—The Spectator reviews a new “campus novel”. This is called Seduction Theory and is written by Emily Adrian. Here is the opening paragraph:
There is a fine tradition of campus novels that stretches from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) through Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (2024). Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory, her fourth novel for adults, shows the author’s awareness of her predecessors in the genre. One of its main characters even regards Pnin (1957), a campus novel by Vladimir Nabokov, as his comfort book…
–A book from the 1970s written in French has been re-edited and re-translated. It is reviewed in The American Mind, a website sponsored by the Claremont Institute. Here is an excerpt:
The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail is one of the most interesting and controversial novels of the 20th century. Which is why it’s good news that Vauban Books, a small publishing house, is coming out with a new edition, complete with a fresh translation by scholar Ethan Rundell. English-language copies of the book, first published in the U.S. in 1975, have been passed around like samizdat. The Camp of the Saints became popular again in the 2010s, but the rightsholders refused to reprint it until Vauban managed to secure the rights.
The Camp of the Saints depicts mass immigration destroying European civilization. In the novel a gigantic flotilla of boats filled with destitute Indians sets course for France to seek refugee status. After much handwringing, the government allows them to land rather than take the only other option available, which is to massacre them. France—and very quickly all of Europe—turns into a dystopian Third-World slum…
In fact in The Camp of the Saints, nobody looks good. Indeed, the novel’s central topic is not the refugees themselves but the bizarre form of cowardice and self-hate of Europeans that leads them to consent to their own replacement. In this sense, it is like Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, whose portrayal of Africans is decidedly “racist” by our contemporary standards, but whose portrayal of whites—and everybody else—is equally savage and outlandish.
Everything in The Camp of the Saints is over-the-top, not just its unflattering portrayal of refugees. It has a dreamlike quality, complete with baroque imagery, which is integral to the artistic style of the novel. This is what makes it such a powerful and fascinating work of art. To dismiss it as “racist” is not just inaccurate—it is philistinic.
–Two Washington papers have taken note of a novel about the international press corps entitled Vulture. This is by Phoebe Greenwood. The Washington Post said this:
Insane innocence runs rampant in “Vulture,” Phoebe Greenwood’s debut novel, about a young British journalist determined to make a name for herself during an eight-day war in Gaza in 2012. Greenwood is herself a journalist who has reported from the region…
The first half of the novel, much of which takes place at a hotel run by a quirky cast of locals doing their best to maintain decency amid the war, is highly reminiscent of “Scoop,” Evelyn Waugh’s canonical satire about foreign journalists in a fictional East African nation. But where Waugh’s novel is a light romp and its main character a lovably clueless buffoon, the second half of “Vulture” goes to much darker places, with Sara sharply descending into physical and mental illness.
The novel is also reviewed in the Washington Examiner. The review is by Malcolm Forbes and opens with this:
In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s great satire of journalism in general and foreign correspondents in particular, newspaper magnate Lord Copper sends a reporter to the African Republic of Ishmaelia to cover the crisis unfolding there. “We think it a very promising little war,” he declares. “A microcosm, as you might say, of world drama.” Phoebe Greenwood’s debut, Vulture, sets its satirical sights on the same topics. However, its protagonist is not dispatched to report on a “very promising little war” but rather the latest flare-up of hostilities in a grindingly long and seemingly unending conflict…
Scoop also gets a brief mention in The Guardian in an article about news coverage in Gaza:
This debate [over Gaza coverage] reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, in which the British novelist mercilessly skewered foreign correspondents and sensationalist journalism in the 1930s. Unfortunately, Waugh’s satire still resonates today…
–A Stanford University website called The Book Haven has an article about the family of novelist Boris Pasternak by Cynthia L Haven. This involves an interview of among others the noted Waugh scholar Anne Pasternak Slater. Here’s an excerpt:
I met the Pasternak family during the Pasternak celebration at Stanford last year (I wrote about it here). I was delighted to renew the acquaintance with two of them in Oxford – Ann Pasternak Slater and Catherine Oppenheimer, both nieces of the poet and granddaughters of the artist. Catherine is an eminent psychiatrist; Ann is professor emeritus of English literature at Oxford (she is currently writing about Evelyn Waugh). Ann is also a formidable critic, and a matchless champion for Pasternak’s work.
