den
01-23-2005, 01:44 PM
Has anybody read this book?
I think it's one of his best, I have read it many times, the current copy of it I have is all dog-eared and slowly falling apart.
It was one of his first widely read publications (after Crome Yellow which was his first). It's a scathing commentary of bohemian London in the 1920's.
The satirical jokes about The Key to the Absolute were probably foreshadowing of Huxleys' own path of mystical enlightenment, and the philosophical and moral pessimism themes running rampant in this book were probably part of his development to writing Brave New World 10 years later.
If anything, there is a strong element of the auto-biographical in this book which is something I always appreciate when reading an author, I like to get an understanding of who they were in real life too, and while some of the characters in this book are outrageous, not too far from how absurd some people really are.
I think it's one of his best, I have read it many times, the current copy of it I have is all dog-eared and slowly falling apart.
It was one of his first widely read publications (after Crome Yellow which was his first). It's a scathing commentary of bohemian London in the 1920's.
The satirical jokes about The Key to the Absolute were probably foreshadowing of Huxleys' own path of mystical enlightenment, and the philosophical and moral pessimism themes running rampant in this book were probably part of his development to writing Brave New World 10 years later.
If anything, there is a strong element of the auto-biographical in this book which is something I always appreciate when reading an author, I like to get an understanding of who they were in real life too, and while some of the characters in this book are outrageous, not too far from how absurd some people really are.