Word: huxleyism
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ISLAND (335 pp.)-Aldous Huxley-Harper...
Admirers of those cleverly nasty satires that Aldous Huxley wrote in the '20s and '30s were certain that one day the master's first name would pass into common usage as an adjective: if someone woke up feeling aldous, he would be liverish, cold to the touch and awfully, awfully acute. So it might have happened, except that a time came when Aldous did not feel aldous any more; he felt thomas-henry. And old T. H. Huxley, the novelist's grandfather, was a solemn teacher, not a satirist. The result was that after the aldous...
...Huxley's utopia is the island of Pala, whose happy inhabitants of mixed Indian, European and native descent have evolved a new form of Mahayanist Buddhism...
...pills made from yellow mushrooms. Those who think the only fun in fungi is in a mushroom omelet may be skeptical when they read that things are just short of perfect in Pala-"a small island completely surrounded by twenty-nine hundred million mental cases." And why did not Huxley heed the warning of one of his own characters that "Eastern philosophers are often rather bad talkers"? Weight of Dandruff. Huxley's hero is William Farnaby, a successful journalist who blunders into Pala by inadvertence and a fortuitous shipwreck. In Huxley's eyes, Farnaby represents a sickness...
When first published in 1947, as Cefalû, it attracted little attention. It suffers somewhat from the fact that Durrell had not yet asserted his independence from such models as Aldous Huxley, and from an excessive urge to moralize. But Durrell is already demonstrating his ability to make the reader care intensely for his characters, even for those-and this is true mastery-that are thoroughly unlikable. Already he can evoke a subtle kind of suspense in which the reader wonders not merely "What will become of so-and-so?" but also "What will he become?" For the action, ultimately...