A Brave New World

by Audlus Huxley

Being staunchly anti-conformist, I really looked forward to reading
Audlus Huxley's Brave New World. What a stupid book. First of all the
technology in it, though it is to take place about 500 years in the
future is archaic. Second, the made-up names are ridiculously stupid.
Ford ("Oh my Ford!") Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning. Arch-Community-Songster. Social Predestination Room. Obstacle and Electromagnetic Golf.

Then there is one of the "heroes," John as a clichéd "noble savage" who makes himself suffer for no real reason, rebelling against the BNW instead of his birth society which is the one that made him suffer that he so wanted to be part of. Also the Reservation that he comes from where the people truly act like the savages that they are NOT like in real life especially a fairly gentle one such as a Pueblo Indian tribe.

The way that people are brought up in his fictional world would never behave the way that they do in the book as adults. Even though he makes people act like people would in those situations in OUR society, there is no psychological evidence to show that people would act like that in the Brave New World if they were brought up the way that it is depicted. It would not be like it was in the book.

The book ends up being more of an indictment of our present way of living rather than the Brave New World. In fact, the only person that made any philosophical sense, at the end, was one of their leaders, Mond.

I would have stopped reading the book very early on but it is such an "important" book I wanted to finish it hoping it would get better. Outside of Mond's final speech, it didn't. The book may have been an attempt at an indictment of "our" world but it definitely failed at indicting the Brave New World.

From A High Place (Arshile Gorky)

By Matthew Spender

Another copious bio about a surrealist painter who lived in the first part of the 20th century.