can we talk about Evelyn Waugh? Please?

'vile bodies'. it's sort of downhill from there, though i suspect the travel books possess some interest.

No no no! Listen not to that chap! 'A Handful of Dust', 'Scoop' and 'The Loved One' are also all fab. The WW2 trilogy is also excellent. The travel books are the disappointing ones, in that they have the feel of having been a bit written for the money.

It has been decades since I read Waugh, so I can't be trusted for a recommendation, but I do remember him fondly.

Morrison OTM. If you like Decline, then Vile Bodies and Handful of Dust should do it especially well.
Put Out More Flags hasn't been mentioned yet, and is also terrific.
The short stories are great too.

Ha, weird: I was going to second Scoop and The Loved One instead of Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust.

The Loved One is blessed with a bunch of secondary interests, too: Los Angeles! America! The mortuary industry! It kind of supercedes everything people like about Nathaniel West.

How does it supercede? Day Of The Locust is arty but it taps deeper.Comparative quotes, please? I do wish West been a little more forthcoming with the observational: the glimpes of the furtive cowboy movie extra underclass (the cockfights etc) almost steal the show. (Oh yeah, and The Last Tycoon's musings while driving and observing fruits of Western Civ/commerce vs. nature in Southern Cali are pretty vivid too)

I loved the way they all had the same cool-looking green and yellow cartoon covers for years and years. I don't think there was a bad one in the batch that I read, although I never got around to the PBS-friendly Brideshead. I was worried beforehand that A Handful Of Dust with its serious title and theme was going to represent a drop-off in comedy and quality but I was pleasantly surprised. The Dickens-loving Geoffrey Holder character that Tony Last runs into up the Amazon is truly terrifying.

Seems like Brideshead came off a little too soap opera as a book, but the made-for BBC/PBS was awesome soap opera! Jeremy Irons was all innocent-seeming, that's how long ago it was. Olivier as Daddy In Exile, everybody was great. According to a chronicle of the Waughs (written by Hilary?) reviewed in the New Yorker recently, E.W. went so religious when his wife left him for another, which explains--I won't say what it explains in the book. The reviewer was like, "Wasn't it amazing that the Waughs could say anything, they did not live in sanitized P.C times (sigh)", good thing he never heard of teh internets. But mostly a really interesting description of the book, and the family...

I guess these covers are still around
http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/8570000/8574885.gif

Here's what I was talking about: Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, by Alexander Waugh
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/07/02/070702crbo_books_acella July 02 issue

Augh, I misspelled reviewer Joan Acocella's name: URL is actually
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/07/02/070702crbo_books_acocella

thanks for all the recommendations! I finished Decline and fall today, and it was so good that I fell true loss now that its over. *sigh* Grimes forever!

*feel

Waugh! What Is He Good For?

Best thread title ever.

That's actually related to how I found ILX.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v483/Hereward/CIMG0217.jpg

I had always thought you discovered ILX through its contiguous border with Ask A Drunk, your native land.

Eric Hobsbawm said that Waugh's book were "black comedy for stoics." Which books are those???

the collected short stories also recommended.

"the Loved One" was very good, though I actually REALLY enjoyed "Brideshead Revisited". Wonderfully constructed, a real artifice which demonstrates real skill at constructing a detailed, fleshed-out plot without superfluidities. They simply DO NOT make novels like that anymore. I didn't finish "Decline and Fall", though I read "A Bit of Learning" the first part of his autobiography (he didn't finish the second) and it was also really good. He is the only Waugh worth reading, even Alec Waugh thought so. Life is long, and Waugh is an author we all should have time to read in his totality without too much exertion. As with Martin Amis, Nab, Pynch, Rushdie, and the other semi-canonical favorites always in print and stacked high at chain booksellers.

Eric Hobsbawm is a marxist historian. He views history as an unfolding of the spirit through the hegelian dialectic. Do we trust such a man's aesthetics when his epistemology dictates a messianic dictatorship of the proletariat? No, we leave him on the shelf with the other continental fruitbaskets.

"the ordeal of gilbert pinfold" is an interesting oddity

boy is Decline and Fall good! It's the last of the major Waughs I'd yet to read.