After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by aldous huxley

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

This will take some digesting and a second read.

I don't really know what this book is about. It is about everything and nothing at the same time. It is about good and bad, the meaning of life, and assorted debates people have with themselves about living a "good" life. (Is it?) My confusion comes as the narrative is hard to follow. I thought I knew what was going on with the longevity studies, then Virginia seemed to come from nowhere and what is Jeremy even doing? He was the first character and I don't know where he fits anymore... Yeah there are some great one liners and it dose prompt the reader to ask questions of their own life choices, so good job Huxley. But as a cohesive whole I do not see it. Yet.

Well I finished. The end picked up momentum and finished with a bang (literally). I enjoyed reading it just because of the beautiful language and writing style really.

0 0 Reply

Atad_Retsam

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

رواية عميقة مليئة بالأفكار،ربما الترجمة رغم انها جيدة الا انها ليست بالمستوى. ثم ان هذا العمل ان الرواية هذه غير سردية. بصراحة اسلوب مغاير لكثير مما قد كتب

0 0 Reply

selfDemanDeD

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Three and a half stars. Huxley sure wrote a vehicle to bring his thoughts and opinions to the forefront All in all, the plot of the story stands well. The philosophic asides became a bit much and were sometimes annoying. Not to say though, that I didn't glean some interesting and thought provoking information from these meanderings. The conclusion seemed a bit rushed.

0 0 Reply

p_dimi

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I was a Huxley fan in my youth, with a shelf of all his works (mostly Granada? Picador? paperbacks, with some rotten old early 20th century hardbacks mixed in) as well as the Bedford and Dunaway biographies... So when I began re-reading this novel a few days ago, I was full of nostalgia. The polysyllabic vocabulary! The learned references! The irony!

Midway through, however, I ran out of steam. It's all talking heads, abstract philosophical polemics... Huxley was surely a brilliant humanist: the last Victorian, maybe. Surely one of the last polymaths... But he wasn't a good writer. Whatever it was that had me enchanted at age 20 is gone at age 53.

0 0 Reply

Senjougaharaa

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

They could make this into a movie.

0 0 Reply

theangrytoonnerd

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

In many ways I like this book better than Brave New World, a book I stand by unreservedly. A satirical and philosophical exploration of futility, mortality, and enlightenment set in Huxley's very modern stereotype of the Southern California of the 1930s, it made me want to read both his spiritual book, The Perennial Philosophy, and Mike Davis's book on LA, City of Quartz. Some reviewers seem to think it is too dated to get 5 stars now, but I would argue (although I'm not going to get into it here) that considering when a work was written is critical in evaluating it, even if that means overlooking many elements that might seem quaint, even naive, to contemporary readers. We are talking about a book published in 1939, after all.

0 0 Reply

Aqwin

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

The opening chapters of this novel are laugh-out-loud funny as Huxley introduces us to the absurd fantasy world of Hollywood in the late-30s. The characters Stoyte and Virginia were apparently based on Hearst and Marion Davies, so one could almost read this after watching Citizen Kane.

Despite the humor of the opening pages, Huxley is unable to maintain that tone. Although humor and irony certainly continue through the novel (especially the end!), the middle of the book transforms into a collection of essays fashioned as dialogues and long monologues, in which Huxley presents a slew of counterintuitive arguments and observations about human nature, many of which are quite cynical (and correct!): time does not trend toward progress but toward destruction; humanity believes that longer lifespans will lead to more time to attain greater wisdom and reduce social ills, when in reality it only leads to more blunders; every so-called moral advancement or achievement in human history that “moves us forward” – from revolutions to democratic movements to defeating tyrants – eventually leads to greater misery, deeper oppression, and more brutal tyranny; modern medicine desires to relieve suffering, but ultimately succeeds in prolonging it; the greatest works of literature in the world were written by artists precisely because they suffered, and if modern medicine had existed in their time, they would have been cured of their illnesses and therefore would never have produced their masterpieces; etc.

The ultimate message of the novel is that man’s search for eternal life, immortality, or the Fountain of Youth is actually a quest that ends in his devolution. (DEVO fans should read this one!) It’s really an extraordinarily insightful – and, again, deeply cynical – view of the haplessness of human nature. Huxley also includes his favorite recurring image: monkeys as stand-ins for humans, reinforcing, as he wrote in Ape and Essence, that we are merely “prurient apes.”

These long, essay-like monologues soon grow slightly wearying, especially after the amusing opening, so I can’t claim this is one of Huxley’s best. But the ending is fantastic (in all the connotations of that word!), and it might make a good supplementary reading along with some of his essays on science and medicine, as well as his better novels – Ape and Essence, Island, Brave New World, etc.

0 0 Reply