Eyeless in Gaza

Description

Anthony Beavis is a man inclined to recoil from life. His past is haunted by the death of his best friend Brian and by his entanglement with the cynical and manipulative Mary Amberley. Realising that his determined detachment from the world has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Anthony attempts to find a new way to live. Eyeless in Gaza offers a counterpoint to the biting cynicism of Huxley's earlier satirical novels, and is considered by many to be his definitive work of fiction.

Aldous Huxley was born on 26th July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early twenties, but it was his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) - bright, brilliant satires in which Huxley wittily but ruthlessly passed judgement on the shortcomings of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy and an account of his experiences there can be found in Along The Road (1925). The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work Brave New World (published in 1932 this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza(1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form as Music at Night (1931) and Ends and Means (1937). In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (Time Must Have a Stop, 1944 and Island, 1962) and non-fiction (The Perennial Philosophy, 1945, Grey Eminence, 1941 and the famous account of his first mescalin experience, The Doors of Perception, 1954). Huxley died in California on 22nd November 1963.

A crystal clear and a deeply moving book... Unerringly, Huxley explores the layers of memory, affection and the decline of sexual attraction, asking the unanswerable question of what you do with love after it dies.... his deepest, funniest, most marvellous of novels * Observer * Sardonically humorous, urbane and exquisite in style * Scotsman * The play of ideas and theories, moral, psychological and sociological, is profuse and scintillating * Times Literary Supplement * Eyeless in Gaza embodies Huxley's conclusions about life. Amusing, moving and brilliant, there is no doubting the sincerity and the beauty of this book * Listener * Brilliant intellectual fireworks * The Times *