The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Loved One
Book Review: siskel n ebert gives it two thumbs up.
Summary: 4 Stars
although i am not an avid reader, this book gave me an interst in reading . this book is not for the young ones (pg-13). it is for mature audiences. final comments : i thought the beginning was dull at first , but as i read on i started to enjoy it. this was a good combination of laughter and strong emotions played by the characters.Book Review: the great novel of Hollywood
Summary: 5 Stars
After a brief, apparently unpleasant, stay in Hollywood--he had been commissioned to adapt his novel Brideshead Revisited for the screen--Evelyn Waugh wrote this wonderfully wicked satire of the movie business, the funeral industry, lowbrow Americans and whatever other hapless targets wandered within range of his savage pen. Dennis Barlow is a young British poet, who, having lost his movie job, is temporarily employed at The Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery modeled after the hallowed Whispering Glades, graveyard to the stars. But such a lowly job is anathema to the British expatriate community, as Sir Ambrose Abercrombie informs him:We limeys have a peculiar position to keep up, you know, Barlow. They may laugh at us a bit--the way we talk and the way we dress; our monocles--they may think us cliquey and stand-offish. but, by God, they respect us. Your five-to-two is a judge of quality. He knows what he's buying and it's only the finest type of Englishman that you meet out here. I often feel like an ambassador, Barlow. It's a responsibility, I can tell you, and in various degrees every Englishman out here shares it. We can't all be at the top of the tree but we are all men of responsibility. You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs--except in England, of course. That's understood out here, thanks to the example we've set. There are jobs that an Englishman just doesn't take.
However, when Barlow's roommate, Sir Francis Hinsley, is abruptly dismissed from his studio job and hangs himself, Abercrombie and his fellow Cricket Club members depend on Barlow to arrange the burial--after all, he knows about how to dispose of animal remains, how much different can it be?
So Barlow heads over to Whispering Glades where he is treated to a hilariously garish tour and sales pitch. He meets and falls in love with one of the cosmeticians there, Aimée Thanatogenos, but must hide the truth about his embarrassing job, particularly since she is also smitten with Mr. Joyboy, the legendary embalmer at Whispering Glades. When she proves unresponsive to his own poetry, Barlow woos her with passages from the great poets, the works of whom she is utterly ignorant.
Naturally, it all goes bung, as Barlow's various frauds are revealed and Aimée kills herself. Barlow extorts some money out of the scandal fearing Joyboy and buries her at the Hunting Grounds, so:
Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed a postcard would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you.
Waugh lays bare a Hollywood where all is pretense and illusion, where human lives--never mind human feelings--are meaningless, where semantic niceties, like calling a corpse a "Loved One" are intended to mask reality. It is brutal, and unfortunately still timely, and quite certainly one of the best novels ever written about the movie industry. It is also just a screaming hoot.
GRADE: A
Book Review: why did I have to read this in high school
Summary: 1 Stars
what were they trying to teach me?
this book is intermittently funny, more often highly and dryly pretentious and snobbish, but more than anytyhing I find it very very creepy. Towards the end when things start to fall apart for Aimee, Dennis/Waugh achieves a combination of callousness and feeble wit that is so offputting to the sensitive reader, I can hardly believe the book made it to press without a major rewrite of the last few chapters. It would be one thing if it were much much funnier, but most of the "comedy" is of the "lost in translation" variety: nothing but xenophobia and looking down on those beings from a different culture and therefore certainly inferior that populate certain parts of the globe. haha those silly japanese persist in speaking their own language/americans women are all completely interchangable unlike our English roses! Didn't this guy also write "Brokeback Revisited" anyway?
I was totally embarrrased to be seen reading it in public when I took it to dinner with me one night at the little thai place!
the movie is interesting cause john waters certainly got the idea of edie the egg lady from this film (and not from the book. mom is quite different onscreen as conceived by terry southern and c. isherwood.( also liberace is fun, rod steiger is A M A Z I N G.
Book Review: you'll believe that the dead are truly happy
Summary: 5 Stars
Looking through the reviews of this book it quickly becomes apparent that the great majority of readers are, in fact, from California. Virtually no one seems to be aware that the very essence of this book's high satire is occurring daily, right in front of them. Death, it's true, is an industry like anything else. And in California, for the wealthy, and for those that desire it, death need never be a simple, natural process. If you've got the cash spend it, you can't take it with you. The book is not a satire on death as such, it's a wonderful pisstake on the ways that people prepare for the great unknown, Through Waugh's highly evolved humor death's sting is lessened. We ought to enjoy life and its absurdities now. Not from any whispering glades. The book is painfully funny. And, fer chrissakes, you people in LA should go out to Forest Lawn in Glendale because that is what the book is sending up. Not the dear departed themselves.