Rating: 
Summary: a nostalgic look at the past
Review: Brideshead Revisited is one of my favorite books of all time. Alas, this, being my first journey into the mind of Evelyn Waugh, has ruined me for his other novels as they are not very similar to this one. This book, for me, has had a magical aura. It was written Post World War I, as a treatise to the past, which explains the grand departure from style and content from other novels. Charles Ryder returns to the Brideshead estate, releasing memories of his school days and his friendship with the exquisite Sebastian Flyte. This novel also carries an extreme theme of Catholicism and a family's attempt to flee from the faith of their mother. Like an unwoven spider web, the children, Sebastian, Julia, and Cordelia eventually become ensnared and return to the religion their mother showed them when they were children. This is an amazing novel. Whimsical and sad, at once. This is a must-read.
Rating:
Summary: Doom comes slowly but surely....
Review: This book deals with many themes, friendship, love, duty, religion, and art. Charting the declining fortunes of the Catholic Flyte family, we are introduced one by one to the dysfunctional but totally charming members of the family, from Sebastian who turns from a beautiful but lightheaded student to a hopeless dipsomaniac; his father, mother, sisters and brother who are all affected by their Catholicism in different ways. We see Julia emerge from a social butterfly to a depressed beauty; Cordelia from a quaint child to a devoted nurse... all through the eyes of Charles Ryder, who himself undergoes a series of transitions from idealistic twenty-year-old to disillusioned artist. it is a poetic book about 'forerunners', how he first loves Sebastian then Julia, then learns to appreciate Cordelia for her strengths, and finally is able to love the House ---Brideshead Castle. A moving and almost epic book. Reviewed by FMJ Shaw
Rating:
Summary: Grace
Review: This is a fairly sizeable novel. It would normally take me about three days with pretty substantial reading time during those days. But there was just something about it, and I made time and read this one pretty much straight through. It is easily one of the most wonderful novels I have ever read. There is so much to like about it. There is sheer joy in reading Waugh's prose as small nuggets of humor and beauty are uncovered throughout. The characters are pretty over-the-top (done on purpose) which makes them entertaining, but the depth of the characters is the truly striking thing. It's usually between the lines, but these characters are changing dramatically throughout, and for the better. I think the theological discussion running throughout the novel is what really makes it rise to true greatness. Waugh's making a compelling argument for a moral universe, and he is revealing what God's grace may look like working in people's lives. Brideshead Revisited is true masterpiece that really cannot be missed by any lover of literature or by any person looking for some meaning out there. It's a joy in every sense of the word. This is one book I'm going to come back to.
Rating: 
Summary: Quite a good novel by an author I never cared for. . . .
Review: This is another of those books that has been on my to-read list for years, which people regularly recommended but which I kept pushing down the list . . . probably because I've never been particularly partial those other works of Waugh's which I've read -- superficial and stilted parodies like _Decline and Fall,_ _Vile Bodies,_ and _The Loved One._ But _Brideshead_ is, happily, quite different and shows Waugh at what I take to be his best. Charles Ryder, artist and scion of a minor upper class family, is a captain during World War II whose unit is posted to a large estate (Brideshead), a place where he spent some of the happiest, and unhappiest, times of his life back in the early 1920s, when he was at Oxford with Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the wealthy and Catholic Marchmain family. The first part of the book is the story of the rise and fall of the friendship between Ryder and Sebastian, who hates his mother and sinks into alcoholism. The second part, which seems disconnected, is the story of Charles's success and the collapse of his marriage, and of his tenuous affair with Julia, Sebastian's sister. And that's about all the plot there is. But I enjoyed the book mostly for Waugh's mastery of character evolution, his depiction of the changes in Sebastian's grasp on the real world and on the growth of Ryder's cynicism. The supporting characters are fascinating: Sebastian's eldest brother, Brideshead (a lovely name!); the younger, pious sister, Cordelia; their friends, Anthony Blanche and Boy Mulcaster, who grow from tiresome undergraduates to men occasionally worth listening to; Julia's Canadian husband, Rex Mottrom; Sebastian's parents and Charles's father, and even quite minor figures in the story. There are also some great comic scenes, such as the thoroughly heathenish Rex's efforts to be converted to Roman Catholicism to please Julia's family, and Cousin Jasper's disquisition on how to be a proper Oxford Man. And Waugh's take on the peculiarities of the Anglo-Catholic world are very good. On the other hand, few of these characters are actually worth the reader's sympathy; they all have far too much money and the associated freedom to do just as they please, and none of them ever contributes much, if anything, to society at large.
Rating:
Summary: A work of remarkable beauty
Review: Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead, revisited" is a masterpiece of twentieth century literature. Spanning a period of twenty years, Waugh paints a most extraordinary picture of idyllic life fraught with undertones of deep sadness. Charles Ryder serves as the incarnate narrator of Waugh's halcyon brush strokes as Ryder emerges as the most critcal character in the book. The women of "Brideshead" are either self-absorbed or flitty and the men are sillier yet. In fact, the second half of Waugh's work is more important than the first. In the latter half, Charles matures....the only person to do so. It is as if Charles is holding a movie camera throughout as the characters rotate in slow motion. They rarely move forward....just on to other locations. Waugh's greatest contribution is, however, his soft hintings of sexuality. These connections are largely left open to the reader's imagination and are gently manipulated by the feel of a warm breeze, the sight of a flower-filled field or the scent of spring. A question I often asked myself while reading "Brideshead" was "are these people really connecting in any way?" My answer was "yes", but at a distance more relevant to the times and to the country. Charles's denouement was a curtain being pulled down on a dysfunctional family that had little real understanding of how to hold themselves together, but did so, anyway. "Brideshead, revisited" can be read in a short time but, like an afternoon tea, should be consumed in small sips. The refreshment of Evelyn Waugh's descriptive prose evinces a master mind at work...the author turned painter. His canvas is a tour de force.
Rating:
Summary: Picture of salvation.
Review: This book is not written in accordance with current literary tastes. It is descriptive to the point where it is florid sometimes; the writer's politics and elitism can easily offend(he is thoughtlessly snobbish towards characters such as Hooper); and he is describing a vanished world that can be difficult to understand--the sort of aristocrats he describes do not exist anymore and maybe they shouldn't exist (one could reasonably call them parasites). However, the same things could be said about many of the novels that are most worth reading (think of novels from nineteenth century Russia for example). The sensitive reader will soon realize that Waugh is talking about the human condition in this book and showing the necessity of faith, as all that they have materially cannot satisfy these people. They still have a void that can only be filled by God and God pulls them, no matter how much they try to run away from this fact. These are real human beings who are involved in definite sins such as adultery; homosexuality (though it is unclear whether Sebastian and Charles have a physical relationship, the homoerotic undertones in their relationship are very strong, and there are several other openly homosexual characters);alcoholism runs rampant; the narrator has the sin of pride. However, God has grace to handle all of it, and Waugh brilliantly uses Dante's philosophy of human love (including the sinful love such as the adultery and that with the homoerotic element) leading human beings towards the divine love which it is a mirror of. He will make you uncomfortable and challenge your late twentieth/early twenty-first century ideas of moral relativism as he is very uncompromising about what is right and what is wrong and believes in such unstylish things as 'sin', 'redemption', 'duty' and 'sacrifice'. However, he NEVER preaches. The depiction of Sebastian in his later years is one of the most moving things, I think, in all literature, as he describes the destruction of his beauty and his grace in the alcoholism, shows what a total wreck he has made of his life by worldly standards, and yet lets you feel that he has achieved something else with his pain, which is the salvation of his soul. And so there is hope for Julia, for Charles and for all of the other extremely flawed people in this novel. In a world that seems to be dying (one of the best things about the book is its depiction of the world at war).
Maybe some of us could use some of this message in a world in which so many more people, not just the 'aristocrats' but also the 'Hoopers' of the world (at least in Europe and America) have so much financially, and are spiritually so miserable. And don't even realise that our disease is spiritual, or if we do, try to salve it with easy, patched-together counterfeits of religion that can do nothing for us, like people taking pleasant-tasting placebos instead of real medicine.
Rating:
Summary: A matter of taste
Review: This book is worth a read for one reason: Waugh skillfully portrays the dysfunctions and excesses of aristocratic British life. The evident futility of their lives is very poignantly expressed - Waugh's literary style seems to just ooze 'futility' and a sense of 'an end of an era'.
That being said, I did not find the prose very fluid (hence the 4 stars instead of 5). I also do not generally like books where I'm left with a sense of loss and hopelessness. However, if you do like those types of books, then Waugh's poignancy is definitely not to be missed.
Rating: 
Summary: Brideshead Revisited is just dreary
Review: I read this book when someone gave me a copy of it for a gift. It was just terrible. First of all, everyone calls this a gay book but the book is never clear of Sebastian and Charles' relationship. In any case, Charles meets Sebastian's rich family and abandons poor Sebastian. He must have not care for him at all really. Add insult to injury, he then begans to date his sister. It sounds more like a episode of Jerry Spinger, then a classic novel. It's so beautiful when Julia rejects him though. Charles was a pig and deserves. The book is terrible because the most interesting charactor, Sebastian, disappears half way threw it and we are left with boring Charles and his quest for the sister. When this happend, it seemed like two different books accidently put together. Just horrible.
Rating:
Summary: A haunting decline and fall
Review: A classic of 20th century British literature and a book one is not likely to ever forget. This is the very sad depiction of an aristocratic family's decline and fall in the years between the two world wars. It is one of those rare novels where the reader doesn't necessarily have to like any of the characters to be moved by them. Through the brittle and rather unsympathetic narration of Charles Ryder, the reader is given glimpses of a world sundered by the hypocrisies of sex, religion, and class and the impending cataclysm of World War Two. We come to know the Marchmain family without really knowing them, much as Charles - an outsider himself - does. Still, this does not deflect from our sympathy for Sebastian's alcoholic devolution or the repressed misery of the tragically beautiful Julia. Read the book and then rent the splendid - and faithful - BBC adaptation starring a young Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, and Diana Quick. Both novel and film will haunt you.
Rating:
Summary: A picture of a world that no longer exists
Review: This book is marvelous...when it was written it may have been valued for the story of religious convictions and societal conventions coming between a man and a woman who were in love. Today it is more of a fascinating tale of a way of life that is not to be found on any continent, any country, anywhere. I'm especially fascinated with the "roaring twenties" which to me, with my historical detachment, are kind of like the 60's only without the still lingering societal wounds. My first introduction to this story was the amazing "Masterpiece Theatre" adaptation which starred Jeremy Irons and his laconic british-accented narration. To this day I associate everything before the 1940's with the always detached, always calm, always above all capable attitude that came across in the series. Maybe the main reason to read this book today is simple escapism. Maybe you just want to enter a world of easy privilege, if only for an hour or two. Maybe you just want to be reminded that the people that you know, and how they behave, is probably the most important thing in your life. It's nothing to be ashamed of, and Evelyn Waugh accomplishes all of these things admirably.
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