A Handful of Dust

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (1903–1966) is an outstanding British writer, novelist, journalist, essayist, biographer, and critic—one of the finest stylists in 20th-century English prose. He was recognized as a master of black humor and sharp, biting satire (often infused, however, with hidden lyricism and an autobiographical undertone, behind which one can sense nostalgia and the personal nature of the plot). He created grotesquely amusing fantasies in which everyday life, psychological types, class prejudices, social sores, and ideological paradoxes of the slowly passing British Empire are refracted—slowly but surely disappearing into the past.

This book presents one of Evelyn Waugh’s best-known novels, “A Handful of Dust” (1934). A flirtation with the worldly idler John Beaver—begun out of boredom by Lady Brenda Las—soon turns into reckless passion, leading to dramatic consequences: her husband Tony, a naive idealist and romantic who retreated from city bustle to the idyllic estate of Hetton, imagining himself a medieval landlord, when faced with betrayal suddenly discovers that his harmonious, rationally arranged world has turned into “a handful of dust.” Having lost love and peace of mind, barely surviving the accidental death of his son and exhausted by a divorce process that reached a dead end, he sets off with a scientific expedition to Brazil in search of a lost city—only to find himself in an even more dire situation, though also tragically comic…