Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Five top imaginary castles in fiction

At The Daily Beast, novelist Johanna Lane tagged "several favorite moated-and-turreted locations that only ever existed in the authors’ minds," including:
Brideshead Revisted by Evelyn Waugh

I chose this because it’s the novel from which I took the epigraph for my book: Charles Ryder, the narrator of Brideshead Revisited, says “I regarded men as something much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes.” I love this sentiment because it articulates how ironic it is that families create these great houses to demonstrate their own importance, but their houses almost always outlive them—and their family line.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Brideshead Revisited is one of John Mullan's ten of the most memorable hunting scenes in literature, Robert Irwin's top ten quest narratives, Val McDermid's top ten Oxford novels, and Christopher Buckley's best books.

--Marshal Zeringue