The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

Some people can only read a book if they know that the events it describes 'really happened.' I'm the other way round: if, as with OGP, the book fictionalizes actual events, I often get bored. There's a good reason for that--what I most appreciate in fiction is the distance between author, narrator and characters. When someone is describing what actually happened to him/her, all of that distance gets squished into a tiny, tiny little span, and I often end up feeling like the author is an idiot who's incapable of self-reflection.

That's particularly sad in the case of Waugh, who often has great swathes of distance in his work. But here... well, I just can't help feeling like it's just a bunch of self pity. Had I come out of the book show more feeling like Waugh himself had learned from his Pinfoldian experience (i.e., that some of his various sillinesses were not harmlessly silly, but actually obnoxious), I might have had a better time. As it was, Pinfold comes out of it feeling like he's a superman who can defeat psychological disturbance with an apt phrase, and that therefore he's quite right to ignore the accusations leveled at him. Is that how Waugh felt? I can't help but believe that it was. If someone can convince me otherwise, I'd really appreciate it, because I suspect this book has made it much harder for me to go back and enjoy Waugh's earlier works. show less

Lacks the hilarity of Waugh's other dark comedies, and is repetitive and predictable across large sections. However it retains some interest for historical and psychological reasons. As it is at least semi-autobiographical we get some insight into Waugh's own later life, and his period of mental breakdown. His delusions and paranoia provide the main stock of humour here, though this mainly falls flat. Not a classic.

4463. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold A Conversation Piece, by Evelyn Waugh (read 26 Jul 2008) This could be described as a memoir, since it apparently relates what happened to Waugh himself. It is deliciously well-written and had me laughing aloud many times. It tells of a trip to Ceylon which Pinfold takes on a ship and has him hearing voices. The funniest parts are when Pinfold talks to the other passengers about the things he hears. The book is a delight. It is the 15th book of Waugh's I've read.

This is a very different sort of book from Waugh's others. The most familiar elements are the unrelenting bits of racism and his usual mode of satire. The fact that it's based on real aspects of his life makes it somewhat terrifying, but the execution was great. How he knew and didn't know they were just voices, how he kept rationalizing things and how contradictions weren't a big issue. The back of my book contained a few short stories which I didn't have time to read, but which I intend to get to.

Very weird-but-engrossing, autobiographical retelling of a long schizophrenic episode induced by combining sleep-inducing drugs of the day.

This turned up on the audiobook shelves at the library; I recognized the title from my parents' shelves, so I thought why not? It's all rather English, borrowing from stereotype here and lending itself to stereotype over there. There's not much drama, since the reader (listener) knows perfectly well that Waugh's stand-in Pinfold is suffering from hallucinated voices while on a long cruise; the melodrama he imagines is nearly without consequence, except on the few occasions when Pinfold threatens to act in the real world based on the misinformation in his head. Fortunately (for himself; unfortunately for the reader) he never really does much except send alarming telegrams to his wife and change his tickets for an earlier return.

But the show more audiobook reader (Michael Cochrane) does an excellent job bringing all those voices to life, with distinct tones and accents, and the result is not unlike an old-fashioned radio play. I doubt I've learned any profound life lessons, but I did enjoy myself for 5 hours. show less

Waugh’s fictionalized account of the time he went crazy on a cruise due to reckless self-medicating should be pretty entertaining, right? Wrong. Waugh just describes his paranoid delusions in detail. Why should we care? I’ll never know because I gave up a quarter of the way through.