Tag Archives: #LostforWords

Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn

Lost for Words

A Sense of Place

No doubt about it, the setting for acclaimed British author Edward St. Aubyn’s delightful, witty work, Lost for Words, could be none other than England.  Quintessential England, at that, with men named Tobias and Malcolm, and ladies named Penny Feathers.

Throw in a uniquely British-sounding book contest–the Elysian Prize for Literature, sponsored by the patrician-sounding Elysian Group–and you might feel ready to jump right on a double-decker bus with a Union Jack pinned smartly to your lapel.

 A Sense of the Absurd, Charmingly Served

For those who enjoy a good dose of acerbic wit, this novel will supply a smorgasborg of it!  At every turn, the novel turns convention and snobbery on its pointed nose.

Why, take your pick! A short-listed cookbook of generations-old Indian recipes, The Palace Cookbook, heralded as a brilliant piece of fiction (though it is neither brilliant nor fiction), after a prestigious publishing house mistakenly submits the Indian cookbook instead of the much-anticipated novel of our tragic heroine?

An Indian manservant commissioned by his employer’s “Indian grandee” nephew (whose own novel was overlooked while his aunt’s Indian cookbook is celebrated) to murder one of the judges in revenge?  An elevator that malfunctions and traps the esteemed Malcolm Craig, Chair of the Elysian Prize committee,  mere moments and just steps from the podium where he is to deliver the Elysian prize?

Missing Pieces

Katherine Burns.   Emotionally vacant, sexually vociferous though never sated.   Why, Katherine, why?  I would have liked to have known more about the life events that contributed to her desperate hunt for men who seemingly could never fill that reservoir of sadness she forever sought to fill with them.

How fitting that her novel–the one that one of her lovers seemingly had a hand in (accidentally?) failing to deliver to the Elysian committee by the deadline– was titled, Consequences.

Overall

Overall, Lost for Words, is a winner.  If there were an Elysian prize for the work of fiction with the most echoes of that most prized master of wit, Oscar Wilde, then this surely would take top honors, if not top prize.