Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful and farcical at the same time
Review: Beerbohm was a great caricaturist, both in words and illustration, but Zuleika was, sadly, his only novel.The first time you read it you will weep with laughter at the farcical hilarity of the situations that Beerbohm conjures up and the way that he describes them. The second time you read it, you will weep be entranced by the beauty of the prose. The third time you read it, you will realise that you have acquired a true friend in the book, which will live with you forever. I have purchased countless copies of the book because I keep giving or lending copies to people ... and this is a book that once lent, never returns.
Rating: 
Summary: Misogynistic and Shallow
Review: I found the heroine (ZD) so flatly written that she could only come off as a selfish, flightly idiot. She never has a chance to be a real person nor to have any real character. To anyone reading today, with any smattering of enlightenment, I believe Zulieka Dobson will be frustrating and annoying. She's set up to make a mean-spirited point. I suggest picking up Evelyn Waugh or Nancy Mitford to get some fine writing on the society of the between-war period and the English upper classes.
Rating:
Summary: a hoot
Review: I have to admit that when the Top 100 list came out, I had never heard of this book or it's author. And yet, by itself, the revelation of this satirical baroque masterpiece justifies all the wretched dreck I've waded through on the List. Zuleika Dobson is the beautiful young granddaughter of the Warden of Judas College at Oxford. She's been earning a living as a conjurer and is the toast of France and America. But Zuleika has never loved a man. She has determined that a woman of her superior beauty can only love a man who is so superior as to be oblivious to her charms. Thus far, there has been no such man. Immediately on her arrival on campus, the entire student body falls madly in love with her. However, at dinner her first night the young Duke of Dorset seems indifferent. Could he be the man? Alas, it turns out that he too is smitten and when she discovers this she spurns him. Unused to such a dismissal, the Duke decides that he must kill himself & soon the whole College is ready to follow his example. The book is a shrieking hoot from start to finish & the whole thing is rendered in an ornate prose that is wholly unique. Take this description of the Duke & his troll like flat mate Noaks: Sensitive reader, start not at the apparition! Oxford is a plexus of anomalies.
These two youths were (odd as it may seem to you) subject to the same Statutes,
affiliated to the same College, reading for the same School; aye! and though the
one had inherited half a score of noble and castellated roofs, whose mere
repairs cost him annually thousands and thousands of pounds, and the other's
people had but one mean little square of lead, from which the fireworks of the
Crystal Palace were clearly visible every Thursday evening, in Oxford one roof
sheltered both of them. Furthermore, there was even some measure of intimacy
between them It was the Duke's whim to condescend further in the direction of
Noaks than in any other. He saw in Noaks his own foil and antithesis, and made
a point of walking up the High with him at least once in every term. Noaks, for
his part, regarded the Duke with feelings mingled of idolatry and disapproval.
The Duke's First in Mods oppressed him (who, by dint of dogged industry, had
scraped a Second) more than all the other differences between them. But the
dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they
will come to a bad end. Noaks may have regarded the Duke as a rather pathetic
figure, on the whole. Or this passage describing the suicidal yearnings of the student body: You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hindlegs. But by standing a
flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. If man were not a
gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real
progress towards civilization. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him
loose among his fellows, and he is lost--he becomes just a unit in unreason. If
any one of the undergraduates had met Miss Dobson in the desert of Sahara, he
would have fallen in love with her; but not one in a thousand of them would have
wished to die because she did not love him. The Duke's was a peculiar case.
For him to fall in love was itself a violent peripety, bound to produce a
violent upheaval; and such was his pride that for his love to be unrequited
would naturally enamour him of death. these other, these quite ordinary, young
men were the victims less of Zuleika than of the Duke's example, and of one
another. A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units
pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.
It was because these undergraduates were a crowd that their passion for Zuleika
was so intense; and it was because they were a crowd that they followed so
blindly the lead given to them. To die for Miss Dobson was 'the thing to do'.
The Duke was going to do it. The Junta was going to do it. It is a hateful
fact, but we must face the fact, that snobbishness was one of the springs to the
tragedy here chronicled.
I can't recommend this one highly enough.
Rating:
Summary: Laugh-Out-Loud Satire
Review: If this were anything but a social satire, the argument that the characters are unlikeable would have more merit. However, the tone of the narrator throughout the novel clearly tells the reader that he or she is not to take the characters too much to heart. The intentional bathos of many of the scenes undercuts the dignity and importance of the events and people with which the narrative superficially presents them. Beerbohm's wit and frequent excursions into the supernatural, (describing events from a statue's perspective and his personal relationship with the historical muse, just to name two instances), allow us to accept the characters as likeable within the make believe framework of their setting - a circumstance that is, I think, at the heart of the satire. Well, ZD herself may not always be likeable since she is so shallow, but that is her nature as a succubus (not literally, but the overt suggestion is there). A great femme fatale, though not a feminist.
Rating: 
Summary: zuleika dobson
Review: The book is a beautifully written evocation of its time and place as well as well-aimed and astute social satire. That much has often been said. What I find amazing is the prescience of its author regarding the fate of that generation. Those young men were, in fact, soon to die out of a sense of duty, honor and (?misplaced)idealism. Although historians may object, perhaps rightly, it could be said that the reality proved more incredible than the fiction. Beerbohm could not have known the horror the near future would bring or the all of the reasons for it, but did he see the where those youth were heading? Personally I think that the novel was written as a pure farce. The pervasive sense of doom, while presented in an often humorous foreknowledge of the students' deaths is a part of the comic structure of the novel. But there is an poignancy to it. The Duke's struggle between desire to live and love and his perceived duty to die an honorable death; his succumbing at last to tradition (even dying in uniform), is touching. In the hindsight of history it is even more so. Therefore, this book can be read either as a comedy or a tragedy. Beneath the sparkling surface, there are depths.
Rating:
Summary: zuleika dobson
Review: The introduction to this version of the novel contains a quote to the effect that "[Beerbohm] only mocked what he loved." How he must have loved Oxford! This novel's outrageous satire doesn't fail to please from one page to the next, as Beerbohm swerves from one affectation to another in satirizing the Edwardian Dandy, the Modern Woman and anyone who comes between them. Structurally, the book consists of various collisions between caricatures of the sort that made Beerbohm famous: from the Duke of Dorset to Mr. Oover to Noaks to the fateful Zuleika herself, each character charms and delights. Beerbohm's prose is liquid, self-consciously affected and simply hilarious. It's the kind of prose that can't be recreated in today's literary environment, but the kind that ought to be treasured and brought out often at night, like the Duke's bottles of port. (If I had one complaint, it would be that the book is a bit too long, and the plot's fanciful consummation is postponed for a few too many superfluous chapters. But that's minor, since the book isn't very long in any case.) The unerring owls have hooted. The Emperors of Oxford smile in approval. This book is for the ages.
Rating:
Summary: should be cast into a river...
Review: The only reason that I do not consider this book to be even less than two stars is because of the author's note that precedes the first chapter. Here, Beerbohm at least warns us to not look for some sort of satirical meaning to his story; he says that he himself supposed "it was just a fantasy" and that this fantasy was applicable to the "old Oxford" with which he was acquainted. My goodness... the old Oxford must have been well-stocked with buffoons! I am critical of the story itself, rather than the style in which it is written. Beerbohm wrote with great elegance and wit... I only wish this was not his only published novel so we could see him having a go at some better content. The whole idea of an entire class of scholars flinging themselves "like lemmings" into the Isis River over this gal Zuleika is too absurd for me to comprehend, and when I began to realize that this in fact was going to happen in the story I wanted to give up and quit reading. But I finished it and conclude that it is not worth re-reading, and it will suffer a drier fate than its idiot characters did, for it will end up in my dust bin. If Oxford is your alma mater, I can understand you reading this book with the same heartfelt enthusiasm as someone who continues to cheer for their home team while badly losing the game. The rest of us will scratch our heads and wonder how this book ever got to be on The Modern Library's list of the Best 100 Books of The 20th Century.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring and silly
Review: This book was highly recommended to me, but I found it to be a complete waste of time. As a woman, the fascination the male students had with ZD went past me totally. If she was set up as an example of ideal womanhood of the time, then it's shameful. If she was supposed to be an example of how even a silly and stupid woman can be idolized by men in a frenzy, it's ridiculous. The story has nothing to offer today's women, and I would recommend that anyone with a sense of humor and a deep appreciation for the well-turned phrase to look elsewhere for entertainment. Max Beerbohm was obviously not a talented author. If you have an interest in him, find his collected cartoons, which are masterworks.
Rating:
Summary: Sharp-toothed Humor
Review: Zuleika Dobson is a witty, colorful, often biting look at British Edwardian society and at male and female vanity. If you like the short fiction of Mark Twain, you'll really enjoy Zuleika.
Rating:
Summary: A short, smart and funny work of art
Review: Zuleika Dobson was published in 1911, a little less than a decade after the Boer War ended. It is a meditation on how beauty and love can mascarade for death: "Yonder, in the Colleges, was the fume and fret of tragedy--Love as Death's decoy, and Youth following her." There is a lot of love in the book, and a big dollop of death, too, and it remains a hilarious read. The book is a sort of mascarade ball. It was, according to itself, a gift to Clio--the Muse of History--from Zeus, who finally gets to bed her by granting her wish to provide a historian "invisibility, inevitability and psychic penetration, with a flawless memory thrown in" to cover the events thrown into action by a certain Ms. Zuleika Dobson at Judas, College at Oxford. In the novel several ghosts, including George Sand and Chopin, play minor roles as do several Roman Emperors, who are all forced to suffer the indignities of the elements year-in, year-out, and, as statues, usually make their thoughts known by such actions as sweating. You learn quite a lot about the late 19th century activities on Olympus--given that it is a place less reported on in our times--what it means to be an omniscient voice, are treated to a few lectures and even tantrums by the author, and to beware phrases in French, Latin, and Greek. (Not to worry, there are but a tiny smattering of these.) That said, it is a very funny book which won't take you too long to read and which foreshadows Flann O'Brien's work as well as other, less interesting, magical realists. One further note of explanation: Zuleika Dobson was recommended to me as a cautionary tale on the perfect woman. Ms. Dobson was not perfect, unless you mean she was an idea. I think that Mr. Beerbohm--and all men--are far too Aristotilean to be so physically transported by her. That, of course, is part and parcel of the joke. Zuleika Dobson is one of the Modern Library's "100 Best Novels" and deserves the honor, without doubt.
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