The Loved One

I first encountered this excellent author decades ago when I read his first novella, Decline and Fall. What struck me then was not just his brilliance, wit and soaring writing skills, but his utter heartlessness towards his creations. No author I have encountered before or since does such utterly beastly things to his characters.In the Loved One, Waugh sends up multiple aspects of American mores and society in a style that somehow manages to be both outrageous and understated. At the same time, he recalls and seemingly repackages, without acknowledging it, the central character from Decline and Fall. In the earlier work, that character is Paul Pennyfeather, the more than callow public school teacher that acts as a tabula rasa for the indignities that life visits on those adrift on the seas of British education, pretension, and social prejudice.In The Loved One, it is as if Paul has been recreated, slightly older and only obliquely wiser, refitted with ultimate cynicism. The renewed character, I think, proves to be less successful in the final reel of the book (could he really be that cynical?), but otherwise it’s a grand, short romp with an author with some of the wittiest, grandest, most irreverent authorial skills of the twentieth century. A true delight.

I real departure from what I normally read. This book read like the script of an old movie. I could just see the black and white version of characters interacting. I could even hear their voices. It even ended like a movie from that era, abruptly an d kind of leaving you mystified.

The Loved One is an odd little story about a love triangle among people who are unusually comfortable handling dead things. Dennis, a poet/pet mortician, is not entirely forthcoming about his occupation with Aimée Thanatogenos lest she, as a beautician of human cadavers, despise him for it. Aimée, for her part, is torn between her attraction to Dennis and her respect for Mr. Joyboy, who is what passes for a stud among morticians. Joyboy courts Aimée by manipulating into smiles the faces of the corpses he works on that are headed for her cubicle.Waugh's macabre novella pokes fun at the ceremonial nonsense with which we shroud death, packaging that manages to render the inevitable obscene. It's amusing, if not a "wickedly funny" satire as promised in the blurbs, and would perhaps be more successfully humorous on film.Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

what were they trying to teach me?this book is intermittently funny, more often highly and dryly pretentious and snobbish, but more than anytyhing I find it very very creepy. Towards the end when things start to fall apart for Aimee, Dennis/Waugh achieves a combination of callousness and feeble wit that is so offputting to the sensitive reader, I can hardly believe the book made it to press without a major rewrite of the last few chapters. It would be one thing if it were much much funnier, but most of the "comedy" is of the "lost in translation" variety: nothing but xenophobia and looking down on those beings from a different culture and therefore certainly inferior that populate certain parts of the globe. haha those silly japanese persist in speaking their own language/americans women are all completely interchangable unlike our English roses! Didn't this guy also write "Brokeback Revisited" anyway?I was totally embarrrased to be seen reading it in public when I took it to dinner with me one night at the little thai place!the movie is interesting cause john waters certainly got the idea of edie the egg lady from this film (and not from the book. mom is quite different onscreen as conceived by terry southern and c. isherwood.( also liberace is fun, rod steiger is A M A Z I N G.

I've long heard the praises of Evelyn Waugh, but this is the first of his works I've read. I enjoyed his wry and biting sense of humor and the satire of both Hollywood culture and the funeral industry. The only reason I have given it four stars instead of five is that I found the ending to be abrupt and unsatisfying. That aside, I heartily recommend it.

A good read, had me engaged throughout most of it. I will say, the cover is NOT the posted picture. So if you're like me, buying this specific one because of the cover, it does not look like that. Not going to lie, I was disappointed with that but the content was good. Sometimes I do buy books because of the cover okay?

This was my first reading of Evelyn Waugh. His description of the mortician business in Los Angeles is realistic and funny. His prose is fluid and entertaining. His characters are hilarious, cynical and selfish. The result is a story at the same time representative of the period/place it refers (years before WWII) and pleasant for the reader. The irony of the author and the somewhat hypocrisy and superficiality of the characters combined to a great story.

Waugh is my favourite author in the world and no one says it better than him. The loved one is an irreverant, cheeky, completely accurate look at the business of commercializing death in Hollywood. From beginning to end this book will entertain you! Watch the 1965 movie if you can find it - the cast is stellar Rod Steiger, Roddy McDowell, Liberace, John Guilgud - the best thing about a Waugh movies is that his writing style is so good that it is inimicable - the movies follow the books word for word!

Evelyn Waugh wrote this novel while visiting the US, shortly before WWII. While there, he became fascinated by the ‘unsurpassed glories,’ of a cemetery, which is renamed here as, “Whispering Glades.” The book was published in 1948 and is set in Hollywood; among the British expat community. Dennis Barlow is a young poet, who is staying with Sir Francis Hinsley. Dennis is currently working at a pet cemetery, prosaically named, “The Happier Hunting Ground, ” much to the disapproval of many fellow expats. At the beginning of the book, the two men are visited by the rather bossy, Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, who points out, “There are jobs that an Englishman just doesn’t take. Yours, dear boy, is pre-eminently one of those.”This is a novel about the clash of cultures, British snobbishness and the satirising of a garish funeral industry. When Dennis has to organise a funeral, he visits “Whispering Glades,” which his own pet funeral parlour is modelled on. There he comes across the young Aimee Thanatogenos, a junior cosmetician, with a bad memory for, “live faces.” Dennis begins to woo her, by sending love poems, not necessarily written by himself. Meanwhile, Aimee, who was a hair stylist before discovering the joy of clients who were unable to speak back, admires Mr Joyboy, the embalmer, who shows his own affection in the expressions he creates on the corpses he sends on to her.I have always loved Evelyn Waugh’s wicked sense of humour and he is at his best here – sly, satirical and utterly snobbish. While the British attempt to keep up appearances, playing cricket in the Californian sunshine and putting their hands in their pockets to cover up their countrymen’s mistakes, Aimee is torn between her two suitors and full of self doubt. Like all satire, this is cruel in places and you can just imagine the delight Waugh had presenting this to his publisher. Surely as much delight as I had in reading it – including the preface, in which the author is keen to point out that he is not obsessed by morticians and that readers should refrain from sending him any more information about the subject. I hear the weary sigh, and I smile…

A short story: well crafted. Aimee is a questioning, searching character: who fails to fully understand and realise, her predicament. Which to the most sensible, can easily be rationalised and acted upon. Two men (other main characters) at passive loggerheads: who are bought together, by the unexpected. The thread of human selfishness, defines itself towards the latter part of the story.

This is a rather odd short novel about rivalry between two morticians in Hollywood, one a luxury provider of funerary services. the other specialising in pet funerals. It is blackly comedic and bizarre. Not sure if I would say I liked it, but it was short enough to take the risk. This is the first Waugh novel I have ever read - I first heard of it back in the 1980s as there was a Doctor Who TV story that partly satirised this satire.

I know that far greater brains than mine have reviewed this book since 1948 when it was first published, but having read Brideshead Revisited several times I decided to try another by Evelyn Waugh and I am pleased that I did. This little volume is a delightfully quirky read but also strangely fascinating - as fresh today as ever I suspect. Dennis Barlow is in America doing his best to get by and to remain a poet -ready to turn his hand to anything that needs to be done and that is the way he truly stars - doing so terrifically well in the end. Wonderful names populate the story - Mr Joyboy the mortician, Mr Slump the Agony Uncle... All rather like Cold Comfort Farm in the same tremendously funny tongue in cheek style. The goings on at Whispering Glades have to be read to be believed. I found it all to be great fun and well worth getting to know. On now to Decline and Fall!

The simple desire of improving your diction and prose will be met by this book. Furthermore, the characterisation of both protagonists and situation are superbly achieved. They may be, at times, dislikable, but they are always in full colour.