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Yet another in a long
list of books that are completely embarrassing to be seen reading
in public, this one even includes fey New Yorker type illustrations
smattered throughout its pages. I mean it's not as if I'm reading
The Celestine Prophecy and marking my pages with some frilly
tassel, but the odd drawing on the front and the general tone of the
thing just screams tranny. I guess in this case you kind of can judge
a book by its cover. The story is almost as doily-ish as its jacket
indicates. There's nothing in the world like a novel written in 1911
by a stuffy British Oxford grad to get your fill of ten-dollar words
and awkward English phrases that translate worse than a Godzilla movie.
In fact there a few times when Beerbohm breaks into Latin and never
tells the reader what's going on. I guess you have to be a dead language
scholar in order to read one of his tales. The basic gist of the story
is that there is this woman, Zuleika Dobson, who is so hot that the
entire undergraduate class at Oxford has sworn an oath to kill themselves
due to her unrequited love. From the drawings, she certainly doesn't
look worth it. The main character, The Duke, is a kind of BMOC, and
is the original purveyor of the suicide solution. Basically it's unclear
whether the boys are dying to be like The Duke, or because they truly
love Zuleika. What is clear is that he could have done a much better
job with the plot progression. He also tends to meander into some
sort of self-aggrandizing involvement in the lives of his own characters,
injecting himself in the story and talking about statues and whatnot.
I don't know; maybe if it was written in more modern language, I would
have liked it and gotten it more, but the humor and soaring syntax
was lost on me. Snootiness can only go so far.
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