Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memoriesof Captain Charles Ryder
Charles Ryder, a middle-class army officer billeted in a country house he once knew in happier days, reconstructs his entanglement with the Flyte family: the languid Sebastian, his remote sister Julia, and the Catholic faith that hovers over them like weather. Waugh lets the story unfold as an act of memory, which means every pleasure is already being mourned and every golden afternoon carries a bill.The novel is often mistaken for an aristocratic romance. It is really a study in religious dread and the impossibility of returning to a house that has changed because you have. Little, Brown's edition carries the standard American text; the book, however, belongs to no season. Its uneasy balance of longing and judgment keeps it more contemporary than many novels half its age.
