A Little Something to Make Newcomers Think This Is a Literary Blog
I just now finished, after many, many weeks, The Folding Star, a novel by Alan Hollinghurst. I read it mostly waiting for and riding the bus to and from work. (Earlier this year, I decided to sacrifice the time I used to spend listening to NPR on my Walkman in order to actually get through a non-work-related book now and then; I still get my NPR fix while primping in the morning and walking the dogs.)
I had read Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty this summer, which then led me to this one. The Line of Beauty is better, but in both books his writing is completely gorgeous and -- as he and his fellow Brits would say -- "spot-on." Not a whole lot happens in either one, but he has an amazing, utterly one-of-a-kind way of dissecting a scrap of body language, a line of dialogue, or an emotion in such a way that I would read the words describing the action or feeling, then instantly replay them in my head, nodding in stunned recognition, envy, and satisfaction that he could have gotten it so right -- yet again.
Here's a passage from The Line of Beauty. The main character, Nick, is meeting a boyfriend's mother for the first time:
Nick was always a favourite with mothers, he was known to be a nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity. But he also knew the state of suspense, the faked insouciance, of bringing friends home, the playful vigilance with which certain subjects had to be headed off even before they had arisen; you took only a distracted, irrelevant part in the conversation because you were thirty seconds, a minute, ten minutes ahead of it, detecting those magnetic embarrassments towards which it would always twitch and bend.
And here's a little moment from The Folding Star. It's dawn and the thirtysomething narrator is stumbling out of a car in which he fell asleep on a stake-out in front of an apartment building, waiting for the 17-year-old boy he's obsessed with to appear:
An old man with a knapsack came past and greeted me humorously and I answered him with tremendous gusto -- the day's first phlegmy utterance mad with unadjusted warmth.
I love that stuff! Hollinghurst is fantastic even when he's imperfect: The Folding Star has a really dull subplot that is important to the theme (I guess) but that I kept fidgeting through. The Line of Beauty won Britain's Man Booker Prize last year; The Folding Star was short-listed for the same a decade ago. I tried reading his first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, around the time it came out, 15 or so years ago, and could not get into it. I now want to give it another try since I think I was too young and immature (I was 29 or 30!).
I had read Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty this summer, which then led me to this one. The Line of Beauty is better, but in both books his writing is completely gorgeous and -- as he and his fellow Brits would say -- "spot-on." Not a whole lot happens in either one, but he has an amazing, utterly one-of-a-kind way of dissecting a scrap of body language, a line of dialogue, or an emotion in such a way that I would read the words describing the action or feeling, then instantly replay them in my head, nodding in stunned recognition, envy, and satisfaction that he could have gotten it so right -- yet again.
Here's a passage from The Line of Beauty. The main character, Nick, is meeting a boyfriend's mother for the first time:
Nick was always a favourite with mothers, he was known to be a nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity. But he also knew the state of suspense, the faked insouciance, of bringing friends home, the playful vigilance with which certain subjects had to be headed off even before they had arisen; you took only a distracted, irrelevant part in the conversation because you were thirty seconds, a minute, ten minutes ahead of it, detecting those magnetic embarrassments towards which it would always twitch and bend.
And here's a little moment from The Folding Star. It's dawn and the thirtysomething narrator is stumbling out of a car in which he fell asleep on a stake-out in front of an apartment building, waiting for the 17-year-old boy he's obsessed with to appear:
An old man with a knapsack came past and greeted me humorously and I answered him with tremendous gusto -- the day's first phlegmy utterance mad with unadjusted warmth.
I love that stuff! Hollinghurst is fantastic even when he's imperfect: The Folding Star has a really dull subplot that is important to the theme (I guess) but that I kept fidgeting through. The Line of Beauty won Britain's Man Booker Prize last year; The Folding Star was short-listed for the same a decade ago. I tried reading his first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, around the time it came out, 15 or so years ago, and could not get into it. I now want to give it another try since I think I was too young and immature (I was 29 or 30!).
posted by Billy at 4:30 AM
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