A review by mimosaeyes
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
4.0
I knew this novel to be a dystopian one, but I read it as part of a course on modernist literature, and I have to say, the specific issues it latches on for its dystopic vision are indeed tied to modernity: valuing the new and the efficient too much means the old and the inconvenient get left behind, and we have to supplement all those human feelings in the spectrum that we don't feel when we are alienated from ourselves in modern, civilised life.
There's a lot of Shakespeare: he stands for everything cultural and now arcane. And Ford has replaced God. It's perhaps a bit difficult not to smirk every time you recognise the irony of characters' names, or every time you think about why those names would have been chosen to persist after all the whittling away. But a good read. You'll recognise parts of yourself and your world, remixed and made perverse, dark with humour and loss alike.
There's a lot of Shakespeare: he stands for everything cultural and now arcane. And Ford has replaced God. It's perhaps a bit difficult not to smirk every time you recognise the irony of characters' names, or every time you think about why those names would have been chosen to persist after all the whittling away. But a good read. You'll recognise parts of yourself and your world, remixed and made perverse, dark with humour and loss alike.