uneasy distraction

I picked up Brideshead Revisited at the house in Ireland and, against my better judgment, brought it back to Hamburg with me. I say against my better judgment as I only have a few more days in Germany and I should not be reading English novels, I have far too many books to tote around with me to my next settlement, and I am already desperately testing every excuse to avoid the heap of work closing in around me.

It has been a long time since I have been this immersed in something quite so hyperbolically British: it comes as quite a culture shock. At times, reading Waugh might as well be reading a foreign language. I am realizing just how long it has also been since I have read a novel (without wrestling with German too) and how this one in particular is turning out to be a rather comforting and unexpected tutor in the ways of human relations. Even though the world Waugh writes about is a dead world - deliberately saturated in a queasy nostalgia, a loving portrait of a rotten, even pathological, universe - somehow the little betrayals and unfathomable failures of his characters rests close. It is a book that relentlessly shows how every honest impulse or genuine affection is smothered, aborted, banished to the shadows. And while I would be hard pressed to see an economic advantage to this misery, somehow I am lulled, with the characters, into the belief that this atomization, this shriveling loneliness, is the way things have to be. Quiet, oblique abuse becomes one's only hope and salvation.

I once had my own Sebastian Flyte, but because that relationship did not conclude in drug overdose or crippling alcoholism, but rather ended for still more foggy reasons, I suppose I am rather late in learning the lessons this book has to teach. What happens when no one bothers to notice the slaughter of a sacrificial lamb?