Fathers and Sons
If you're into literary biographies or if you enjoy British humor, you should pick up a copy of Fathers and Sons by Alexander Waugh. Recognize the last name? Alexander Waugh is the grandson of the literary giant Evelyn Waugh, the nephew of lesser literary star Alec Waugh, the great-grandson of historian and all-around ineffably silly sentimentalist Arthur Waugh, and the son of the comic journalist and general bellyacher Auberon Waugh.Quite a pedigree.
Fathers and Sons follows five generations of literary Waugh men as they all, in a grand and twisted family tradition:
-get expelled from English prep schools,
-scrape by at Oxford,
-resist and then embrace the "family business" of writing,
-get married,
-have children, and
-screw them up.
The story of the Waughs is wickedly funny and at times nearly heartbreaking. The relationship between Arthur the elder and his son Evelyn is by far the most excruciating--as a child, Arthur systematically neglected Evelyn, his younger son, in favor of Alec, his oldest. Alec was a talented and prolific writer himself, although he was not nearly as brilliant as Evelyn. Nonetheless, their father esteemed Alec on a level usually confined to kings and religious figures. As such, Evelyn treated his own children with affectionate disinterest and often described them as filthy, illiterate, boring, or downright crazy in his letters to friends. Evelyn's son Auberon thusly treated his own children with indifference, calling each one by random names as they popped into his head (so each child was, at different times, referred to as Nigel, Bernie, George, etc.). In life, it sounds rather cruel, but in Fathers and Sons it is highly amusing.
Told largely through letters preserved across the generations, Fathers and Sons presents modern literature's most luminous family from a unique and intriguing perspective, and this memoir is perhaps one of the finest, most touching tributes to fathers and grandfathers ever published.
Labels: Books
posted by Juliet @ 2:25 PM
4 Comments:
what's a "pedigree"?
what's a battle?
i think it's a ship, but i could be wrong.
hey, I had someone visit my blog looking for you...They searched "Juliet Mize" on google...they're out there...looking for you...
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