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A Handful of Dust
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A Handful of Dust
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A Handful of Dust
Audiobook6 hours

A Handful of Dust

Written by Evelyn Waugh

Narrated by Andrew Sachs

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last has grown bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set. In a novel that combines tragedy, comedy, and savage irony, Evelyn Waugh indelibly captures the irresponsible mood of the "crazy and sterile generation" between the wars.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 11, 2012
ISBN9781619693883
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A Handful of Dust
Author

Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer of books. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the Second World War trilogy, Sword of Honour (1952–61).

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Rating: 3.833527260069849 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I have liked other books by Evelyn Waugh (always with trepidation, since he was a pretty vile human being) but this was definitely a book I didn't find particularly interesting. The book centers on Brenda and Tony Last, who retired to ancient Hetton, away from the hustle and bustle of society life. Brenda takes up with Mr. Beaver, a penniless social climber that nobody seems to care for all that much. Cue marriage crumbling.The novel is populated by a bunch of characters who are basically bored and doing whatever happens across their path to relieve that boredom-- and I mostly felt bored reading about them.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh at first seemed to be a light, witty and satirical novel that pokes fun at the upper class of Britain during the time between the wars. However, as the story developed into the disintegration of a marriage, the author revealed the cynicism and bleakness that gave this story it’s brilliant edge. While much of the story has it’s roots in Waugh’s own life, A Handful of Dust is a perfect blend of comedy and tragedy that captures the self-absorption of the English upper class and the total disregard they had for others. It also struck me how cleverly Waugh turned the tables on his characters by making first one than another the “villain” of the piece. For me, however, the character of Brenda was the worst of the lot. She is the bored, slightly resentful wife that takes up with a society wastrel whose only purpose seems to be that of being the perfect “extra man” that society hostesses can call upon at the last minute. Brenda’s husband, Tony is overly complacent and seems to be fonder of his home than he is of his wife but the resolution of his story could either be considered good or bad, depending on how one feels about Charles Dickens. Elegant, sophisticated, lively and chilling, A Handful of Dust was quite the read and has me looking forward to reading more of this author.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This starts off as a portrait of a marriage in the upper echelons of British society. Tony & Brenda are married and having to economise to keep the family pile, Hetton Abbey, afloat. Tony is fully invested in the place, Brenda less so. Brenda is now bored of her lifestyle, Tony's settled down and she either isn't ready to, or is bored with how their life has established itself. In fact, she's the one who precipitates the action, in some senses. She finds a flat in London and starts an affair with a worthless society sponger. She has friends who she attends parties with, but none of this gets to the root of her meaningless existence. You may guess from this that i didn't have a lot of sympathy for her. After agreeing that they will divorce, things take a turn for the worse when Brenda starts wanting Tony to finance her lifestyle and, in effect, buy her the man she now thinks she loves. Good for him that he does not. It all takes a turn for the somewhat odd when Tony heads off to Brazil and gets himself stuck in a most unusual situation, from which he will be unable to extricate himself. The book ends with Hetton being the focus of attention of another branch of the Last family, and it seems to have a life that somehow it lacked with Brenda as lady of the house. The language is delightful, the portrait of a couple who are falling apart and failing to understand that is poignant. Waugh shows his teeth occasioanlly, and there is certainly a satirical edge, espeically with some of the pointed allusions and comparisons. Throughout the characters remain fairly two dimensional, this is about what happens to them, not how it affects them. An enjoyable short novel.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was chosen by the LibraryThing 1001 Group to read in November 2018 and I thought I should try it. I read Waugh's Brideshead Revisited many years ago when it was shown on PBS (Google tells me that was 1981) and I remember I had a hard time with it. But I have learned that certain books that didn't work for me when I was a callow youth have more appeal now that I am a senior. I'm not sure if that is the case with this book or if it is just that it was more accessible but I quite enjoyed this tale of an upper class marriage gone wrong.Tony Last is the owner during the 1930s of Hetton Abbey, a gothic mess of a country estate that requires all of Last's income to maintain or try to maintain because it is in rather poor shape. The estate taxes that Last has to pay for inheriting the property are onerous and are the main reason the Lasts are short of money. Tony has been married to Brenda for seven years and they have one son, John Andrew. A young man with no job and no prospects of one, John Beaver, comes to Hetton Abbey for a weekend and for some reason Brenda becomes attracted to him. She takes a flat in a converted house in London that Beaver's mother, an interior designer, has divided into small abodes for a pied-a-terre for country folk. Everyone except Tony knows that Brenda and Beaver are having an affair and when Brenda finally tells Tony that she wants a divorce he is astounded. In the law of the time adultery was the only ground for divorce and it is considered bad form to use the wife's adultery. So Tony has to go off to a seaside hotel with a young woman who will appear to the detectives hired to provide evidence to be his lover, This particular chapter is pretty nearly farce and shows just how the divorce laws forced people to suborn testimony. Brenda decides that in order to keep Beaver she needs more alimony than Tony can provide and still keep Hetton. Finally showing some backbone Tony refuses and goes off to British Guiana on an expedition to find a mythical lost city. When gets sick and is abandoned by all the guides he stumbles into a habitation run by a lunatic who has a collection of Dickens' novels that he requires Tony to read to him. A virtual prisoner Tony Last will never return to England and distant cousins inherit the estate with a new round of death duries to pay.The copy I read contained an alternate ending to the book that Waugh had to do for the American publication because the chapter about the madman in British Guiana had been published as a short story called The Man Who Loved Dickens. This certainly shows how powerless writers were to preserve their art at that time. The alternate ending is much less satisfying than the original and I wonder how many Americans at the time realized they had been cheated.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'm a big fan of Waugh, and satire, but this just did not do it for me. I was far more depressed than amused. I know satire doesn't have to make one laugh, but... the morbidly depressing bits of this were a bit much.Were I not already familiar with him, this book would not leave me wanting more.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Ogenschijnlijk luchtig verhaal over een huwelijk dat kapot gaat en eindigt op een vreemde expeditie in het Amazonewoud, maar feitelijk een gitzwarte beschrijving van de menselijke ziel, zowel in de moderne als de primitieve samenleving. Alleen Tony Last, met zijn obsessie voor zijn gotische huis, lijkt de onschuld zelve. Knap
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It moves slowly until the final pages where Tony's wonderful delirium about mechanical mice in the Amazon seals his fate finally and physically from the British upper class that he never really belonged to. The ending is similar in that way to The Moon and Sixpence.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Tony Last and his wife Brenda seem to have it all: lovely home (even if they have to economize), a son John Andrew and a happy marriage. At least, it seems happy until Brenda starts taking up with the worthless John Beaver.This is my first foray into Evelyn Waugh's work, though I know him by reputation to be funny and satirical. I enjoyed the first half or so of the book, poking at the higher classes in Britain in the 1930s, showing the London set to be involved in a bunch of barely concealed affairs that everyone knows about. No one comes out particularly good, except perhaps Tony the cuckold and all-around generally nice, if conventional and boring, guy. Then things kind of fell apart for me, as Waugh doesn't seem to quite know how to end his story and sends his main character off to Brazil for an ending that actually turns out to be a short story that Waugh had written previously. My edition had an alternate ending included, and I personally found that one the more fitting. I would be interested to see how the story turned out if Waugh had brought it into more cohesion. Still, the dialog kept things going and I was interested in knowing what would happen to the characters. I might not read it again, but I would certainly try another book by the author.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was first exposed to this story by way of the film made in 1988. My interest was caught within the first chapter; I'd had no idea it was a satire. I love it. The author's apparently negative perspective on human relations is balanced out by his Twain-like humor. Other reviewers have complained that Waugh appears not to empathize with his characters, but I disagree in relation to major character Tony Last. I believe Waugh shows readers an exaggerated view of English understatement and denial. It may be true that none of the characters behave realistically, but it is difficult for me in any case to relate to landed gentry who never worked, bore children as a matter of form (parented by servants) who they never had occasion to know well, and generally seemed to know nothing about themselves by their thirties in a decade when vice, sex and psychology had recently begun to be considered polite subjects of interest for both genders of the upper class. Brenda Last is essentially the same person as Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, and I am afraid both Waugh and Fitzgerald modeled these characters after women they knew very well.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Ogenschijnlijk luchtig verhaal over een huwelijk dat kapot gaat en eindigt op een vreemde expeditie in het Amazonewoud, maar feitelijk een gitzwarte beschrijving van de menselijke ziel, zowel in de moderne als de primitieve samenleving. Alleen Tony Last, met zijn obsessie voor zijn gotische huis, lijkt de onschuld zelve. Knap
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It's pretty brief, and its prose is pretty spare, but there's marriage, tragedy, divorce and a various kinds of finality in "A Handful of Dust," a cold-blooded, straight-faced satire of the high society types that Waugh once knew and loathed. There's humor in it, too, both of the dry, high-minded British variety and of the more accessible kind. The novel features two of the funniest, brattiest fictional children I've ever witnessed, and they do a lot to liven up a narrative that gets somewhat slow in places. My main complaint about "A Handful of Dust," though, is Waugh's own attitude toward his characters. As expected, most of them are reprehensible: shallow society types enamored of flash, flattery and everything that signifies newness. That's more or less to be expected of Waugh, but he even seems to dislike Tony Last, a character whose sentiments most closely resemble his own. To hear Waugh tell it, Tony, who does his best throughout much of the novel to keep his family's estate intact and honor the traditions of the English countryside, isn't mistaken as much as lacking in intestinal fortitude; he aspires to standards he seems congenitally incapable of meeting. Cultural conservatives might sympathize with the author's view that the present is lacking in the sort of personages that made the past so exceptional and that the current generation is unworthy of inheriting the past's traditions. Still, by the time I reached the end of the novel, I began to suspect that Waugh had created Tony specifically in order to find him wanting, and that hardly seems fair. Waugh seems to have little sympathy for anyone trying to steer a middle path between modernity and tradition, and the novel's last chapter, which sees the Last family's traditions miraculously resurrected, smacks of deus ex machina. It'd be easy to dismiss "A Handful of Dust" as the work of a bitter, culturally atavistic British curmudgeon if the novel weren't so expertly constructed in so many other respects. Unpleasant as they can be, Waugh seems to know most of his characters through and through, and he matches them with social situations and personal possessions that seem perfectly appropriate to them. In fact, at no point in this novel do any of these characters act like anyone but their truest selves, and that's a rare and wonderful attribute for a novel to have. He describes the Lasts' marriage, to cite just one example, as a union that will fall apart with the slightest shove, and when such an event occurs it seems to collapse entirely of its own accord. The aforementioned ending aside, I wasn't at all conscious of Waugh using his authorial license to consciously arrange his character's fates. Tony's own end, which I can't spoil here, is delightfully unexpected, strangely poetic, and, in its way, wholly appropriate. As the novel ends, a sort of Victorian super-order has been achieved: there's a place for everyone, and everyone's in their place, even if you didn't catch the author putting them there. This sort of subtlety suggests that Waugh may have possessed the skill that separates great writers from merely good ones, but the reason I can't bring myself to award "A Handful of Dust" more than three stars is rather personal: I just don't cotton to novels completely bereft of sympathetic characters. In the hands of another author, Tony last might qualify as sympathetic, or at least nobly conflicted, but Waugh's own contempt for him ruin him for me. Since I'm a twenty-first American of liberal sensibilities, it's possible that Evelyn and me are just poles apart and too hopelessly different to get along. Whatever the reason, and although I recognize his talent, "A Handful of Dust" left an appropriately unpleasant taste in my mouth.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Probably my least favourite Waugh of those I've read (Decline & Fall, Black Mischief, Brideshead Revisited), in that I thought it merely quite good. It's really funny in places but reached a point where I felt Waugh was being cynical for its own sake (or maybe out of bitterness, as the novel mirrors the breakdown in his own marriage), rather than to satirise people who deserve it. Also in the second half Anthony goes on an adventure which, while justified within the themes of the book, breaks the plot in half and doesn't really work within the whole in my view. So a fair few negatives, but when it's funny it's really funny.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Unattractive but recognisably human protagonists subjected to brutal plotting. Brilliantly terrible final misfortune for the hero in passages that rather reminded me of the later Michael Innes books of 'abroad' like The Daffodil Affair.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A clueless husband, a heartless wife, and a broken marriage after a tragic loss make up this well-known and well-told timeless story set in 1930's England. Ah, the English. So much depends on how one is viewed by society. Brenda Last has the approval of her aristocratic cronies, even when she pursues her boy-toy John Beaver in London, while her husband and son remain on the family's country estate. Tony is oblivious to her fling as he tends to business and his beloved old house, which is as outdated as he is. However, when confronted with an imminent divorce, boring ol' Tony surprises everyone (including this reader) with his adventurous retreat.What an odd ending. I missed jolly old England. I think "The Man Who Liked Dickens" made a great short story, but seemed like a tacked-on ending to me. The alternative ending was much more in character with the rest of the book, though it fell flat. This was my first experience with Waugh. I loved his tongue-in-cheek way with words and forgive him for these bizarre endings.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is in my opinion the most tragic of Waugh's novels, focusing on the cruelty of gender relations and the disintegration of the aristocracy in the topsy-turvy twenties and thirties. Protagonist Tony Last is the space case English peer crushed flat by the several boots of reality.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Fairly bland book, written in an easy style with some humorous parts. I find the lifestyle of the landed gentry in this era mildly irritating. My favourite part of the novel was Tony's trip to Brazil, and what happened to him there. SO much better than the Alternative Ending which the American magazine insisted upon!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Lasts live a quiet life on their estate with few visitors and these days they rarely go to London. Tony's pride and joy is his family's Gothic manor, with rooms decked out in Authurian themes (Morgan Le Fay and Galahad, for instance), and it's dreadfully, dreadfully out of fashion. Brenda just wants more company, either in London or elegant parties at home. She develops an infatuation for a young man with no social graces, plenty of faults and very little money, much to the amusement of her social set. Despite her knowledge that it is an unwise move, Brenda makes excuses to go to London as often as possible to escape her dreary husband and the dank manor temporarily.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The chilling climax of this book I had read many years earlier in the guise of a short story called "The Man Who Loved Dickens." It was a deliciously creepy feeling to find it lurking in this context.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The author paints a poignant tale of immorality, Carnality, and Sordidness. The book teaches one of the hollow and shameful lives most of the wealthy live. Caught up in selfishness and materiality; they breath only to sate themselves. The top antagonist, Brenda Lost is one of the most loathsome characters I have ever read about. This story was published in the 1930's. However, it is as elucidating about today's world as it was then.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It starts innocuously enough; gentlemen and ladies having fun. As the book carries on, the characters become stranger and the plot more dramatic, until at the end the main characters have all but disappeared, replaced by their likes, ready to make the same mistakes. A clever and disturbing look at how simple decisions can cause major life changes.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The story of Lady Brenda and Mr. Tony Last in 1930's British society. A stinging satire of the upper class, where stories don't always have happy endings.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Waugh gives us a bleak yet blackly comic account of a failing marriage between the aristocratic Tony and Brenda Last, set in a climate of genteel social barbarism.Moving between the worlds of sham-gothic English feudalism and decadent inter-war London society, Waugh's characters act with increasing selfishness and amorality. In the aftermath of the Lasts' breakup, we are given a disturbing vision of where such behaviour leads.This is a starker book than his more exuberant, earlier novels 'Scoop' and 'Decline and Fall', though still with plenty of darkly absurdist humour.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The first book by Waugh I've ever read. It was a quick read, Waugh's style is nice and light. the characters ar detestable, mainly for their shallowness and lack of morals in the case of Brenda and Beaver, and cowardice in the case of Tony. The best bit about the book was the creepy Mr. Todd at the end, he certainly freaked me out a bit.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    You can't beat Waugh for prose style and QLPC (Qualiy Laughs Per Chapter)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This struck me as a mix between Brideshead Revisited and Scoop. It starts off as an English country house drama, and ends up as an adventure story in the jungle. Huh? But it was entertaining through and through -- Evelyn Waugh at his snarky best.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    waugh's finest, and most scathing. the ending clubs you from behind.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    What a discouraging book. The author was giving a slice of life of the idle rich moderns back in the early 20th century - and I ended up disliking all the characters and now even have a grudge against the author.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read this many years ago. Absolutely brilliant!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I never met Evelyn Waugh but I always feel as though we’d have gotten along well because we both dislike children so very much.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I don't know how this got on my reading list but I am glad it did. Going in to the story blind I did not know what to expect and was not (could not be?) disappointed. A tale of love and loss set in England between the wars, Waugh draws compelling portraits of every character and has a way with dialogue that most of his contemporaries did not.