Aldous Huxley’s slim 1939 novel is about mortality, immortality, nymphomania, sadism, the curse of intellectualism, class inequality, fascism, idealism, capitalism, unrequited love, agnosticism and nihilism. It is also very, very funny. The most tweedy of British classical experts, in telegrams home to mother, describes his adventures with a Charles Foster Kane-esque California zillionaire and his menagerie of hangers-on. Along the way Spain falls to Franco, the Marquis de Sade is read to underage girls and fish guts are eaten by powermad Earls and their sex-slave housekeepers. An Italian film director will adapt this for a film some day.
