Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

BookClub: 29 d'agost a les 19 h a la Biblioteca Mestra Maria Antònia.

FilmClub: 30 d'agost a les 19 h a la Biblioteca Mestra Maria Antònia.

(Extracte del punt de lectura.)

About the book

Brave New World is a dystopian—or anti-utopian—novel. In it, the author questions the values of 1931 London, using satire and irony to portray a futuristic world in which many of the contemporary trends in British and American society have been taken to extremes. Though he was already a best-selling author, Huxley achieved international acclaim with this now-classic novel. Because Brave New World is a novel of ideas, the characters and plot are secondary, even simplistic. The novel is best appreciated as an ironic commentary on contemporary values.

The story is set in a London six hundred years in the future. People all around the world are part of a totalitarian state, free from war, hatred, poverty, disease, and pain. They enjoy leisure time, material wealth, and physical pleasures. However, in order to maintain such a smoothly running society, the ten people in charge of the world, the Controllers, eliminate the same fertilized egg and to condition them for their future lives. Children are raised together and subjected to mind control through sleep teaching to further condition them. As adults, people are content to fulfil their destinies as part of five social classes, from the intelligent Alphas, who run the factories, to the mentally challenged Epsilons, who do the most menial jobs. All spend their free time indulging in harmless and mindless entertainment and sports activities. When the Savage, a man from the uncontrolled area of the world (an Indian reservation in New Mexico) comes to London, he questions the society and ultimately has to choose between conformity and death.

The author

Born in Surrey, 1894, grew up in London.

Huxley published three books of poetry and a collection of short stories, which received a modest amount of attention from critics, before he turned to novels: Crome Yellow (1921), set on an estate and featuring the vain and narcissistic conversations between various artists, scientists, and members of high society; Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren Leaves (1925), both satires of the lives of upper-class British people after World War I; and Point Counter Point (1928), a best-seller and complex novel of ideas featuring many characters and incorporating Huxley’s knowledge of music. As in Brave New World, ideas and themes dominate the style, structure, and characterization of these earlier novels.

Huxley’s next novel, Brave New World (1932), brought him international fame. Written just before the rise of dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin the novel did not incorporate the kind of dark and grim vision of totalitarianism later found in George Orwell’s 1984. Huxley later commented on this omission and reconsidered the ideas and themes of Brave New World in a collection of essays called Brave New World Revisited. (1958). He wrote other novels, short stories, and collections of essays over the years, which were, for the most part, popular and critically acclaimed. Despite being nearly blind all his life, he also wrote screenplays for Hollywood, most notably an adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Always fascinated by the ideas of consciousness and sanity, in the last ten years of his life Huxley experimented with mysticism, parapsychology, and, under the supervision of a physician friend, the hallucinogenic drugs mescaline and LSD. He wrote of his drug experiences in the book The Doors of Perception (1954). In 1960, Huxley was diagnosed with cancer. He died in Los Angeles, California, where he had been living for several years, on November 22, 1963, the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

The Film

Directors:

• Leslie Libman
• Larry Williams

Cast

• Peter Gallagher ... Bernard Marx
• Leonard Nimoy Leonard Nimoy ... Mustapha Mond
• Tim Guinee Tim Guinee ... John Cooper
• Rya Kihlstedt Rya Kihlstedt ... Lenina Crowne
• Sally Kirkland Sally Kirkland ... Linda
• Patrick J. Dancy Patrick J. Dancy ... Henry Foster
• Steven Flynn Steven Flynn ... James
• Wendy Benson-Landes Wendy Benson-Landes ... Fanny

Other books by the same author that you can find in English at the Public Libraries of Catalonia (link):

• Antic Hay
• The Devils of Loudun
• The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell
• Eyeless in Gaza
• The Gioconda Smile and other stories
• Those Barren Leaves