By John Crace
Random House UK, $23.95, 355 pages
This is truly a book for people who love books. John Crace has been writing the Digested Reads column for The Guardian in the UK for the past eleven years. In roughly 1,000 words, Crace both digests and parodies popular books. This is not easy work, for the satirist needs to reasonably mimic the voice and tone of the original author, hit the salient points of the source fiction or non-fiction work, and then make it all funny. Drafting new constitutions for emerging nations sounds easier in comparison.
?Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. Their house had four walls, for if there had only been three it would have toppled over. ?
Brideshead Abbreviated has a wonderful concept. Crace has taken ten books to present from each decade of the 20th Century. No author is repeated and, given a choice, he chooses the more popular work of a given writer. Thus James Joyce is included for Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but not for Ulysses.
The result gives the reader an interesting overview of literary developments over the hundred-year span. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and?Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas both involved a certain amount of monsters and fantasy, but the latter certainly could never have been published at the time of the former.
And, let?s face it, we all like to play smarty-pants at cocktail parties. With Brideshead Abbreviated, you will be armed for banter, if not for battle.
Reviewed by Hubert O?Hearn
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