The Unbearable Bassington [Paperback]

Saki (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 14, 2007 | ISBN-10: 1426407505 | ISBN-13: 978-1426407505

Short excerpt: Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have admitted that she was svelte and knew how to dress, but they would have agreed with her friends in asserting that she had no soul…

Product Details

• Paperback: 138 pages
• Publisher: BiblioBazaar (May 14, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1426407505
• ISBN-13: 978-1426407505
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,880,186 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good peek at Edwardian England, September 8, 2009

By 

C. K. Whitsett (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Unbearable Bassington (Paperback)

The Unbearable Bassington centers on Francesca Bassington, a woman obsessed with protecting her possessions, and her son Comus, a wise-cracking, irresponsible, and shallow young man who simultaneously charms and offends everyone with whom he comes in contact. Francesca has affection for her son, but wishes he could be remade as a responsible member of society, especially where such responsibility can lead to Francesca's continued well-being. Comus, however, manages both purposely and accidentally to thwart his mother's wishes, and in the end is sent into exile in Africa, where it is hoped he will make a career. Secondary characters abound, most notably Courtney Youghal, a mediocre but flashy politician with whom Comus has a shallow friendship, and who becomes Comus's rival for the hand of the wealthy Elaine de Frey. Francesca disapproves of Courtney, yet it is clear she wishes that her son were more like him. Ironically, although Comus's main shortcoming seems that he's an idler, he is no more so than his mother and her circle. It seems more to the point to say that Comus doesn't idle in the proper way.

Most of the book is a setup for the last few chapters, which deal with Comus's exile, and which are poignant in the best sense of the word. Essentially, Comus is doomed by his own nature, which will not allow him, as an adult, to fit into the society in which he was raised. I take strong issue with the idea, put forth by the previous reviewer, that Comus is Dorian Gray-like. The comparison is absurd. Comus is merely a puckish boy who doesn't fit, and so is sent away to be forgotten.

The book is a fairly complex study of human motivation, although it is somewhat undercut by Saki's need to clutter the text with political and cultural details that detract from its basic themes. Also present are Saki's ubiquitious bons mots which, while charming in his short stories, become tiresome as the book goes on. This carping aside, it is an insightful look at middle-class England in the waning days of the empire, just prior to the outbreak of World War I.

I think it's also something for us to read today, when perhaps our children aren't "achieving" as we think they should. That's why I reread it, and I'm glad I did.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely entertaining and well written, November 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Complete Novels and Plays of Saki (Paperback)

Stories are typical of Saki. Extremely humourus with an underlying bite ridiculing prevalent pretensions and beliefs. Languages is long winded yet entertaining. A pleasure to read.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BEARABLY SUBLIME, May 5, 2008

By 

John Stahle (New York City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Unbearable Bassington (Hardcover)

I turned to Saki after giving up on Ronald Firbank, and the contrast is instructive. In any Firbank, camp novelties abound (e.g., the British consul named Sir Something Somebody) yet they are unsupported by anything like a story, so in time the reader is driven away as if he were served bones without meat at a swank restaurant. Saki offers everything Firbank does not, and in his minute, satiric observance of the English upper class, he is the heir to Oscar Wilde. Saki rejects the phony moralism of "Dorian Gray" for the untroubled insouciance of Wilde's story "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime." The result is "The Unbearable Bassington," a rare gem among Edwardian novels. In this teeming, perfect work, Saki not only inherits the mantle of Wilde; he trumps him decisively.

Start with a little perseverance. Chapter One of "Bassington" is tedious, unfocused, and discouraging, but get to the end of it and you are rewarded by Chapter Two, so alarmingly pungent it may be the finest quantum of prose in Saki's entire output. After that, the delights never end. A treasure-trove of epigrams twinkles in every fold of this marvelous story, a portrait of Edwardians as knowing as anything Wilde ever wrote. But we are shocked to discern real, pulsing lives behind Saki's screen of artifice. Wilde never cared about his characters as much as the language used to tell about them, whereas Saki cares about both characters and language, and delivers grandly on both.