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Cargando... Decadencia y caída (1928)por Evelyn Waugh
  
» 15 más 20th Century Literature (385) Books Read in 2016 (2,555) Read This Next (17) 1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus (348) Books Read in 2018 (2,045) Academia in Fiction (53) 1920s (45) Best Campus Novels (67) In and About the 1920s (157) First Novels (110) the preppy handbook (16) Biggest Disappointments (494) Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.   ) mrsnickleby | Jan 18, 2024 |  This is the first published, therefore debut novel for Evelyn Waugh and is based on the author’s own experience with academia. The main character Paul Pennyfeather is expelled after running through campus without his trousers. He loses his guardian’s support and is forced to find employment. Employment leads to North Wales which then leads to falling in love and a proposal to marry. The marriage is halted by the arrest, conviction, and incarceration of Paul. In the end, all things end where they started. The author wanted that the reader should know “IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY”. Themes include cultural confusion, moral disorientation, and social bedlam. (  ) Kristelh | Mar 11, 2023 |  ) nhhoward | Jan 19, 2023 |  ) LoriWise | Nov 1, 2022 | About midway of this novel, there is a scene set at a boy’s school sports day. I could picture this event perfectly...the children of the wealthy and prestigious, not an athlete among them, taking all the honors and awards in races that make no sense whatsoever. This is Waugh’s first novel and it achieves what he set out to do, I’m sure. Being a huge fan of his Brideshead Revisited, a more straightforward look at the English privileged, I found this not able to compete. On the other hand, this is where the groundwork was laid for the great writing to come, and as satire goes, this one works. ( ) mattorsara | Aug 11, 2022 |
 No novel is a statement, and we should try to fight against making inferences about the author's state of mind. Nevertheless I will succumb to temptation by suggesting that the twenty-five-year-old Waugh, rather than go mad or commit suicide, was in real need of something that offered an explanation of or an excuse for the horrors of existence. We all know what Evelyn Waugh found —to his artistic detriment: what had been an enlivening bitterness sank to defiance and jeering, a struggle against the unalterable and inevitable on the secular and social plane... Waugh's one great book is the outcome not, as Edmund Wilson put it, of regarding cruel things as funny because he didn't understand them. One way or the other, what Decline and Fall is the outcome of is trying to make cruel things as funny as possible, because that is one of the very few ways of making them a little less intolerable. In Decline and Fall Mr. Waugh did what hardly any modern author has done in his first book; he reated a character that simply and naturally takes its place among the great characters of fiction that are larger than life-size, and more significant than a single child of man can be. Grimes is one of the world's great rogues, one of those whose serenity and bloomy sense of inner rightness almost persuade honest men that there is a strong moral case for roguery; and he has a subtle value, too, as a vehicle for criticism of our English life. For in him the generation that has spent its youth overshadowed by Dr. Arnold and Rudyard Kipling joyously recognized an embodiment of all the exceedingly queer forms that nature, driven out with a fork from the public school, assumes in order that it may effect a reëntrance. The great thing about Decline and Fall, written when the author was twenty-five, was its breath-taking spontaneity. The latter part of the book leans a little too heavily on Voltaire’s Candide, but the early part, that hair-raising harlequinade in a brazenly bad boys’ school, has an audacity that is altogether Waugh’s and that was to prove the great principle of his art. This audacity is personified here by an hilarious character, called Grimes. Though a schoolmaster and a ‘ public-school man,” Grimes is frankly and even exultantly everything that is most contrary to the British code of good behavior: he is a bounder, a rotter, a scoundrel, but he never has a moment of compunction. Decline And Fall stands alone in the canon. The constant flow of comic invention, and the absurdist logic ordering the characters' actions, makes it memorable. The book's logic is that of Lewis Carroll, its spirit allied to the genial anarchy of early Marx Brothers films. When Grimes escapes from prison, as earlier he has escaped from marriage to Dr Fagan's awful daughter, he is thought to have perished in the quicksand of Egdon Mire a joke related to the Great Grimpen Mire in The Hound Of The Baskervilles. Like Paul, however, we know that Grimes is not dead but a life force, immortal. That's the right word also for Evelyn Waugh's comic creation. Pertenece a las series editorialesPremiosListas de sobresalientes
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