The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh
The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh
1 Rating(s)
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The Loved One

Author: Evelyn Waugh

Narrator: Simon Prebble

Unabridged: 3 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/11/2012

Synopsis

"A work of art as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything its author has ever done" (New Yorker), The Loved One is Evelyn Waugh's cutting satire of 1940s California and the Anglo-American cultural divide.

Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday--and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art. Waugh's dark and savage satire depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Paige on July 23, 2007

The copy I had of this was used, and had underlines where the previous reader would note in the margin "funny," and "ha." This reader stopped doing this by the third or fourth page, either because s/he no longer found it funny, or it became absurd to underline all passages and mark them as "ha." I t......more

Goodreads review by Paul on February 18, 2020

You heard of the phrase “shooting fish in a barrel” – that’s what Evelyn Waugh does here. There are two barrels, but both are of solid oak and the fish are glittery and plump so there is still a lot of fun to be had. The story I get from Wikipedia which got it from his biographer is that Hollywood w......more

Goodreads review by David on April 07, 2010

My appreciation of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One is authentic, sure, but at the same time a little reserved because, try as I might, I can't convincingly revise my initial impression of it as a cheap shot at American life and values -- which isn't to say that it isn't funny or compelling or entertain......more

Goodreads review by Vit on December 14, 2016

What is this thing necrophilia? According to Evelyn Waugh it is a truly megalomaniac obsession with burying the dead. And The Loved One is a cynically murderous and hilarious… obituary. “Our Grade A service includes several unique features. At the moment of committal, a white dove, symbolizing the de......more

Quotes

"Fiendishly entertaining."—New York Times

"As a piece of writing it is nearly faultless; as satire it is an act of devastation."—John Woodburn, The New Republic

"You'd better buy The Loved One, because I can't imagine a purchase apt to corrupt and delight you more...Never before that I can remember has a talent of such austere and classic design been applie to such monstrous vulgarities; never before have the majestic themes of love and death been so delicately perverted to absurdity....It is certainly a work of art, as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything its author has ever done."—Wolcott Gibbs, The New Yorker

"Although the locale of The Loved One is Hollywood, it is not filmdom that Mr. Waugh takes in hand, but the American ethos....He finds a touchstone for the mass-mind of America, for the compulsion to 'package' everything, even love and death....Mr. Waugh's treatment of his macabre material is uninhibited, and wickedly funny...as sadistic, playful, and decisive as a cat's paw on a mouse."—Alice S. Morris, New York Times Book Review

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