Rating: 
Summary: His lesser qualities Still Good art
Review: Brideshead is a gloomy book but a must-read nonetheless. I am sometimes embarassed to say I liked it enough to read it twice and I'm sure that I'll read it again. I read mostly for the story- (not particularly postmodern of me) and for the pleasure of perceiving with some hard intimacy the lives and surroundings of a period and time that is no more and wouldn't have been mine anyway. The Catholic intensity would be meaningless to a younger lapsed soul, but even in my American youth, the religion as destiny- for better or worse- was certainly a part of my parents' top ten issues of life. As such, they were also for the younger me.
Waugh's own yearnings for lineage and the rest of inheritance and 'class' are transformed into a good story with details of snobbery and those horridly cold (British upperclass) childhoods. Those children became adults only having born consequences of World War, modernism and legacies of excess- religious and alcoholic. All of those were certainly bedeviling Waugh as much as any of his creations. No doubt the novel was chosen by a smart BBC producer for the very same details that made the book work for me. If you are a reader of Waugh or Nancy Mitford or any of the first half of the 20th century 'greats,' I cannot imagine that you would forego Brideshead- if only because it is certainly more serious, and in that, more silly. Even his lesser literary efforts- and God knows he had plenty of those-reflected his superstardom, his trajectory as one of the most multifaceted authors.
Rating: 
Summary: The Decline of Aristocracy
Review: Charler Ryder, a rather sarcastic non-beleiver, reminisces about his experiences at Brideshead Mansion and its owners the Flyte's.Ryder first meets the family through his friendship with Sebastian a rather foppish character whose life is spiralling wildly out of control. A homosexual liason between Charles and Sebastian is presumed and Charles eventually recognizes that Sebastian is beyond help and he begins his own career. Charles marries and for all intent and purpose Sebastian's character fades away. While travelling back to England from America, Charles encounters Julia, Sebastian's sister. Julia and Charles begin a love affair that is doomed by Charles' failure to accept Julia's reembrace of the Catholic church. The decline of the aristocratic family is seen in the lifes and deaths of the family members and the Brideshead mansion itself.
Rating:
Summary: Great novel
Review: I could go on and on about how fantastic this novel is but that has been done already. This novel probably won't appeal to everyone, but certainly worth checking out. One of my personal favorites.
Rating:
Summary: Like Reading It for the First Time
Review: I had a friend who made it a point to read "Brideshead Revisited" once a year without fail. She considered it the finest book ever written. While I might quarrel with that hyperbole, I do in fact list it in my own personal top ten. I, too, re-read it, in my case, every few years. And of course I was riveted to the brilliant BBC production starring Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder. Imagine my delight, then, when I found this unabridged reading by Irons himself! My delight was rewarded. Irons' perfect reading of this book opened up a whole new world for me. This time, I heard and felt the absolute poetry of Waugh's words--his ability to take his reader from sultry ... summertime to the slums of the Casbah to a storm at sea that is the perfect metaphor for the turmoil to come. Waugh never wasted a word. Never said more than he had to say. Never helped the reader by sugarcoating the story. And the result was breathtaking. Maybe because I was listening this time rather than reading, I paid much more attention this time to the book's main theme, religion versus humanity. Can one exist without the other? Does one destroy the other? How far can one stray when bound by the "invisible thread"? Waugh's very personal and moving tale of upper-class Catholics in a Protestant country is a brilliant affirmation of faith, and at the same time, a bitter acknowledgement of the price that faith can exact. I cannot say enough about this recording, which brings all the best of Waugh to the fore even more so than the written word.
Rating:
Summary: Rare Book Warning
Review: If you have a Little and Brown dated 1945 and it is the 1st American Edition, one of 600 predating the trade edition, that book in good condiion is worth several hundred or more. Even if yours states January 1946 and after the 600, it is still worth in the hundreds. If you see the words "trial" or "examination" then your book is in the hundreds category. Refer to Abebooks on this.
Rating:
Summary: Pure poetry
Review: Never before has a novel affected me in so many different ways over so long a time. The older I get, the more brilliant it becomes. It's about love and innocence and innocence lost and tragic dysfunction. In other words, absolutely real life, regardless of its period. I've never come across such profound use of language as his is in presenting this story as art on the page. Now, I'm in my mid-thirties and as each period of time goes by in my life and I re-read this again, another truth is realized within it. It's magically romantic, and as most love is, it is also sorrowfully tragic as demons hatch out of previously enchanting objects, and desires shift, and hearts tire from being so long malnourished. You'll be right there at Oxford from the moment the characters begin their journey, so if you're someone who loves to get lost in a novel, go go go, but understand that you'll pay for the highs of innocence with the lows of inevitable life experience. You're only really young and in love for so long before life takes over to settle you down for good. How you cope with that reality is the measure of your character after all is said and done. But who of us doesn't look back and delight in our innocence and the true love we felt in our youth? You'll find that place in this novel and enjoy yourself within it. I fall in love again every time i read it!
Rating: 
Summary: Arcadian Wonders and Brideshead Blunders
Review: Okay, maybe 'blunders' is a harsh word. How about 'misfires'? That's probably more accurate. I am not nearly qualified to give Evelyn Waugh advice on how to write. But I will anyway: Please, Mr. Waugh, stick to cute satire, and leave the romance fiction to the less acute; make the books more mordant than maudlin; model "The Loved One", which was far better than this tale of loved ones. My main complaint is that Waugh here comes off as little more than a poor man's Oscar Wilde. You have a proliferation of aesthete's epigrams ("Oh, Charles, don't be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it's pretty?"), the crypto-homoeroticism (actually, it's not that well hidden at all), and various variations on Dorian Gray's syndrome. But where Wilde's writing revels in its formulas and in it's decadence, Waugh doesn't appear to be having very much fun. The first half begins well enough. Charles Ryder, a cipheric army captain, happens on Brideshead Castle after a lengthy absence. It, and its occupants, defined his youth, and the sight of it forces forward a flood of memories. The remainder of the novel takes place within these memories, Ryder mainly acting as observer of those around him. He is a fine narrator, allowing equal time to the objective and subjective aspects of his memory (i.e., the events as they happened vs. his reactions to said events). While at Oxford, his chief subject is Sebastian Flyte, a charming dipsomaniac. Sebastian is Charles' best and only friend, while being his 'in' to Brideshead. He's an addictively self-destructive character, still in love with his childhood (a teddy-bear named Aloysius goes with him everywhere; he adores his old nanny), which eventually leads to his own undoing. It's typical of the novel that when Sebastian's immature drunkenness rears its ugly head, one of his school chums casually remarks: "How boring!" Charles' days at Oxford are the novel's high points, as the charming and intriguing people he meets form a peculiar tapestry. It was a true pleasure to read the first hundred or so pages, as Waugh appears on top of his game. Unfortunately, Oxford days are abandoned in the novel's second half, and the narrative flounders under the weight of 'big ideas'. While the residents of Brideshead are no less fascinating than the Oxford boys (as Sebastian accurately says: "I'm not going to have you [Charles] get mixed up with my family. They're so madly charming."), the harsh melodrama that ensues got on my nerves. And, ultimately, Waugh never gives his characters anything cohesive to do; episodes drag on much too long, wearing out their welcome long after any relevant point has been made. Take his treatment of Lady Marchmain, Brideshead's matriarch, and a devout Catholic. A side comment by (her daughter) Cordelia epitomizes her mother's character: "I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated mummy... She was saintly but she wasn't a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it's God and hate that." Out of the mouths of babes, no? Cordelia (read: Waugh) crystallizes in that one speech all the problems that religion has brought to the novel's second half. It's typical of the kind of sharp writing Waugh excels at. But the effect is diluted when the argument is repeated, in various forms, ad nauseam. It got to be quite tedious. Charles, at one point, pledges to only live in a world of three-dimensions, that he can experience with his five senses. He soon he finds out that artifice rules the day, especially at Brideshead Castle, and such a world doesn't exist. I'd expected Waugh to pounce all over this idea with his sharp pen and sharper mind. But instead he revels in Charles' overwrought sincerity. Waugh's pointed wit usually punctures holes in stuffy characters such as these, but here he is content to just create them. While in arcadian Oxford, "Brideshead Revisited" shines, enough that I can offer a marginal recommendation. Once it leaves that idyllic setting, Waugh gets rusty.
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: 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.
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