Christina reviewed Zuleika Dobson by Sir Max Beerbohm
Review of 'Zuleika Dobson' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
This was not as hot an epic as I had anticipated. As an absurdist Belle Epoque novel, Zuleika Dobson should have enamoured me as its title character enamoured the undergraduates of Oxford.
Certainly the writing is easier to follow than the prose of some of Beerbohm's contemporaries.
The humour is in the flightiness and exaggeration. Zuleika, a celebrity for her legerdemain, visits her grandfather at Oxford, and the impression she makes is electric, and so is the impression the snobbish Duke of Dorset makes on her. The gods look down and laugh. The marble busts of emperors bear witness. The Muse Clio bestows the narrator with unearthly powers so that the story may be told.
I wanted to like this more than I could manage. Don't let my deliquium (thanks for enriching my word power, Max Beerbohm!) dissuade you. This Belle Epoque apparently ranked #37 on Modern Library's Top 100 …
This was not as hot an epic as I had anticipated. As an absurdist Belle Epoque novel, Zuleika Dobson should have enamoured me as its title character enamoured the undergraduates of Oxford.
Certainly the writing is easier to follow than the prose of some of Beerbohm's contemporaries.
The humour is in the flightiness and exaggeration. Zuleika, a celebrity for her legerdemain, visits her grandfather at Oxford, and the impression she makes is electric, and so is the impression the snobbish Duke of Dorset makes on her. The gods look down and laugh. The marble busts of emperors bear witness. The Muse Clio bestows the narrator with unearthly powers so that the story may be told.
I wanted to like this more than I could manage. Don't let my deliquium (thanks for enriching my word power, Max Beerbohm!) dissuade you. This Belle Epoque apparently ranked #37 on Modern Library's Top 100 novels of the 20th century, but my 21st century mind, appreciative of flickering tintypes, absurdism, antique phonographs, black humour, could not absorb much beyond Mr. Beerbohm's gleeful caricatures and diversions into the ethereal and mythical. Maybe if I didn't live in a place where the even less-gifted than Zuleika, obese, demented, narcissistic, sociopaths are engorging on the attentions of the limited, seeking admiration always, I could see humour in the ridiculous.
