Eyeless in Gaza: A Novel

Eyeless in Gaza has me frustrated. This is very high quality writing and some high level plotting. Evan so I am not a fan. Our central character, Anthony Beavis, is a scholar attuned to fining meaning in obscure scholarship. He is sufficiently well off that he can peruse a comfortable and self-centered life style. He and most of the people around him are more or less self-centered and un happy. There are several discontinuous time periods ranging from before WWI and some vague point past the European version of America’s depression. Time jumps are artfully used to give us a deep understanding of Anthony, how he came to be who he is and why he has reason to be dissatisfied. We are given many chapters to come to dislike this person and then asked to care about his recognition that he does not like himself either. Having laid out a complex and unhappy persona, the resolution is too pat and for me unsatisfying. The added irony is that the book ends and was written just before World War II which could mock its resolution. Mine Is not the general opinion. I admire the writing but was not convinced by the plotting.It has been decades since I last attempted an Aldus Huxley book. I remember being very happy with Brave New World, and Brave New World Revisited. After Many a Summer (Dies the Swan) was a warning that I probably missed much in all of 3 these books and should re-read them. I take up Eyeless in Gaza as a more mature and better read person. I do not believe I missed anything important, but I know I will not be re-reading this one.Anthony Bevis is not a nice person. As a youth he was something of a victim to his father’s scholarly but boring and aesthetic preferamces. The mother to his future best and closest friend will provide for him holidays where the two boys can experience some of the good life but with constant urgings to lead spiritual lives. The friend, Brian Foxworthy becomes extreme about being exactly the perfect person his mother most wants and in so doing becomes the victim of Anthony’s casual disinterestedness and preference for compromise and accommodation.By seeing Anthony in time slices assembled in thematic rather than temporal sequence Huxley maneuvers the reader from some level of sympathy to a full agreement with Anthony’s dissatisfaction with himself. This is the central conflict of the plot and upon its resolution hangs the pleasure in; or disappointment in the book.There are some wonderfully deep thoughtful quotations and scholarly essays. These are 'heavy' thoughts on the human condition. For me these tended to be too long and to contribute to the heavy handed preachiness of this novel. The writer has an assumption that his reader is also well read and a deep thinker. Too much so. A lighter hand might have made this book more accessible and less like an extended sermon. I appreciate that this kind of writing is respectful towards the reader. I like being treated like an intelligent person, but this goes beyond that.Having built the book on the assumption that we are thoughtful and well read, the resolution did not work for me. It approached the trivial and was almost predictable. We are asked to read a long pages in preparation for Anthony to squarely face himself only to be dropped into his life after an incomplete melodrama that is the climax of the book.The question that Huxley may not have appreciated as he finished this book in 1936 was: Is the resolved Anthony Bevis ready for what is about to happen two years later?

Since there are already so many excellent reviews of this book, I will just add my two cents.First, Huxley's writing is exquisite. Like James, Conrad, among others, and, yes, Shakespeare, he is able to craft language so adeptly to show his characters' beautiful and profoundly complex internal worlds and those separate worlds' couplings and collisions, and, in this case, setting those characters within an enthralling story. I can't give specifics, but many times as I read this book I thought to myself how I will need to reread it fully appreciate Huxley's better passages, of which there are many, many, many.Second, Huxley's satire is brutal, reminding me a lot of Zola. All the characters are flawed to loathsome in their own special ways, and the main good, noble character, of course, dies. And, of course, he is flawed too. (Okay, Anthony's father and step-mother are cute in their late in life love.) This book also reminds me of a film like "La Notte," in which bored wealthy people lead empty, pointless lives and try in vain to fill that emptiness with art, philosophy, politics, making more money, adultery, substance abuse, etc. (I'm afraid that is a paltry synopsis.) The story is disturbing, scandalous, and engrossing.I'll stop there. This book is great - please read it, and enjoy!

In his later years, Aldous Huxley aimed to take on the big questions. He was applauded when he did this in a cynical way, as in Brave New World, but a number of critics did not like it in the least when he made real, positive statements on what he had come to see life as being about.Eyeless in Gaza is genuinely spiritual novel, a quest to understand goodness in a world that often seems insane. Huxley wrote it when he was a the height of his powers as a novelist, and his unequaled eloquence makes this book truly inspiring as a vision of how to grow and find meaning in the modern world. It is also an absorbing story, and included chacters drawn with unequaled insight to psychology and the human condition.Few people write like Huxley did anymore, and his prose style feels like heavy lifting at first, almost like Shakespeare. But, for anyone really searching for something Philosophical, a novel of ideas that is endlessly thought-provoking and undeniably profound, there are very few books that can approach this one. I once read a number of passages from it to a study group that I was a member of, and the entire room was not only touched, but moved.

I have read this three times and will probably do so again in the future. I simply love the way Aldous Huxley can portray such deep concepts that are light and airy. This story is interesting in many ways and to describe anything specific becomes hard to do without describing the entire story. As usual some may find it to be bland until the end philosophical point which is what Huxley seems to be a master at, drawing out the story to promote dedication to reading it and then slamming knowledge in your face if you make it to the end, which is like a sweet treat that is much anticipated.

A fascinating book, but not an easy read. It skips about in time and space, has untranslated foreign quotations, quite a lot of 'sociological musings', but it's an amazing story, with extraordinary characters, who get themselves into genuine moral dilemmas.

The only good thing going for this very confusing novel which jumps around in time all the time is the "surprise ending" which is given away on the back cover summary. Don't waste your time ploughing through 700 pages.

After rereading this again, it is as great as when I read it at 21.Highly recommended as are all of Huxley’s novels

Gift well received

A good gift.