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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Saturday, August 11, 2018

The saddest moment in Brideshead Revisited

Picking up on versions of sin in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Julia goes off on one of the longest jags in this novel after she leaves the room in tears when her brother Bridey accuses her of living in sin w narrator, Charles  - she seems to be ranting against the forces of morality and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church (she is an RC) though it's hard to interpret this odd and out-of-character outburst.  What's notable is that at the end she recalls her stillborn daughter and cries out that "they" wouldn't even let her see the child. I don't know whom to blame there - the church, the doctors, her family, her husband - but's the saddest moment in this novel. Shortly thereafter the other Flytr daughter, Cordelia , returns to Brideshead and to this narrative after a ten-year absence doing nursing duty in the Spanish civil war and in Europe - narrator notices how plain and aged she looks, even tells her so when pressed - this novel is surely in part about the ravages of time, on people, families, marriages, houses. None of the flute children has fulfilled early pro,use, or st least early hopes. Cordelia gives the narrator a long update on the condition of his first friend (first love?), her bro Sebastian- now living in an alcoholic stupor at a Moroccan monastery- it's a god portrait of the man in ruins but of course indirect, second-hand. What we're waiting for if a final meeting e Sebastian, a scene in which the narrator comes to some kind of recognition and reconciliation w the divergent paths of their lives and with what caused them both to avoid emotional commitment, family, parenthood.

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