Point Counter Point, the title says what the book is about - the double bind that humans are in. The quote on the frontispiece is by Fulke Greville. "Oh, wearisome condition of humanity, Born under one law, to another bound,…"I read Point Counter Point about ten year ago. With novels that have a vast cast of characters, I started keeping a folded sheet of paper as a book mark adding all the names of the characters as they are introduced into the story so as to remember who is who, and I started

Point Counter Point by Aldous HuxleyAnother version of this note and thoughts on other books are available at:- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...This is a monumental novel that I must admit to have rejected years ago.How foolish one can be.Aldous Huxley has dazzled me with:- Brave New World, The Doors of Perception and now this masterpiece.It is a complex work, with complicated characters and surprising events...There is even a murder, a few deaths and some love affairs.Astonishing points...

Counterpoint can't exist without a point. The opposites need each other.The industrialists who purvey standardized ready-made amusements to the masses are doing their best to make you as much of a mechanical imbecile in your leisure as in your hours of work. But don’t let them. Make the effort of being human.That's an exact description of the today pop culture.I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.Some persons try to be a part o...

Point Counter Point is a tragicomedy about a group of London intellectuals and/or members of the leisured class in the 1920s. Despite cynical and fun-making elements, Huxley allows his characters to formulate a series of profound and serious ideas, amongst them being:(a) Why do people bother with worrying about liberty, democracy and politics, when they should just get on with living their lives (b) It is easier to live the life of the intellectual, to live in a world purely of ideas, than it is...

Habit is as fatal to a sense of wrong-doing as to active enjoyment. After a few years the converted or sceptical Jew, the Westernized Hindu, can eat their pork and beef with an equanimity which to their still-believing brothers seems brutally cynical. It is the same with the habitual debauchee. Actions which at first seemed thrilling in their intrinsic wickedness become after a certain number of repetitions morally neutral. A little disgusting, perhaps; for the practice of most vices is followed...

A phrase like "novel of ideas" sounds so ponderous and leaden-- you'll not find many who liked The Magic Mountain as much as I did, but I'll readily admit it was tough going-- but Huxley proves that a novel of ideas can be on the contrary, witty, playful, and as bitchy as a gin-sodden Truman Capote. Nearly every page has a line that's a total keeper:"The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living prope...

Bad people doing bad things, but in a very witty way. That is a brief, if incomplete, summary of Aldous Huxley's novel, Point Counter Point.It is more broadly a "novel of ideas" with a novelist of ideas, Philip Quarles, at its center. Quarles is a withdrawn, cerebral man, ill at ease with the everyday world and its emotions. He is surrounded by friends and family whose lives are like those of the monsters that Philip writes about in his journal. Just as Philip decides to structure his novel on t...

I give this book two stars but not because I consider it mediocre. It's just an average of two extremes: some moments superb and some moments catastrophically bad. Particularly if you're a feminist, or have any investment in a non-rapey world.THE GOOD: Huxley pays attention to class. A person's position of power or disenfranchisement is shown as the foundation for the most intimate of thoughts (you can only believe certain things when you have a guaranteed weekly income). It is latent in any phy...

From Wikipedia:In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines (or voices) which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradition, strongly developing during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period, especially in the Baroque. The term originates from the Latin punctus contra punctum meaning "point against point", i.e. "note against note". Book titl...

Neither brilliant nor awful. It has some good elements but it has no central theme or idea, and no plot to speak of. It reminds me of a cross between Vile Bodies and The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir. It is a book about the racy nihilism and the upper classes in the jazz age and a 'roman a clef' about the ideas and personalities of the twenties. I recognized the character of DH Lawrence, and it was interesting to see how highly he was thought of at the time. I think I got who James Middleton M...

Huxley is quite the literary enigma. He is the progenitor of a style of expression that is thoroughly unique and exhaustive in its presentation of the matter at hand and this itself prevents any form of imitation by other lesser competent literary mortals. Yet the only deterrent to Huxley is perhaps Huxley himself. Over indulgence is undeniably his most persistent arch nemesis and it befuddles the authors best efforts in quite a lot of his creations and is well demonstrated here in PCP. The noti...

Brilliant satire that is undone by an uneven and jarring structure. Every chapter follows a new or revisited set of characters arguing on their contrasting belief systems. Several times in humorous and massively insightful ways, and many times in dull and droning ways. Future chapters go back to certain characters, but there are so many, and the whiplash chapter to chapter, left me as a reader with a flawed memory of who was really who and had said what before.It made reading this really tedious...

'Point Counter Point' (1928) is a very typical Huxley: he presents fierce intellectual discussions, moral dilemma's, and lot's of characters eagerly making their own life miserable. There are connotations of satire, some sardonism, and in general blunt pessimism. Stylistically Huxley offers some really great chapters, though after a while the writing process becomes a bit tedious. In general though, this book is a stimulating read, portraying the egotistic aridity of intellectual circles. Huxley...

Huxley never disappointed me so far. The man was a very fine writer indeed. This is one of his longer works, I think it might even be the longest novel he has wrote. It is certainly a very complex work, something I'd recommend if you: a) can appreciate a fine difference between literature and a popular novel, b) are a fan of Huxley c) want to read something that might actually make to think. Point Counter Point is a novel featuring a colourful cast of characters. You're bound to love some, and h...

I reread Point Counter Point after discovering that Dorothy L. Sayers wittely, intellectually and mostly gently pokes fun at the book and its author in The Documents in the Case , in the person of John Munting, alias Philip Quarles, alias Aldous Huxley himself (talk of Russian puppets inside puppets!). Of course Aldous Huxley was a pacifist, Sayers quite the contrary; Sayers was a Catholic, be it more of the mind than of the heart, where Huxley tends to some unspecified universal mysticism. B...

Utterly addictive. This book had some indescribable quality about it that made it completely fascinating, although it was ostensibly about not very much at all. Filled with the intellectual, raging, pathetic, humorous musings of all its characters, it held up so many strings all at once and never dropped any of them. It took me a while to get all the names of the characters right (I kept confusing Burlap and Bidlake, for example, and forgetting who Walter was), but their experiences and inner mo...

To this day, Aldous Huxley's "Point Counter Point" remains my favourite novel. The deepest corners of human nature -- that's where he goes, and that's where I haven't seen anyone else being able to.The novel doesn't have a front-to-back storyline, a precise plot, or a main character. It starts off with Walter Bidlake's "trials and tribulations", only to extend to the entire social network of the London elite of the 1930s.Huxley's versatility brings this writing to the status of "masterpiece", si...

Point Counter Point (1928) is the third Huxley novel I have read in close succession, following Crome Yellow (1921) and Eyeless in Gaza (1936). It is far closer to Eyeless in Gaza than to Crome Yellow in character: vast in scale, structurally complex, hugely ambitious in terms of the philosophical ideas it chooses to wrangle. Its great theme is (in the words of the epigraph, by Fulke Greville) the “wearisome condition of humanity,” as a wrenching cohabitation of “passion and reason, self-divisio...

I am still shaking my head in disbelief that Huxley penned this drivel just four years prior to the publication of Brave New World. Perhaps I’ve missed his point (sorry, just couldn’t help myself), but this one was a snooze fest for me. There was, as expected, some great dialog and a multitude of interesting characters, however, I cared for none of them nor did I care for this lengthy tale.There is, of course, class distinction, however, most of the affluent characters were rather self indulgent...

Huxley is one of those important writers that are rarely read, outside of his famous work "Brave New World." That is an important work and it is easy to see why it is so well known, and well-read. But it is Point Counter Point that is the far more important, and more significant work. The book is largely about two families--the Bidlake's and the Quarles' along with their circle of friends and relations. The two families are tied together through the marriage of Philip and Elinor, who begin the n...