Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Often hilarious, often dull..., May 31, 2000
The best thing going for this book is its title--which, in many ways, is also the funniest thing about the book. I enjoyed sitting in front of my dorm reading it, to have people ask "what are you reading?" to which I replied, "Eating people is Wrong." "That's true," they'd say. There are many funny passages in this book. Many funny moments. Malcolm Bradbury has a sharp wit--he's the author. The plot is fairly simple--a college professor in a British school has a sort-of mid-life crisis as he interacts with the arrogant-madman Louis Bates and as they both fall in love with the gentle and mildly attractive Emma Fielding. Things happen, but I felt somewhat claustrophobic in the book as it didn't move around much. It was confining. But maybe that's the point. Reading this book made me feel like the protagonist, Stuart Treece, probably felt---weary, disillusioned, and not wanting to go on but feeling compelled to (with the book, at least). There are great passages, and I underlined a few. "Life is catalysed by knowing interesting people. That's where the vivid moments come from. And there just isn't time for bores and fools" (193). I agree with that. "Moreover, all his life, Treece had been doing things that he did not exactly want to do, journeying off on holidays he had no intention of taking, watching plays he did not wish to see, playing sports he detested, simply because someone had gone to the trouble to persuade him, simply because he felt they cared, simply...well, simply because he could not say no. He always thought what a hard time of it he would have had if he had been a woman; he would have been pregnant all the time" (149). There were moments that I loved this book, that I laughed and reread the passage aloud. Then there were moments where I found myself lost in a paragraph, completely uninterested, irritated that I was stilling reading this, asking myself, "is this going anywhere?" So I'm not sure if I recommend it. If any of this sounded interesting to you, then you should read it. If not, then don't. I'm not passionate about it or anything...but in the end, I'm glad I read it. After all, like Treece, since Bradbury had gone to the trouble of writing it, I couldn't say no.
|
|
|
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Prescient, February 21, 2006
A first novel with the kind of uneveness that you might expect, but a very good read, and often very funny -- especially if you've spent some time around universities. Liberal academics are the target here, although the book is not unsympathetic or mean-spirited; he's writing about Britain, but it connects with the US scene pretty seamlessly. "Liberal" here refers to the 1950s version (the book came out in 1959) of the well-meaning socialist left, with its ideological moorings in the 1930s and beginning to entertain guilty doubts about the perfectibility of either man or society. Bradbury was writing before the appearance of the New Left, Black Power, militant feminism, and political correctness, but his antennae were up and humming. He saw what was coming, and something about why it would all find a home among university liberal arts faculty. There is a fascinating Afterword, where Bradbury writes about the context of the times, and how he came to write the book.
|
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hilarious, sophisticated, but most important: very humane , May 13, 2005
This a sensitive, hilarious, thought provoking and well thought-out novel. Its settings is a provincial British University where you encounter Mr. Eborebelosa, a student from Africa and a son of a tribal chief, who escapes the pecularities of the British life by locking himself in public lavatories and promising sensitive Emma Fielding of attractive African clothing if she is to join his long line of domesticated African wives. There is the would-be poet Lous Bates, a prospective genius for some of the time and a madman for the most of the time. There is the almost beautiful Emma who invokes images of Virginia Wolf especially if you hadn't seen Virginia Wolf on or off the screen. But above all there is Treece, a true liberal acting as liberals should, he has to carry out other people's burdens when they don't have the capacity to carry it out for themselves, and if the immoralities of others didn't disturb their conscience it was not his place to condemn them, but if had been around while those immoralitites were commited he felt it his duty to square them. A major English novel.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Vladimir Nabokov
by Richard Russo
by Kingsley Amis
by Malcolm Bradbury
by David Lodge
See all 30 books citing this book
