Lord Flyte, Revisited

A Times interview with Jhumpa Lahiri — whose new novel, The Lowland, is one I’ll buy in hardcover and read straight through; no need to see what the reviewers are saying — is full of remarks that stick in the brain. There’s Lahiri’s seemingly offhand comment that she and her husband have read to their children every night for ten years (“We take turns, alternating nights”). And there’s this:

If you could be any character from literature who would you be?

I’d like to be Sebastian Flyte from “Brideshead Revisited,” but only during the early chapters, before things start to go downhill. I’ve always wanted to dress for dinner.

Myself, if I were Sebastian Flyte I’d want to follow the role through to the point where he becomes a lay brother attached to a monastery in Morocco. Because it seems to me that Waugh’s novel invites us to conclude that it’s not at Brideshead Castle but in north Africa — where the exhaustingly looked-after English lord finds a way to look after others — that Sebastian is fully alive …

• 28 September 2013