BOOK REVIEW

“THE LOVED ONE” by Evelyn Waugh
Reviewed by kevin foy
This is such a good book i’m not going to give any of the it away. I want you to enter it childlike, experience those first few pages of awkward fumbling, and then allow it to progress until it feels familiar all around you. Past, present, future. When you have all three in front of you that's when a book is at its best. Characters have ascended their plotlines, established themselves, past fits in with present and the future awaits. The Loved one comes alive after a death and ends with another, a lovely contrast. That's what the Loved One is, a book about contrast.
Waugh early into his career, in love and newly wed, was ditched by wife for another man. The other man must’ve been deemed much lesser a man by Waugh. Success with women in Waugh writing is paired with been a loser or treating them with contempt. The innocent boys who dote on women are ruthlessly exploited. Men harden with life experiences and women soften. So it is we reach the underrunning current of The Loved One "American innocence and European experience". Anyone who knows even a little about ‘Game’ and PUA we know that boys put girls on pedestal. They develop oneitis. Completely unrealistic ideas about women are formed. Preposterous fantasies are devised, like where the boy wins the girl of his dreams heart by saving her from some peril. My own often involved drowning. Thankfully Waugh was ripped painfully out of the fake world of chivalry and romance at a young age. The only instance of perfect love in his writing is between two young men. Relations between man and women in Waugh’s writing are perfectly realistic, they are about outcomes not about each other and certainly not about love, that word unknown to all men. Imagining the tosh he would’ve produced if remained in the youthful romantic stage for too long and one can only squirm at the forethought of Brideshead Revisited or A Handful of Love. So why should you read The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh?Well because it’s darkly funny, and to learn why Miss Aimee Thanatogenos is wagging her tail today thinking of you in heaven.

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