When I started reading this book, I had high expectations of Huxley, but was immediately disappointed at what I mistakenly supposed was a hackneyed situation. There was a bad poet hopelessly in love with an unresponsive-not to say cold-female; a sophisticated person, much older in both physical and mental terms, a true to type Woman of the World, and he a clichéd portrait of the kind of person rampant in literature, either as a caricature or as comic relief. Spare me an unrequited-love romance, even as an aside, I inwardly implored.I was spared.
What I found instead was a delightfully good-natured literary satire on the various 'types' found in literature, the kind that every reader recognizes instantly. Here, you find them all, congregated in a short and enchanting novel full of the most subtle and gentle humor-the least obvious and most entertaining joke is, of course, that none of these people can really be taken seriously.
In a parody of characterization in literature, Huxley comes up with: The Philosopher, The 'Sensitive' Wannabe Poet, The Serious Pretentious Pseudo Intellectual, The Spiritual Author as the Protégé (Pet) of a Rich lady With Nothing To Do, The Rich Lady With Nothing To Do, The Rich Lady's Husband With Nothing To Do, The Charming Accomplished Amorous Aristocrat With Everything Going For Him, The Mediterranean Artist, The Religious Fanatic, and finally, the Ice Maiden.
Huxley takes this rich cast of familiar and even sometimes lovable characters that we have known from time immemorial in innumerable novels and puts them together, in the close proximity of a house in which they are the house guests of the rich lady and her husband, who in literature, have nothing to do but invite people over for the summer to endure excruciating contact with other people they have nothing in common with. And then, Huxley casually presents us with their performance.
This very theme is touched upon when Denis, the poet, discovers what Jenny, the only original character in the whole book, does when she scribbles silently in her diary. His dishonesty leads him to the disquieting realization that there are people beside himself who possess the faculty of observation and interpretation. He had underestimated Jenny, just as the reader is led to do, as a deaf woman in her thirties, quite unnecessary in any tangible sense: her apparent distance from the action leads us to discount her importance as a character or a human being, the very thing many of us do in real life when we come across quiet, self effacing, retiring individuals.
What appealed to me personally about Crome Yellow was that Huxley, whether consciously or unconsciously, had used two characteristics from two of my favorite authors: he had taken Dickens' style of casting all his characters as types (though Dickens is, of course, more lucrative in his supply of types than Huxley is or should have been), and then using them to make a story; in Dickens case, the characters assist him in his chief aim, that of satire and social criticism, and are not themselves the focus, whereas here the characters are the point. The other characteristic is the distance of the author from his characters, which is best exhibited by Forster. Huxley is wonderfully omniscient and yet absent in this work, with no leaning towards any particular member of his cast. No favoritism, so to speak-there are no heroes and no villains.
I am charmed by this work. The writing is refined, the story original, there are some surprises always waiting for the experienced reader too ready to take things for granted. It's a fresh fresh composition.
Idioma: INGLÉS
El secreto de la asistenta
