–The Sydney Morning Herald reviews Salman Rushdie’s latest book (probably referring to The Eleventh Hour). The review is by Australian literary critic Peter Craven and is headed: “Unsurprisingly, death is a recurring theme in Salman Rushdie.” It contains some mention of Evelyn Waugh of which only this has survived in the SMH internet posting: “Evelyn Waugh, who for the purposes of this story is older than our hero, says he should concentrate on ‘The Matter of Britain.'” Based on earlier reviews, this is probably a reference to Waugh’s appearance as one of the characters in a story included in Rushdie’s book.
–A recent issue of the Financial Times has an article about workplace fiction. The particular book discussed is Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt. Waugh makes a brief appearance:
…Starritt says many people found the entire premise and world view of the book baffling. His first novel, The Beast (2017), was set in the newsroom of a barely disguised Daily Mail, and brought the newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop raucously back to life. A number of reviewers also described Drayton and Mackenzie as a satire. The author says emphatically it is not, preferring to call it a comedy. Refreshingly, Starritt names real companies and inserts actual people, such as Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, grappling with events such as the 2008 financial meltdown and the 2012 Eurozone crisis…
–An article by Algis Valiunas appears in the latest issue of the religious-philosophical journal First Things. This is about the work of novelist Walker Percy. Here’s an excerpt:
…Shining humanity in the most intense moments has come to be thought the particular virtue of the humanists, as though they were uniquely endowed with the insight, courage, and compassion necessary to deal with extremity. (Think of Rose of Sharon in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,offering her maternal breast to suckle an old man dying from hunger.) Percy restores the claim of the faithful to this human excellence. This passage strikes one as more real—everydayness intruding upon the solemnity—and thus more moving than the famous deathbed scene in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in which the adulterous Âunbeliever Lord Marchmain emerges from unconsciousness long enough for an elegant acceptance of the last rites. Here is Percy at his best…
–The Daily Telegraph’s obituary of David Pryce-Jones has been posted on the internet. It is among the best of many. Here’s a link.
–Finally, many papers have printed obituaries of Tom Stoppard, the British playwright who died last week. Several of those have noted a link to Evelyn Waugh from the beginning of his career. Here’s the excerpt from the Guardian:
…Stoppard left school at 17, initially to become a journalist on the Western Daily Press in Bristol. After a couple of years of playing around with short radio plays, his first stage play was picked up for the theatre in Hamburg and television in the UK. Moving to London, he wrote theatre reviews under the Evelyn Waugh-inspired pseudonym William Boot, before a Ford Foundation grant enabled him to escape to Berlin to devote himself to the idea that would become Rosencrantz and Guildenstern…
