Reviews

• * Cautiously psychotic in a classy way *

• One of my favourite books!

• After Many a Summer is Huxley's great story of LA and California. Its images from the thirties have inspired other great writers, Evelyn Waugh with The Loved One among them. Huxley's bitter-sweet philosophy reads as fresh today as when he wrote it during the Spanish Civil War. Don't fail to read this. One word of advice AVOID THE DUMMIED-UP VERSION by the FOLIO SOCIETY, London, 1980, which includes illustrations. This will always be a MODERN book and should be presented as such. Pete Edler, Stockholm

• A very interesting novel, based in late 1930s Los Angeles at a San Simeon-like castle, with leading characters remarkably similar to WR Hearst and Marion Davies. At times extremely racy for a book published in 1939, it takes you places Citizen Kane could not go -- i.e. sexually explicit situations and into the lascivious minds of the participants. The high-tech advancements available to the mega-wealthy Hearst-type in the 1930s are ones that even today all cannot afford. The ideas about ecological living, etc. -- unfortunately long departures from the storyline -- are the same as what's bandied about now. Incredible descriptions of LA hold up amazingly, all that's needed to advance them into the 21st century is the addition of mega-skyscrapers, freeways and traffic jams. Books by authors who are iconic for one massive success such as Brave New World, often have terrific material that's unfortunately overlooked, or just lost in time. Having recently found and enjoyed Erich Maria Remarque's less famous works, and this, I now look at the work of their American contemporaries like Hemingway and Fitzgerald with a jaundiced eye, and wonder....Is that all there is?

• Tolle Dialoge wie ....(original in Französisch und von mir übersetzt) "mein Frühling und mein Sommer sind aus dem Fenster gesprungen". Das bezieht sich auf eine konkrete Frage die ich jedoch nicht verraten möchte.

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