Brideshead Revisited

This isn't going to be much of a review cos I honestly don't feel like I know this book well enough to even write a fair review, despite having finished it.

I'm quite glad that Waugh wrote a preface before this book explaining his frame of mind when writing this, and what he had set out to achieve. He had written this when on medical leave in WW2, sickened by his experiences, simultaneously homesick and also jaded. He wanted to write an eulogy to the culture of the English country house and its upper classes, which he saw to be on its way to irrelevance and obscurity. This helped me put a lot of this book into context, but even then - boy, was it a difficult book to finish.

Waugh's surfeit of descriptions and narrative was probably analogous to the meaningless excesses of the English upper class, but it didn't make it any easier to get through. I nearly DNFed multiple times in the first 25%. Things got a little smoother after that when some semblance of a plot picks up, but also not by a whole lot.

I'm really on the fence about this book. On one hand, I think I have some idea of what it's trying to do in a metatextual kind of way, and I can give props to that. On the other, it was sometimes entrancing, but sometimes really a slog to get through (and that may have been intentional on the author's part - but even so). There is maybe a group of people I would recommend this to but this is far from a blanket recommendation to anyone, even if they like classic literature.