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Naming a novel is painstaking, agonizing, delicate. But does the title matter? It certainly feels consequential to the author. After several years' battle with your laptop keyboard, after 100,000 words placed so deliberately, you must distill everything into a phrase brief enough to run down the spine of a book. Should it be descriptive? Perhaps [...]

It's spring! The sun is shining. The flowers are in bloom. The Blazers are winning (fingers crossed). We're in a good mood. So for our latest round of Required Reading, we lined up our 25 favorite funny novels. Whether biting, riotous, savage, or slapstick, each of these books consistently makes us laugh. ÷ ÷ ÷ [...]

Edward St. Aubyn, whose social comedy is “more reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or Nancy Mitford than of anyone writing today,” appears Upstairs at the Square this Wednesday.

Back to Brideshead Revisited, for it is important not to leave that book behind before celebrating a few more aspects of its differentiating greatness. I mentioned structure in yesterday's blog, and I should have been more clear, I should have said: Isn't it extraordinary how Waugh is able to shift his camera's lens from character to character, giving us all we need to know about each one, precisely when we need to know it? Waugh unveils relationships, and this trumps any adherence to strict chronology. It is by shuffling his time deck that he gains much of his power, so that by the time we begin Book II and we are told, "My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time," we already fully understand that we are not just reading a masterfully assembled story. We are being steeped in something much deeper.

That's one thing. But there is also, of course, the peeling away that Waugh does, his sui generis descriptions of people, his way of showing the magnitude and mystery of time passing. Take this passage, about his heroine, Julia, whom Waugh's narrator knew as a 20 year old, and whom he rediscovers several years later:

She was not yet thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spiderly look; the head that I used to think Quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was now part of herself and not at all Florentine—not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself, was her own essence, and could only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have for her.

One last thing, just for today: Waugh's mastery of nuance. Not just the nuance of telling one story overtly while suggesting another (the told story of one aborted love affair, the never quite told story of a suppressed one). But Waugh's ability to pin a concept to the wall. Here he is on charm:

"... Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you."

Brideshead Revisited is a classic, as my niece Claire would say. An electrification, on so many levels. An instruction.

Okay, so in order to write this post I have to confess something– I have an obsession with Brideshead.

I know a lot of you will be saying, “Oh, me too… nothing to be ashamed of..”

But no.  I have an OBSESSION.  I have read the novel about 20 times. I own the entire miniseries (on VHS, a legacy from my grandfather, who taped it from TV). I own and have read “Charles Ryder’s School days”, Waugh’s book that preceded the actual novel (more than once). I have the soundtrack to the miniseres on both vinyl and CD.  And to top it all off, I wrote my senior paper in high school about the dang thing.

I like it a LOT!

Not just because my mom made me watch it as a kid. Or because its lush and rich and aristocratic.

But because it really really ROCKS.  There are lines of real poetry. The characters  are so incredibly multifaceted.  And watching Charles and Julia and Sebastian change and grow as they aged, in different ways, had a profound effect on me in my twenties, as I tried to think about what it meant to get older, and how that related to pleasure and obligation– silly things like that.

It was a very different book for me when I was 18 than it was when I was 28.   As I grew into who I wanted to be as a partner, parent, person.

The beginning and the end of the book are so different. Youth and age, innocence and experience. exuberence and nostalgia and wisdom.

So…

When I heard they were making a movie I got very excited. But this morning, watching the trailer, I was sad.

The film appears to be watchful from the get-go. In the book and the miniseries, eden turns.  But from the looks of this trailer, the snake is slitering around the garden before the movie even starts.  This won’t work for me.  Without the sacred, the profane just isn’t that interesting.

And this is so much a book about faith and grace, as well as our base instincts, our passions, our complexities..

When the book opens, Charles is looking at the house, remembering his youth there.  As the book proceeds, he moves from remembering with nostalgia what he calls “halcyon days” (his life at Oxford, his finding of the “low door in the wall”) to remembering with sadness the demise of his friend, and his awareness of the complications and dysfunctions of the Flyte/Marchmain clan.  His loss of youth, etc…

But without the halcyon days in arcadia, this will all fall very flat.  We don’t need another movie about the dirty underbelly of the bored and twisted British aristocracy.  The point about Brideshead is that you read it and you experience his process, his growing-up, his realizations.

I find it telling that the music in this film is SOOOOO different from the astoundingly beautiful score to the miniseries. It is ominous. It foretells.

In my case, it disappoints.

This may be a situation like Bridge to Terabithia, where the marketing is just awful and the film is not, in fact, the film being advertised. Maybe they did capture the youth and love and nostagia, the magic. The garden before the fall.

Let’s hope.

Here’s the new trailer, and bit of the old…  a scene I feel captures the loveliness, the dappled youth, the light…

What say you?