Brideshead Revisited : Unabridged

Rating:
Summary: Epic story told with beautiful writing
Review: The quintesssential story of the years between the wars, full of rich detail, emotional understatement, a terrific story, a bitter-sweet romance.
I'm a writer myself, and I copy memorable bits of the writing of others (especially classic authors) into journals. I listened to this book while driving CA Route 1 along the coast and kept having to pull into a turnout to write stuff down. After that trip, I bought a small purse-sized tape recorder!
This book is lush and gorgeous, like a bouquet of orchids.

Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful, Powerful Story
Review: This book stunned me when I reached the end. Throughout, I enjoyed reading about the various characters and the British ambience, and I didn't expect the very moving way in which the main characters ultimately developed. In addition to telling a good story and depicting a beautiful world, the author made some very profound statements about religion and character. It is a book that I will enjoy reading again.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful story.
Review: This is a story of an aristocratic, very Catholic family in Protestant England, and of the narrator, a well to do friend of the family who we meet as he enters Oxford, and leave as a middle aged establishment artist. It is a novel of character, but also of class, religion, and beauty. It is beautifully written, and is moving, sad and sometimes funny. Part of the genius of this novel is that not only do the characters evolve, but your understanding deepens, so that there is a cumulative impact. It is a book in which you cannot always take what the characters, including the narrator, say at face value, not because they are dissimulating, but because they don't have complete insight into themselves. Extending this idea, I would suggest that Catholicism is not quite as dominant an influence as the book seems to suggest, and that disfunctional parenting plays a major role that the narrator (not to be confused with Waugh) is not sufficiently developed as a human being to appreciate.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful story.
Review: This is a story of an aristocratic, very Catholic family in Protestant England, and of the narrator, a well to do friend of the family who we meet as he enters Oxford, and leave as a middle aged establishment artist. It is a novel of character, but also of class, religion, and beauty. It is beautifully written, and is moving, sad and sometimes funny. Part of the genius of this novel is that not only do the characters evolve, but your understanding deepens, so that there is a cumulative impact. It is a book in which you cannot always take what the characters, including the narrator, say at face value, not because they are dissimulating, but because they don't have complete insight into themselves. Extending this idea, I would suggest that Catholicism is not quite as dominant an influence as the book seems to suggest, and that disfunctional parenting plays a major role that the narrator (not to be confused with Waugh) is not sufficiently developed as a human being to appreciate.

Rating:
Summary: Temporary Beauty
Review: Waugh's technique as a noncomic prose stylist can be summarized as follows: adopt an unhappy view of the world and describe it with strange nouns. Fine as this book undoubtedly is, that does not make for timeless writing. What you have in Brideshead Revisited is an advanced lexicon made to seem grave and thoughtful by the unreasonably harsh view its characters take of luxury. I am not here to denounce the rich and I'm sympathetic to the kind of love described in this book. I think, however, that I was bored by the 450th word for flower turned out by the end of Book One. This seems quibbling but God must be in the details, and I think the incompleteness sensed by other reviewers on this site is a result of Waugh's preference for unusual words over unusual meaning.

Rating:
Summary: Love, despair, war . . . read on
Review: While this was Waugh's least favourite of his own books, the one that he blamed for exposing him to the trials of fan mail and public recognition, it is in fact, a great and glorious book. Spanning the short adult life of Sebastian Flyte, it is told retrospectively through the eyes of his friend and former lover Charles, who goes on, once youthful experimentation is over, to carry on an equally passionate and hopeless love affair with Sebastian's sister. But in some ways, these themes are not the great story. The larger pictures are of the slackening grip of British aristocracy, the power of love and the power of Faith. Waugh paints a masterpiece of the sweet, desperate years between the wars, at Oxford, in London and Paris, with one generation lost and the next helplessly watching history lurching towards a repetition of the same madness.