Novel
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley · 1932
Synopsis
A guided tour of a hatchery and conditioning centre in London, where human embryos descend in bottles on a conveyor belt and where the intelligences the State needs are manufactured by caste. Children learn in their sleep the phrases they will repeat all their lives. A puny psychologist, of whom it is said that alcohol was put into his blood surrogate, takes a young woman on holiday to a reservation in New Mexico where people are still born of a mother. There he finds a young white man, steeped in Shakespeare.
Context
The book was written in four months, during the summer of 1931, at Sanary, on the Provençal coast. His letters of that year speak of the horror of Wells's utopia, and its author later linked it to a parody of a utopian novel by that fellow writer. The title comes from a line of Shakespeare, in which a girl raised on an island, faced with a crowd of human beings she is discovering, marvels at the world she is being shown. The book was banned in Ireland as soon as it appeared and in Australia from 1932 to 1937.
Who it is for
About two hundred and seventy pages in the 2023 French translation; its author returned to it in a 1958 essay.
Prizes and reception
Retranslated into French in 2023 by Josée Kamoun, ninety years after the first translation, under the same title.
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