Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century

by John Crace

John Crace's 'Digested Read' column in the Guardian has rightly acquired a cult following. Each week fans avidly devour his latest razor-sharp literary assassination, while authors turn tremblingly to the appropriate page of the review section, fearful that it may be their turn to be mercilessly sent up.Now he turns his critical eye on the classics of the last century, offering bite-sized pastiches of everything from Mrs Dalloway to Trainspotting via Lolita and The Great Gatsby. Those who have never quite got around to reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will be delighted to find its essence distilled into a handful of paragraphs. Those who have never really enjoyed Lord of the Flies will be pleased to find it hilariously parodied in an easily swallowable 982 words. And those who find all such works a little highbrow will be relieved to discover, between the covers of this book, John Crace's take on the likes of Ian Fleming, P. G. Wodehouse and the Highway Code.Witty and sharp, this is essential reading both for those who genuinely love literature and for those who merely want to appear ridiculously well read.

Genres: Humor, Fiction, Books About Books

372 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 3, 2010

Reviews

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wickedly funny. I often laughed out loud. One book for every year of the 20th century, most of which I’d read, whether for pleasure, studies or out of a sense of misplaced duty.
He manages to summarise each book in a few pages in the style of the author. It’s fun to see those I regard as the “great overrated writers of the 20th century” dissected so wittily and concisely.

Those books I haven’t read like Proust and Genet - don’t think I’ll bother. “Temps perdu »

[N. N. Santiago · Rating 4 out of 5]

When they are good, they are very good indeed.

God of Small Things - "May in Ayemenem is a hot brooding month, where the days are long and humid, crows gorge on bright mangoes and too many overwrought descriptive passages pile up in a car-crash of a creative writing tutorial."

Midnight's Children - "I fear I may be lapsing in to repetition, yet what is life save a series of repetitions, and what is a Salman Rushdie book save a few good pages, overwritten and overwritten with the verbosity of an obscure intellect?"

[David Sogge · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has utility value.
Its satirical micro-fictions allow for a rapid cull of the mediocre via a kind of triage as follows:
First, the book flags writers I've never read but can now safely avoid. Examples: Jay McInerney, Anita Brookner, Edgar Wallace, Ian Flemming, A.S. Byatt, Martin Amis, Bret Easton Ellis… indeed most of those featured in the book;
Second, it indicates writers I should now read more of. Examples: Edith Wharton, E.M. Forster and Samuel Beckett; and
Third, it suggests to me some writers (unread up to now) worth dipping into. Examples: Jean Rhys and Arundhati Roy.

The book has entertainment value.
Its spoofs can raise a chuckle, for example in their over-the-top versions of famously randy fiction, such as John Updike’s, or notoriously rancid writing, such as Henry Miller’s. However the author's digests of writing in dialect, namely the Scottish argot used in the digested version of Trainspotting, were for me indigestible.

The book has value in signposting bad literature.
Crace regularly mixes his lampoons with thinly-veiled literary criticism. For instance, his take on Henry James: “They smiled at one another, a smile that lasted for at least another dozen pages, which induced an extreme sopor, a sopor that in time would degenerate into unconsciousness.” And on Coetzee: “He becomes attached to a dog but puts him down anyway. The simple present tense and third-rate characterisation has got to him…. The mutt isn’t the only one pleased to be put out of its misery.”

His essays can go off-key when idioms don’t match the time or place: his satirized Hemingway writes about someone whose shotgun “wasted” another – a 21st century slang term retrofitted into writing of the 1930s; his make-believe Updike uses the term “to shag”, and his Faulkner sends one of his characters to a “chemist” – those are British terms applied in distinctly American settings. But then again, these spoofs originated in Crace’s ‘Digested Reads’ for a British newspaper, The Guardian.

This book is good, but for compressed satire, collections by E.O. Parrott such as How to become ridiculously well-read in one evening and satirical reviews appearing fortnightly in Private Eye have yet to be bettered.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tasting platter of C20th literature (one book synopsised per year of the century), as well as very successful pastiche, as well as highbrow larfs, and also, occasionally, a tiny philosophical critique of revered writers. It is of course easy to make anything ridiculous if you compress it enough, but Crace is not cheap about it. He reserves most of his scorn for the obscene sensationalists (Ballard, Burroughs, Joyce, Kundera). Here is the main joke Crace makes in at least half of all of them, fourth-wall shamelessness:

“Why do you do Junk, Bill?”
“Because once I´ve shovelled enough garbage into my body” I replied, “I’ll get away with shovelling any old garbage into print. Take it from me, some suckers will one day call Naked Lunch a masterpiece”.

I read books about books because I'm a prig: my ignorance of these things makes me anxious. As a result of reading Crace, I can tell I won't read about fifty of the hundred. So, big gains, even if the larfs wear thin halfway through.

[Judith Speed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant! Thank you so much for reassuring me that just because I hated/didn’t understand/had never heard of/couldn’t be arsed to read a much-hyped intellectually credible tome, that doesn’t necessarily make me a complete numpty. And that many much-hyped intellectually credible tomes are actually pretentious crap, written for the purpose of the writer demonstrating their own brilliance, rather than telling a story or connecting with their readers.
Thank you for giving a working definition of postmodernism. If I throw that into conversation, I’ll sound like a proper smartarse. 😊
But please don’t stop here. There’s plenty of 21st century novels/memoirs that could do with having the piss ripped out of them.

[Francesca Pashby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read the parodies of the books I’d read ... but I thought those were spot on. Very funny and clever.

[Alison]

well I didn't like, or hadn' t read quite a lot of the 100 books-10 per decade, of the 20th century he paraphrases/parodies/abbreviates-and, to be frank, don't want to read them either. the ones I knew something about are wittily written about, although always with the same tone of superiority-about plot, motivation, or lack of it, character, writing style etc. it did become rather tiresome.
do like the way he gets to the essence of a book if it's not good though. but am glad I hadn't especially liked most of these!

[Phillip Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Crace writes the Digested Read column in The Guardian in which he reviews new books by distilling them into a few parodic paragraphs, and here he does the same to a hundred 20th Century classics (ten from each decade). He gives you the gist of each book garnished with some wickedly irreverent humour.

A bookaholic would enjoy receiving this book for Christmas every bit as much as an alcoholic would love to be given a box of liqueurs.

I'm loving it.

Hic.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Crace abbreviates 100 works from the 1900s to the 1990s including such modern classics as Heart of Darkness and Death in Venice. It is a book those who don't take the literary style of some much loved and acclaimed authors too seriously. I laughed out loud at some of his parodies and this is my prefered version of The Golden Bowl by Henry James. It will also amuse those who started works such as Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and decided life was too short to go on reading.

[Malcolm · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved John Crace's Digested Read pieces in the Guardian but this book was an ubpleasant read. Either twentieth century English Lit was nothing but disguised porn or Mr Crace is unhealthily obsessed. I had bought two copies of this - one for me and one for a friend. I can't tell you how embarassed I am to have given this to a friend. I'm not particularly over-sensitive or prudish but explicit sexual detail and obscene language is not the hallmark of great comic writing.

[Philippe · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Crace satirises 100 popular 20th century books by condensing the plot in the style of the original book.

Fun, but really only so if you have read the original books (I admit I haven't read all 100 of them). Also the parodies seem to lack the bite of the ones in his Guardian column. Still a good read to have on my phone as each "book" only takes a couple of minutes to read.

[Louise Armstrong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very clever, very funny, but probably works best as a newspaper column. More than two at a sitting is a bit depressing.

It's so much easier to poke fun than it is to create anything. I loved when I read Vincent Van Gogh got upset with critics who were harsh on his fellow artists. He's right. It takes far more heart and guts to write a book than to parody it.

[Antonio Nunez · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compilation of Crace's "Digested Read" columns for London's Guardian. The concept is that he will summarize any work of fiction in 600 words of less, and then he will summarize his summary in 6 words or less. When it works, it is brilliant. And it works. Mostly.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poor attempt to be funny. The books I did read were ruined by Crace and the remaining 90 chapters were just boring banter. First chapter was sorta fun but it wore off immediately after that. Proud I even finished this.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever, funny, and made me realise I've still got some reading to do - I haven't read 32 of the 100 books that he parodies.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Obviously it's only worth reading the parodies of the novels you've read and know well but those are hilarious.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only read the chapters about books I already know. Mildly amusing, but also rather cynical.