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| Source: goodreads.com |
Published: 1944
My edition: 2011
Condition: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Essentials
From: My bookshelf (25th book in 'Off the Shelf')
Charles Ryder is a lonely student at Oxford, who befriends the rich Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian invites Charles to his family home, Brideshead. Charles discovers a world of eccentric and aristocratic inhabitants, but at the same time experience that duty and desire, and faith and earthly happiness are in constant conflict. This double world threatens to destroy his beloved Sebastian.
The reason for choosing this book for Banned Book Week was because it lives in my bookshelf, I have seen the movie (from 2008) and lastly because it is listed on the '1001 books you should read before you die'.
Brideshead Revisited is widely regarded as Evelyn Waugh's finest work, but sadly it doesn't appeal to me. I should have known since I didn't like the movie too much, I wouldn't like the novel. It contains a funny mood of guilt, and of people who really don't want to be where they are. However, the book is not entirely bad. The conversations between Charles and his widowed father, Edward Ryder, are some of the best comic scenes in the novel.
Why does it appear on the Banned Classics-list you may ask? ALA.org writes that in 2005 an Alabama Representative proposed that novels with gay protagonists and/or books that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle should be removed from school-, public- and university libraries in Alabama. I do not agree with the Alabama Representative because we live in a modern world, and every person deserves to be happy with who ever they choose, male or female. Do you agree/disagree?
All in all I did not become an immediate fan of the novel, but I hope there are others who enjoy it.
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As part of Banned Book Week at Bookjourney I am giving away a copy of Brideshead Revisited. Leave a comment, whether or not you agree with me not, and you will get a chance to win. PS. If you don't have a blog I can contact you at, please leave your adress at elidasta(a)gmail.com.
XOXO
