherto held in check by his satirical point of view, has here emerged shameless and rampant... In the meantime, I predict that Brideshead Revisited will prove to be the most successful, the only extremely successful, book that Evelyn Waugh has written, and that it will soon be up in the best-seller list somewhere between The Black Rose and The Manatee. Appartiene alle Collane Editoriali10/18, Domaine étranger (1398) — 13 altro Penguin Books (821) Penguin Clothbound Classics (2016) Penguin English Library, 2012 series (2020-10) Penguin Modern Classics (821) RBA Narrativa Actual (20) A tot vent (202) Ullstein Taschenbuch (20232) Иллюминатор (42) È contenuto inHa un prequel (non seriale)Ha l'adattamentoÈ riassunto inHa uno studioHa come commento al testoHa come guida per lo studenteMenzioniElenchi di rilievo
Written at the end of the World War II, this work mourns the passing of the aristocratic world which Waugh knew in his youth and recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by the austerities of war. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Già recensito in anteprima su LibraryThingIl libro di Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited è stato disponibile in LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Discussioni correntiNessunoCopertine popolari
Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)823.912Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1901-1945Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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