A rollercoaster of conflicting philosophies, scenes and moods. Actually, hard to bear, except for those rare pages here and there that were genuinely hilarious. In my sincere opinion, there was something quite wrong with Huxley’s mental state when he wrote this novel. That could have been no problem, but it felt very uncomfortable to read his nearly breathless ramblings time and again for ten pages in a row. A 2* rating would have been fair as far as I am concerned, but I don’t want to show such disrespect to the author of Brave New World.

“His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right. Like all the others, he had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop. Like all the others, he had abandoned any idea of subsistence farming to think exclusively in terms of a cash crop; and he had gone on thinking in those terms, even when the crop no longer gave him any cash.”

This was not the book for me. If one skips the chapters where Mr. Proctor waxes prosaic about human nature (as I ended up doing) it would make for an interesting novella. The final few pages made for a climatic but abrupt ending.
Definitely a slow burn of a story, but the character development just wasn’t there for me. Some of the characters motives are a touch vague — or maybe just a touch too subtle for my tastes.

I wanted to enjoy this classic, and I admire, and often aspire to, the cynical tone of the prose and point of the plot. Ultimately, it read too much like a philosophy textbook in the guise of a science fiction paperback, and not a one of the characters was likable. Well, except for Mr. Propter, who at least excuses my own inability to effect changes at a societal level and encourages better effort at the personal one.

Verbose "madness" (see part ii chapter 10)

The first pair of chapters give a great description of Los Angeles; the quirkiness and the contrasts, giant billboards, architecture, landscape, the transients and the well-to-do, all an insight into what makes LA, LA, and perhaps could only be written by someone such as Huxley coming from a different country getting a fresh view to this new American city in the 1930s.

As always, Huxley is heavy on the philosophies and satire as he mocks the continual California search for youth with science and fad diets, yep they had them back then, and the bombastic veneer that can come from such things as exercising or wealth.

The identification of most of the characters Huxley is commenting upon would be lost on the contemporary reader, though one of the obvious would be publisher William Randolph Hearst and his San Simeon castle. Another is a local University President, though at the time a friend, Huxley skewers him mercilessly, a battering from which it is said the President never recovered from socially.

Other fascinating tidbits are found in characters working to get 'off the grid', experimenting on solar energy to get away fromutilities, this was written in the 1930s.

If you are, or still have a bit of, the angry young man, or woman in you, Huxley will fire up your feelings and thoughtson things.

Ο Jo Stoyte είναι ένας εκατομμυριούχος που κατέχει απίστευτη περιουσία, από εκτάσεις και εταιρείες μέχρι το τοπικό νοσοκομείο παίδων και το νεκροταφείο, ενώ ζει σε μια πλούσια έπαυλη που έχει τα πάντα εκτός από βιβλία στην βιβλιοθήκη. Επίσης, αρχίζει και φοβάται τον θάνατο. Η ιστορία διαδραματίζεται στην έπαυλη του στην Καλιφόρνια, όπου ζει με την νεαρή ερωμένη του, Virginia Maunciple, ενώ έχει καλέσει τον Jeremy Pordage να κάνει καταγραφή κάποιων παλιών αρχείων μιας βρετανικής οικογένειας. Παράλληλα, έχει φωνάξει τον Dr. Obispo και τον βοηθό του για να τα απαραίτητα τσεκ απ, αλλά κυρίως για να ερευνήσουν το μυστικό μακροζωίας κάποιων ζώων όπως οι κροκόδειλοι ή οι παπαγάλοι, ο γιατρός βέβαια την πέφτει και στην Virgibnia. Τέλος υπάρχει ο καθηγητής Propter που ανοίγει συνεχώς φιλοσοφικές ιστορίες

Περίεργο μυθιστόρημα του Χάξλευ, που χωλαίνει σε πολλά σημεία και πλατειάζει σε κουραστικό βαθμό, ανοίγοντας συνεχώς θέματα, αν και η ιστορία που βγαίνει μέσα από τη μελέτη των αρχείων έχει τελικά το δικό της ενδιαφέρον αλλά οι συνεχόμενες αλλαγές σε χρόνο (από τον 20ο στον 18ο αιώνα) και τόπο (από τις ΗΠΑ στη Βρετανία) προκαλούν σύγχυση αφού επί της ουσίας δεν υπάρχει η κλασική δομή μιας ιστορίας.

I shouldn’t read one-star reviews, but I have and there are some things I just can’t let lie, so let me see if I can say what I want. What I want, I think, goes like this:

If someone has furnished their brain with fancy words, expensive concepts and highbrow literature; if they have integrated that into their mental process and genuinely think in those terms; if they express themselves naturally, fluidly, even gracefully in a way that incorporates such things, then no, sorry, that doesn’t qualify as pretentious. There’s no element of pretence, you see. Huxley is not pretentious and neither is this book.

Of course someone who affects to enjoy Huxley or After Many a Summer Dies the Swan may be pretentious, but then again they may not, just as someone juggling words to witter about pretension may or may not be a pretentious git. It all depends. So there.

But I’m quibbling with a choice of vocab, really, with the letter not the spirit, because I agree, in part, with what was intended by some of our one-star friends. I don’t agree that it’s a bad thing, but Huxley does indeed use ten-dollar words when he needs to, references highbrow lit and juggles big, heavy concepts in a way that, yes, can be hard to keep up with. You need, so to speak, a bit of ballast. You need a bit of common ground. Quite possibly you need to read more and be a better person, though that goes for everyone so don’t take it personally.

Oh, but if you can keep up with him – because his brain must have stretched and bulged and positively fizzed – a book by Aldous Huxley can be thought-provoking, dazzlingly witty and magnificently eloquent. Profoundly pessimistic, of course, but I can deal with that.
If you can’t keep up – if you find yourself skidding along in his wake or drowning in metaphysics – then that that doesn’t mean you’re a dimwit (though I suppose we shouldn’t exclude the possibility); it could just be that this stuff isn’t to your current taste and you’re tuning it out, or that you’re not carting around enough mental bric-a-brac to understand what’s going on. I can see that, though it’s still no reason to throw rocks at him.

It has to be said, however, that Huxley doesn’t generally write satisfying stories. To some extent he’s not interested in writing stories. Like Thomas Love Peacock, what he like to do is play with ideas and have his characters express them to one-another. That’s what After Many A Summer does: there’s a lot of talking, but not so much in the way of action… except when there is, when it can be quite deliberately lurid to contrast with the more cerebral aspects. So I think I’m probably justified in saying C’est manifique, mais ce n’est pas un roman.

And yes, that actually was pretentious but I couldn’t resist it.

Now, I genuinely enjoy this stuff because my brain is so much bigger than yours that’s just the way I am. I like Huxley’s lucid prose-style, his refined pessimism, his combination of the imp and the mystic. I like the way he can bridge the arts and the sciences. I like the way he genuinely has read Eckhart and de Sade – I don’t feel the need myself, but it’s nice to know someone has enjoyed both. I like his impishness, his satirical nature, his clear-sightedness. I even like the other side of his nature: the mystic.

Here he indulges both sides of that nature. We get the contrast between satire on the one hand, the earthly, temporal and profane, with religious sentiment. Different ways of dealing with morality and mortality, effectively, with a few really quite lurid plot elements blowing a huge raspberry at the whole thing. How can you not like that?

Well, clearly you can not like that. You can take issue with the cynicism of the thing, or the pessimism on human nature, or the religio-metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, or the way that it isn’t quite a novel, or even jump up and down and scream that it isn’t Brave New World, which of course it isn’t. That’s all fine. I’m not going to claim that it’s a perfect book, but it’s interestingly flawed.

And that’s that.

This novel is a delicate tragedy; its a tragedy in the same way as an otherwise gorgeous woman has moments of complacent hysterics and a bad breath.
An Englishman is hired by an American millionaire to study a large mass of paraphernalia of an illustrious British family. The millionaire lives in a splendid 14 storied castle with legendary artworks scattered all over the house (as estimated by our Englishman, they amount to 12 million dollars altogether in "bric-a-bracs"). The millionaire also has a young girl of twenty-two living with him, literally and figuratively his "baby"(adopted, not begotten). His physician, who also has his laboratory inside that castle, is a sly cold-hearted man of science, complacent and bumptious; his assistant, on the other hand, is naive and warm.
There is also a curious character, a Mr. Propter, a walking preacher of Indian mysticism in the middle of California who spews wisdom with unreal confidence and eloquence. This last character has already seemed out of place in a brief survey; in the novel itself, he is dangerously poignant.
The senescence theme is predominant- here and there, our eccentric Mr. Propter contributes to this theme with concise poking on the morbid nature of all that we consider human. But his interference to the theme isn't handled with sufficient care. I openly accuse Mr. Huxley of trying to be too didactic and shamelessly obliterating a harmony of one theme approached through two different ways. You see, between our aesthetically charged Englishman with nothing conclusive to show for his erudition, and that naive assistant, Mr.Propter need only open his mouth to fill the theme with rich textures. The problem isn't the hard, so-called "mystical" philosophizing of Mr. Propter; the problem is that he dedicates an equal amount of time to serve the theme of senescence and death, as well as to deviate from it. If Mr. Propter had remained in his high ivory-tower and refused to discuss facism, electric tools and other social issues, our theme would have been delightfully rich. But no! the gorgeous woman has her complacent hysterics, her bad breath comes all the way down to her perfect nates.
Other than that minor problem, everything is fine. You're in for an absolute treat. I just wanted to state my complaint. Enjoy.

As novels go, After Many A Summer by Aldous Huxley presents something of the unexpected. It’s a strange, rather perplexing experience. By the end, most readers will feel that what started as a novel somehow morphed into something different. What that something might be is probably a subject of debate. And exactly how of where the transformation took place will remain hard to define.

At the outset, any review of the book should state that this text is rather verbose, uses long sentences that tend to ramble, and presents paragraphs that can go on for pages. This is about as far as we could get from late twentieth century easy reading, though it was written only just before the Second World War. The narrative, if there is one, jumps from America to Britain, from the twentieth century to the end of the eighteenth, from third person reported events to the pages of a first person diary. Overall, the experience of reading After Many A Summer takes on a distinct feel of the random, rather than mere confusion.

Underlying the book’s progress is a search for an elixir of life. There’s a man of science and a doctor involved. There’s also the evidence provided by the memoirs of an eighteenth century diarist, an aristocrat who lived well into his nineties and chased skirt to the end. He develops - perhaps out of experience - a taste for fish entrails, specifically from the carp, and thus his writing influences the present, as twentieth century analysts believe that the fish innards might just have been the source of his longevity and preserved functions.

It would be wrong, however, to stress the word ‘plot’ in relation to After Many A Summer. It would also be stretching a reader’s imagination to claim it portrays characters. In essence, the book is only a novel because it lacks structure and because its author requires his musings to be voiced distantly by named protagonists, rather than by himself. Here Aldous Huxley subjects the reader to a string of almost random philosophical throwaways. Some of them descend to diatribe, but may - especially those that deal with the relationship between science and religion - are deeply thought provoking. Assembled, however, they do not constitute a novel and anyone who reads the book in search of linearity, literary tickling or elegance of expression will be deeply disappointed.

After Many A Summer is the kind of book that an interested reader might take up to read a page or two at a time. Since there is little thread to lose, it can be enjoyed in disconnected bites, the intervening estrangement allowing any ideas to ferment and settle. There are some real gems, but even these rarely elevate into the memorable.

Aldous Huxley’s book is very much of its time. The fall of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War takes place as the story progresses, and it is used as a vehicle for musings on the rise of fascism, totalitarianism, religion and the generally irrational. Overall, however, the book is a demanding and only partially satisfying read, which, on completion, does not eventually satisfy. Though it’s certainly not the author’s masterpiece, it is worth a look for anyone who has already read Huxley’s better known works.

Huxley is brilliant and an amazing writer, but non too subtle about the social points he wants to make. And his fantastical allegories are a bit much sometimes, but nonetheless, he always leaves you thinking and his books make a permanent mark. This one is no exception. It was weird, grounded, poignant, deep, funny, shallow, sarcastic and earnest all at once. I read it after reading some fun but overly solemn and artlessly written fluff (Sue Collins' The Hunger Games, I think), and it really cleansed my "literary" palate. Nothing like some really sharp wit delivered through masterful use of the English language to wake you up, clarify and focus your mind again.

całkiem przyjemna satyra na amerykańskie społeczeństwo, popkulturę i kapitalizm, jeszcze więcej pikanterii całej historii dodaje fakt, że główni bohaterowie wzorowani byli na autentycznych postaciach. nie zabrakło oczywiście wielu wycieczek filozoficznych, ale taki już jest Huxley, jego powieści nie mają mieć wciągającej fabuły, mają przedstawiać światopogląd autora.