Razvukla sam je na jedno mesec-dva, pa možda zato i nisam uspela u potpunosti da se stopim s njom...opšti utisak je prosečan, zbog toga trojka.

Kad sve sumiram, osim velikog broja likova, totalno različitih, gde je skoro svako u nekom svom svetu (što nas još jednom podseća na to koliko smo svi posebni i jedinstveni), mogu reći i da mi se posebno dopala raznovrsnost međuljudskih odnosa, naročito muško-ženskih. Da ne nabrajam, ko je čitao, znaće o čemu govorim :)

Huxley has a readable style and mixes plot events with mystery while working in his point and counter points.

Though in this tale he has too many characters. I call this the poor man's, or maybe I should say the "Reader's Digest" version of 'Dance to the Music of Time' (which I recently just finished).

The plot keeps one's interest but many of the ideas and happenings are severely dated. This novel doesn't quite stand the test of time. Probably selected for the Modern Library 100 because of his fame
and the teachings of those who picked the list.

PCP is supposedly a skewering of the mores of the day with many characters taken from society. One is supposed to be DH Lawrence, another probably Mosley, a British fascist leader of the time. Other than those two, no one now would know or care about the others.

A lot of the fun in the book is in the title. Huxley puts forth an idea, then switches scenes and has another idea counter it. One of the humorous episodes concerns the character Phillip Quales, who probably depcits Huxley, who writes about writing. So you have a mirror and mirror effect, a writer
writing about a writer, who is writing about writing?

"Nunca acontece nada a um homem que não seja semelhante a esse homem."

To this day, Aldous Huxley's "Point Counter Point" remains my favourite novel. The deepest corners of human nature -- that's where he goes, and that's where I haven't seen anyone else being able to.
The novel doesn't have a front-to-back storyline, a precise plot, or a main character. It starts off with Walter Bidlake's "trials and tribulations", only to extend to the entire social network of the London elite of the 1930s.
Huxley's versatility brings this writing to the status of "masterpiece", since all characters are explored (or they explore themselves) in great depth, from the flourishing façade to the darkest memories and secrets. The incredibly beautiful and superficial woman, the rough military leader with a soft spot, the cynical and politically involved, the rich, the one who despises the rich but secretly envies them -- name it, and you've got it there. And then there's the way they all influence each other's lives. It gives you the feeling you're looking at a complicated chess game, only from inside the pieces. It's clockwork, but it's also got the spontaneity you expect to find in the 20 years between the World Wars, when the world was left without any solid values and everyone was just thinking about tomorrow.

Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley

Another version of this note and thoughts on other books are available at:

- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...


This is a monumental novel that I must admit to have rejected years ago...
How foolish one can be.
Aldous Huxley has dazzled me with:

-tBrave New World, The Doors of Perception and now this masterpiece.

It is a complex work, with complicated characters and surprising events...
There is even a murder, a few deaths and some love affairs...

Astonishing points of view are expressed on almost anything

From God to the music of Beethoven, from Saint Francis to Tolstoy.

Speaking of Saint Francis, there is a personage that attacks the said Francis with aplomb.

He was sick, licking the wounds of lepers for his benefit.
This Saint did not cure those sick people, he was just enjoying himself.

Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit that I found the remarks funny, albeit in a tasteless, cruel and exaggerated way.

John Bidlake seems to be towering over this account, at least in terms of seniority, if not with his status as the leonine creator of old.
A lover with energy, charm, talent, success and idiosyncrasies he is likeable...up to a point.

Walter Bidlake is one of my favorites, the son of the aforementioned painter and trapped in a disastrous affair with Lucy Tantamount, while also cohabiting with a pregnant Marjorie.

I just realized that I have to give up on the other characters, even if this mix is fascinating.
The dinamic of their relationships was hard to follow sometimes, but this chef d'oeuvre is extremely satisfying.

The dialogues are marvelous and the themes are serious and looked at from unusual angles.

Tolstoy is dismissed as something of an old fool and I happen to have read The Intellectuals by Paul Johnson which shows that despicable side of the Russian writer...and a good number of others:

-tIbsen, Hemingway, Rousseau...

One statement that intrigued me was, I hope similar to what I put here:

-tThe search for The Truth is not really "noble".
-tIt is just like any other occupation.
-tIndeed, many of those who think about that are ordinary or worse.

It was in the line of challenging Saint Francis, the music of Beethoven which is too wonderful, too heavenly...

And there are characters that challenge most accepted points of view

perhaps this book was simply too extroverted for me with its two dozen main characters?

Considered by many to be Aldous Huxley’s greatest novel, despite the appeal and popularity of Brave New World, Point Counter Point is unquestionably his longest and most complex book. It was published in 1928 to mixed reviews, with some hailing the novel as a significant examination of contemporary society—Cyril Connolly in New Statesman called it Huxley’s “most important” novel, while Joseph Wood Krutch in the Nation called it a “comprehensive analysis of the contemporary soul.” But others were less impressed. In Spectator, Rachel Annan Taylor complained that Huxley’s characters were types taken “from the pathology textbooks,” and in the Saturday Review L.P. Hartley called Huxley’s fictional world “a hospital.” Even Huxley’s friend D.H. Lawrence was harsh with his praise: “I do think that art has to reveal the palpitating moment or the state of man as it is,” he wrote to Huxley. “And I think you do that, terribly.”

One has to wonder whether Huxley was amused at the divided reactions to his novel. After all, the reviews themselves engaged in their own “point-counterpoint,” as if under the influence of his novel. In any case, history has been kind to Huxley’s book, and the Modern Library did include it as number 44 on its list of the 100 best 20th century novels in English (they do, it is true, list Brave New World as number 5 on that same list). Yet despite its reputation, the novel is actually out of print. Even the most recent editions promoted on Amazon are available only in used copies. Nor can you get an audible version of the book. So if you’re going to read it, you’re going to have to get it used, or take the shocking step of getting it from your library.

The first thing you should know about this book is that it is a prototypical “novel of ideas,” and that those ideas come at you full on in discussion after discussion among the various characters of the book. The vast majority of the book seems to be characters discussing things (at this point I can hear my own readers crying out, “Physician, heal thyself,” but I digress). Things do happen, of course, but the narrative is not made up of interconnected plot points, but rather of infidelities, betrayals, grave illnesses, artistic triumphs, even a murder (but I won’t say whose or give away any motives), all occurring more as illustrations, refutations or causes of the various characters’ viewpoints.

Hence, of course, the title. At first blush, Point Counter Point refers to the flow of arguments in a debate, and there are plenty of debates in the novel, concerning politics, science, art, religion, in which the various characters will take one side or the other as in a debate. The overall theme seems to be the dichotomy of reason vs. emotion, mind vs. body, as they effect those other themes. It was a constant concern of Huxley’s.

But the title also suggests another meaning of “counterpoint,” as it is used in musical composition. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines musical counterpoint as “one or more independent melodies added above or below a given melody,” or “The combination of two or more independent melodies into a single harmonic texture in which each retains its linear character.” That Huxley had this definition in mind in the composition of his novel is not in doubt. One of the characters, Philip Quarles, a novelist himself, makes notes at one point as he plans the structure of his novel:

“The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound. . . . But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions . . . More interesting still, the modulations. . . . Get this into a novel… All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots….More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways ….Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: The novelist can assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events in the story in their various aspects—emotional, scientific, religious, metaphysical, etc. He will modulate from one to the other…Put a novelist in the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting—at least to me.”

I quote at length because this is Huxley’s own explanation, put into the mouth of the novelist character in his novel, of exactly what he is doing.

It should come as no surprise that Philip Quarles is usually regarded as a representation of Huxley himself in the novel. Other characters are presumed to be fictionalizations of Huxley’s acquaintances. The character of Mark Rampion, a writer and artist who is perhaps the most respected debater of the novel and is a critic of modern society in general, finding no value in industrialization on the one hand or religion on the other, is generally thought to be Huxley’s fictionalized version of Lawrence, and the section of the book that depicts Rampion’s wooing and wedding of his wife Mary seems to recall Lawrence and his wife Frieda. One wonders if that is one of the details Lawrence had thought Huxley had done so terribly.

The young journalist Walter Bidlake, has scandalously been living with a woman, Marjorie Carling, who has left her husband is bearing Walter’s child. But the relationship is falling apart because Walter is in love with the free-loving Lucy Tantamount, who is based on the aristocratic British writer Nancy Cunard, with whom Huxley had a similar relationship. Walter’s father is the well-known painter John Bidlake, who has had his own multitudinous affairs, and who is based on the Welsh painter Augustus John, the toast of Britain’s art world prior to the first World /war but who work, like Bidlake’s, was in decline in the post-war world. Denis Burlap, Walter’s editor, is a hypocrite who mouths Christian morality in public but is scheming, greedy, and lecherous in his private life. Burlap is purportedly based on author and magazine editor John Middleton Murry, a friend of Lawrence’s and of Katherine Mansfield’s.

One of the more controversial figures in the novel is Everard Webley, political activist and founder, in the novel, of the right-wing Brotherhood of British Freemen. Quarles’ wife Elinor is tempted to have an affair with Webley, who has often been compared with Oswald Mosley, bounder of the British Union of Fascists. However, that organization was not founded until 1932. There were, however, plenty of smaller Fascist movements in Britain in the 1920s to give Huxley fuel for his fire.

Another major character is Maurice Spandrell, purportedly based on the French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, whom Huxley would not have known. In the novel, Spandrell is obsessed with finding evidence of God in his own life, and deliberately commits outrageous acts hoping to provoke God to punish his vices. He consistently tries to get Rampion to admit that something in the world is actually evidence of the existence of God, Ironically, if there is anything in the book that suggests this, it’s the fact that when Elinor considers adultery with the Fascist Webley, her young son is stricken with meningitis—evidence, if at all, of a cruel and vindictive deity.

The novel has no traditional protagonist, as each character represents a kind of position on the point-counter-point dialectic. Some, however, do represent positions quite meaningful in today’s world as well as in Huxley’s. It’s somewhat surprising, for example, to find the amateur scientist Lord Edward Tantamount taking an environmentalist position that could easily be pronounced even now, nearly a century later:

“No doubt,” he said, “you think you can make good the loss with phosphate rocks. But what’ll you do when the deposits are exhausted?…What then? Only two hundred years and they’ll be finished. You think we’re being progressive because we’re living on our capital Phosphates, coal, petroleum, nitre—squander them all. That’s your policy.”

This novel is a worthwhile read—providing you can get your hands on a copy. I’m not recommending it replace Brave New World in our curricula, but this is a fascinating book in its own right.

Aldous Huxley’in “Ses Sese Karşı” başlıklı romanı, yazarın çok bilinen distopik eseri “Cesur Yeni Dünya" ve ondan biraz daha az bilinen ütopyası “Ada”dan çok farklı.

Ses Sese Karşı, 1900’lü yılların başında çoğu İngiliz aristokrat sınıftan bir grup insanın kendileri, birbirleri, hayat, tanrı, ölüm ve toplum hakkındaki görüşlerini içeren bir roman. Pek az aksiyon, pek çok diyalog ve düşünceden oluşan 700 sayfalık kitap çok akıcı ve kolay bir okuma vadetmiyor. Roman kişilerinin teker teker seriminin yapıldığı kitabın ilk yarısında, bu kurguda bir başkahraman olmadığını, yazarın öne çıkardığı 10 küsür karaktere de bilinçli olarak eşit mesafede durduğunu kavradıktan sonra ise eşsiz bir edebiyat şöleni ile başlıyor.

Kitabın orijinal adı “Point Counter Point” adını bir müzik terimi olan “Counterpoint”ten almış. Eserin çevirmeni Mina Urgan, oldukça açıklayıcı olan önsözünde bu konuda şöyle demiş:
“Counterpoint, bir ezgiye eşlik etmek üzere eklenen başka bir ezgi ya da ezgilerdir. Bir müzik parçasında çeşitli ezgiler kaynaştığı gibi; Ses Sese Karşı’da da birbirleriyle kaynaşan, çeşitli kişiler, çeşitli görüşler, çeşitli durumlar bulunur.”

Kendisi de bir İngiliz seçkini olan Huxley, bu romanına yazarlar, ressamlar, yayıncılar, bilim adamları, sosyalistler, faşistler ekleyerek , onların seslerini yanyana koyarak, çarpıştırarak kendi çağını anlatmış. Bu açıdan bu roman çok sesli bir düşünce romanı. Huxley’in kendi sesi ise romanın en hüzünlü karakterlerinden biri olan Philip Quarles’in dilinden duyuluyor. Hayatının bir bölümünde kör olan Huxley, Quarles’i topal çizerek bir ipucu vermiş aslında.

Counterpoint can't exist without a point. The opposites need each other.

The industrialists who purvey standardized ready-made amusements to the masses are doing their best to make you as much of a mechanical imbecile in your leisure as in your hours of work. But don’t let them. Make the effort of being human.

That's an exact description of the today pop culture.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Some persons try to be a part of the universal harmony and some want to become a counterpoint and some are just tone-deaf.

I read this novel by Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, because it is on The Modern Library's list of Top 100 Novels. I am not sure why it was considered worthy of making the list. Brave New World is a masterpiece and is widely accepted as one. I would never have heard of this novel if it had not been on the Top 100 list.
For me, this was quite a complex novel to slog through; it took me almost 2 months to read it. There are almost as many characters in this novel as in a typical Charles Dickens novel, for one, and the dialogue between the characters is very deep, often having to do with religion or art. It seemed to me that the "points" and "counterpoints" throughout the novel were made up of religion, science, art, knowledge, or kind of like emotional or subjective topics as compare to logical and scientific topics. The characters' personalities were varied in a similar way - some were interested in science or politics, to their detriment in their relationships, while some were obsessed with love and physical affection. In some sense, I would liken this novel to one by Edith Wharton, exposing and condemning Victorian society from being the curtains and under the covers of the rich and famous.
Characters who are important at the beginning of the novel eventually fade away before the conclusion, and the reader never finds out what happens to them. It is more like the characters provide a voice for the author's individual thoughts on certain topics, where their dialogue with each other becomes like mini essays. There is not much of a plot at all, in my opinion. Toward the end of the book, some fairly extreme events happen that completely surprised me and caught me off guard. It felt like the tone and the pace of the novel changed drastically in the last 20% of the novel, to the point that the author either set it down and came back after a time to finish writing it and/or he became bored with it and just wanted to finish it.
The prose itself is not difficult to read, and Huxley writes in a clear and descriptive manner. The characters are well-described and fleshed out to be realistic and engaging. It's just that the plot is fairly nonexistent and I did not have much enjoyment in reading this novel. I would not recommend this novel to anyone, for any reason. Just read Brave New World.

Originally published on my blog here in November 1999.

Point Counter Point is about contrasts (hence the title) as well as Huxley's perennial themes of dehumanisation and futility in the modern world. It is full of mismatched couples, people committed to psychological and political opposites. It is one of Huxley's longest novels, and is full of philosophical argument.

There is no single central character. Rather, it is about a dozen or so equally important people, vaguely connected through mutual acquaintance. They are mainly English upper class, though popular politics is an important part of the novel. It is set in the thirties, possibly the heyday of extremism in British politics, and includes both Fascist and Communist characters.

The plot is virtually non-existent; this is a novel of ideas, of characters. The events that happen - deaths, affairs, separations - are there to parade a series of people before the reader, to show us their differences. It is superbly written, and rather more subtle than (say) Brave New World. The philosophical discussions, mainly revolving round the question of whether human beings are purely mechanistic of whether there is more to life than that, have dated somewhat, but are at the core of the contrasts which are the heart of the novel.

Što bi Huxley imao reči/napisati za današnje društvo, današnje bogataše i današnje intelektualce? Koliko bi se usamljen tek osjećao u našem vremenu?
Likovi Kontrapunkta zatvorenici su vlastitog karaktera i ega, bogati intelektualci nezadovoljni životima koje žive, sjajni izvana dok u sebi tragaju za smislom, istinom i Bogom.