07-28-2008, 07:15 PM | #1 |
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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Brideshead Revisited
All right, I have no idea why there hasn't been a thread yet, but there is now.
1) Have you read it? 2) What do you think of it? (NOTE: If the answer to #1 is "No", then do so post-haste! )
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07-30-2008, 04:26 AM | #2 | |||
Elf Lord
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Quote:
I like this quote: Quote:
How to watch Evelyn Waugh. Though this doesn't sound promising: Quote:
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Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals."- Winston Churchill |
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08-21-2008, 03:53 PM | #3 |
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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Are you going to see the movie?
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Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis. Nulla talem silva profert, fronde, flore, germine. Dulce lignum, dulce clavo, dulce pondus sustinens. 'With a melon?' - Eric Idle |
08-31-2008, 08:18 AM | #4 |
Elf Lord
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Not sure- the TV adaptation was so good that I'd hate to spoil the memory.
Sorry, it's been so long since I read it that I don't think I could even discuss it now- plus I'd get the book and the series mixed up. But if you want to start, it might prod something loose.. I do remember Waugh saying later that if he'd written it again, he wouldn't have put the death-bed acceptance of the Last Rites in, though I don't see why not- I'm sure a lot of people who have doubts might change their mind at the last minute.
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Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals."- Winston Churchill |
08-31-2008, 12:20 PM | #5 |
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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Don't. It's crap. So wrong on so many levels.
The miniseries, on the other hand, is superb. And not in the standard "true to the book but poor production and sub-par acting" way of BBC miniseries, but just all around spectacular. I loaned mine to my brother, and I was annoyed that I had done so; I needed something to purge my system after watching the movie. It really is the book on screen, effectively. They often bring the subtexts more to the forefront, but they are never making it up; everything in there has basis in the novel. It's really quite astounding that someone made such a great adaptation of a novel. Will it ever happen again, I wonder? I'm rather surprised you and I are the only one's who've read it. This being a fairly literary crowd with a certain level of anglophilia floating around, and Brideshead being a well-known English novel, I'd have thought the two would have connected.
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Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis. Nulla talem silva profert, fronde, flore, germine. Dulce lignum, dulce clavo, dulce pondus sustinens. 'With a melon?' - Eric Idle |
09-01-2008, 05:49 PM | #6 |
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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How exactly would you characterise the homoerotic element to the relationship between Charles and Sebastian? Subconscious? Conscious, but chaste? Chaste and homosexual? Unrequited?
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Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis. Nulla talem silva profert, fronde, flore, germine. Dulce lignum, dulce clavo, dulce pondus sustinens. 'With a melon?' - Eric Idle |
09-04-2008, 12:28 PM | #7 | |
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Quote:
It's kind of hard to say, giving the conditions Waugh was writing under but... I'd say definitely conscious on the part of Sebastian, but not necessarily overtly sexual, at least at first IIRC, Charles was presented as coming from that middle/upper-middle English intellectual background that was associated with a rather dessicated empiricist/skeptical background- very J. S. Millish; all mind and no body. (One always gets the feeling with these types that they engaged in adultery and sexually liberated behaviour more out of a sense of duty to 'epater le bourgeois' than any actual lust.) While being at the same time rather scrumptious in a clean-cut innocent way; is that made clear in the book, or just in the mini-series? So I think it was the seduction as such that appealed to Sebastian- awakening Charles's total sensuous being, as much through the aesthetic sense as the bodily. Charles is as affected by all the art and architecture as much as the pink champagne and strawberries of their private picnics. Later, Sebastian may actually fall in love with Charles, but I think he is also pushing him away through his deliberate self-destructiveness, and deliberately rejecting any chance of such happiness as he might have obtained. Charles himself? Julia...I did a quick trip through some critical comments, and most people seem to see her as the culmination of the feelings that Charles has been first awakened to by Sebastian; I tend to see her as more of a consolation prize- that which is acceptable to society, and desirable in herself, but no substitute for the flame of her brother.
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Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals."- Winston Churchill Last edited by GrayMouser : 09-04-2008 at 12:32 PM. |
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09-09-2008, 11:50 PM | #8 | |||||
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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Well, it runs a close race with "Who is Lady Marchmain?" for the most interesting question.
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Even her marriage is rather disreputable. Remember the hole-in-the-wall wedding, boycotted by her family, in a seedy chapel? A reading of his relationship with Julia as merely a respectable consolation prize also doesn't seem to be consonant with the fact that it is, in the end, rejected by her, and for purely respectable reasons. It seems strange to portray a relationship as ended by the very thing which constitutes it. Or am I misreading you? Or am I just wrong?
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Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis. Nulla talem silva profert, fronde, flore, germine. Dulce lignum, dulce clavo, dulce pondus sustinens. 'With a melon?' - Eric Idle |
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09-16-2008, 05:39 AM | #9 | |
Elf Lord
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Quote:
As related to Charles and Julia, anyway. I still remember the prediction one of the monks gives to Charles about Sebastian's future- ending up as assistant gardener, with his own little rituals and now and then falling into temptation.
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Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals."- Winston Churchill |
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