The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
by Evelyn Waugh
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Book Summary Information
Author: Evelyn WaughEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-09-20
ISBN: 0316926604
Number of pages: 611
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Book Reviews of The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
Book Review: For Wauvian Worshippers
Summary: 5 Stars
Evelyn Waugh is the author of my favorite book, "Decline and Fall" and I am also extremely positive about most of his other novels. This volume would have been better named the Complete Short Fiction as it is more a study of starts, new endings, periods, etc. and some short stories. This must be part of a Waugh-obsessed person's library, and I consider myself one of that distinction. ... This collection is like a lost treasure map for his familiars. It includes a story which can only be an attempt to subvert a considerable anti-semetic theme in his work. It provides a time and place coincidental with the failure of his marriage that his fictional marriages carry sinister, if comedic overtones. He even wrote self-parody, in the characters that were bloated boors, alchohol reddened old men, undeniably like himself. Frankly, I can't imagine a world without the old impossibly wicked, toad. ... He was gallingly honest when it came to intolerance for silly, selfish theater of human beings. He skewered irresistably, an African royal celebration desperately trying to seem European. And the book adds to his best known cruelty toward the champagne swilling beautiful young things, lacking in the most basic human instincts, especially towards children, passion for others or ideals. (He was not considered a loving parent, by any means.)
These are great boons to those of us who want more, having been through everything else so often. Waugh's work is shocking and hilarious. I only wish he could return briefly and leave us something on the politically correct. But as that will surely not come to pass, I must say, that this volume is a great footnote, to the god of caustic disdain, to be read in bits and pieces- forever.
Summary of The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
Now in paperback, 39 short fiction works by Evelyn Waugh are available in onecomplete collection.Mordant, mirthful, and unrelenting in their lampoon of aristocratic mischief, Evelyn Waugh's novels have earned him a permanent place in the literary pantheon. But this cantankerous master--the scion, by the way, of a decidedly middle-class family of publishers and writers--was no less adept when it came to the short form. Indeed, Waugh first broke into print in 1926 with "The Balance: A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High Necked Jumpers," an early story that suggests a modernized and misanthropic P.G. Wodehouse. And he continued to write short fiction throughout the rest of his career, all of which has now been collected in the delectable Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh.
The first few entries in the collection capture a kinder, gentler author, not yet red at the verbal tooth and claw. But by 1932, when he wrote "Love in the Slump," Waugh's eye for the black-comic detail was firmly in place:
It rained heavily on the day of the wedding, and only the last-ditchers among the St. Margaret's crowd turned out to watch the melancholy succession of guests popping out of their dripping cars and plunging up the covered way into the church.... A doctor was summoned to attend the bridegroom's small nephew, who, after attracting considerable attention as a page at the ceremony by his outspoken comments, developed a high temperature and numerous disquieting symptoms of food poisoning.Waugh's wit only sharpened throughout the succeeding decades, and the very texture of his prose thickened (although it never took on much in the way of modernist adipose tissue). In "Compassion," a 1949 tale that belies the author's vaunted anti-Semitism, a mere glimpse of some Yugoslavian partisans leads to this superabundant sentence: "He passed ragged, swaggering partisans, all young, some scarcely more than children; girls in battle dress, bandaged, bemedalled, girdled with grenades, squat, chaste, cheerful, sexless, barely human, who had grown up in mountain bivouacs, singing patriotic songs, arm-in-arm along the pavements where a few years earlier rheumatics had crept with parasols and light, romantic novels." Nobody can accuse Waugh of squishy sentimentality--remember, romantic prose is strictly for convalescents. Still, The Complete Stories offers an accurate and stupendously entertaining vision of human folly, no less effective for being administered in smaller doses.
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