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| Those Barren Leaves
| | Aldous Huxley
| Aldous Huxley spares no one in his ironic, piercing portrayal of a
group gathered in an Italian palace by the socially ambitious and
self-professed lover of art, Mrs. Aldwinkle. Here, Mrs. Aldwinkle
yearns to recapture the glories of the Italian Renaissance, but her
guests ultimately fail to fulfill her naïve expectations.
Among her entourage are: a suffering poet and reluctant editor of the Rabbit Fanciers' Gazette
who silently bears the widowed Mrs. Aldwinkle's desperate advances; a
popular novelist who records every detail of her affair with another
guest, the amorous Calamy, for future literary endeavors; and an aging
sensualist philosopher who pursues a wealthy yet mentally-disabled
heiress.
Stripping the houseguests of their pretensions, Huxley reveals the superficiality of the cultural elite. Deliciously satirical, Those Barren Leaves bites the hands of those who dare to posture or feign sophistication and is as comically fresh today as when first published.
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