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257th out of 299 books
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The Spell
Here are the interlocking affairs of four men: Robin Woodfield, an architect in his late forties trying to build an idyllic life in Dorset with his young lover, Justin, a would-be actor increasingly disenchanted with the countryside; Robin's attractive and dangerously volatile twenty-two-year-old son Danny; and Justin's former boyfriend Alex, whose life is unexpectedly tra...more
Paperback, 272 pages
Published
May 1st 2000
by Penguin Books
(first published 1998)
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Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which won the 2004 Booker, may be one of the best novels I've read, among those novels in the Forsterian/Jamesian tradition, if such a tradition can exist. You know what I'm talking about. Novels about the lives of interesting people just a shade more fascinating and a shade better looking than average, whose lives fall in the midst of some greater sociopolitical moment. &c &c. What's surprising is how that incredible novel came out of the writer who produced t...more
Hollinghurst's prose is as frank and lush as ever in The Spell. He reveals his characters' intricate internal worlds; to the reader's benefit, they are wonderfully observant and self-aware, yet they do not communicate well with one another. They withhold information; they hesitate to reveal themselves. It's not unexplored territory, but Hollinghurst deals brilliantly with characters' emotional and psychological lives. I'm left wondering if they're all happy with who and what they end up with, o...more
Fiction. This book was so unpleasant I finished it in two days. I'd read a chapter, make a face, put the book down, and walk away. Later I'd find myself reading it again. It's a terrible book filled with gay men who are all cheating on each other. The really annoying thing is that it's quite well written so I kept reading even though I didn't want to. I wanted to see how it turned out, but I didn't care about any of the characters because they obviously didn't care about each other. So that was ...more
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Gail
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Every morning when Alex woke he thought of Danny; his thoughts emerged from the watery interview or vanishing railway-carriage of dreams, stumbled on for a few forgetful instances, pale and directionless, and then fled towards Danny in a grateful glow of remembered purpose. It was love, and all the day would be coloured by it. Or perhaps love was the primary thing, onto which the events of the day were transiently projected - that was how it seemed afterwards, when his memory gave back rather li...more
Beautifully written story by Hollinghurst describes the loves and betrayals of 3 gay men. How each cope and their feelings toward each other as they meet on a weekend. Two are ex-lovers and we find a contrived weekend merely to compare loves. It's cruel and Justin is cruel. Robbin is hot. Alex is dumped and lonely.
Hollinghurst manages to illicit emotions and feelings from the smallest things in life and encapsulate them and uses them to describe how a little stream, dust motes in the air al...more
Hollinghurst manages to illicit emotions and feelings from the smallest things in life and encapsulate them and uses them to describe how a little stream, dust motes in the air al...more
If you are expecting the beyond beatiful, every page has a gem prose style of "Line of Beauty," you're not going to get it here. You can tell this is one of his earlier books and his jeweler's eye is not yet refined enough for Cartier. Tiffany maybe. It's still a great read, even if you're a hetero female (I'm not quite sure all the sex is necessary, but I guess I'm a bit prudish compared to the men of merry ol' England). If you're going to read just one Hollinghurst, make it "...more
This book, which has been much-praised, goes to show that if your standing in the literary world is elevated enough, you can get away with writing a shit novel. I, too, love Alan Hollinghurst, but I cannot pretend this book is anything but awful.
The storyline (in as much as there is one) concerns a father and son, both gay, and their lovers (present and former, which include some overlap). However, what should be a fizzy soap opera is merely banal and depressing. The novel seems rudd...more
The storyline (in as much as there is one) concerns a father and son, both gay, and their lovers (present and former, which include some overlap). However, what should be a fizzy soap opera is merely banal and depressing. The novel seems rudd...more
The Spell is a slight book, almost fully concerned with romantic interaction and drug use (and of course the intersection of the two). Three of the four main characters (all are, of course, gay men) aren't likeable, and I guess that's the problem. Sometimes Hollinghurst writes beautiful characters; here he writes ones that are consumed by their flaws. OK I mean one I completely wrote off because he is a goateed '90s stereotype. The one I liked best is Justin, and he is the most broken of all...more
This is the third of Hollinghurst’s four novels. And from what I can gather , the runt of the lot for quite a few of his readers. Not hard to see why, given what it followed: a brace of densely brilliant novels which permit us to richly inhabit the lyric sensibilities of two very sinuous and engaging first-person narrators (writers are still taking up the gauntlet of Lolita). The Spell, by contrast, flits among a circle of suggestively drawn but necessarily flatter London men. Hollinghurst does ...more
What's fascinating about this novel is the way it looks at the more superficial aspects of late-20th-century urban gay life: it treats it all seriously (not that the book is humorless--far from it) and rather than dismissively. Two of the four main characters might be pegged as empty-headed and vapid, but Hollinghurst shows us the humanity in each of their souls. I might never become good friends with them in real life, but I enjoyed getting to know them in this novel.
Sooraj Subramaniam
added it
Didn't enjoy it despite the first few pages, slow that they were, promised to propel me into a dark and mysterious literary journey. While the metaphors were engaging and proviking in small doses, entire paragraphs just dribbled like mid-afternoon diarrhoea.
There were two or three stories running parallel with none of them reaching any significant climax. While I was drawn to it in a strange fashion (haha) I was, overall, disapppointed.
There were two or three stories running parallel with none of them reaching any significant climax. While I was drawn to it in a strange fashion (haha) I was, overall, disapppointed.
Not nearly as good as The Line of Beauty, which is one of my all-time favorites, but still a pretty good book. Hollinghurst is probably my favorite author in the gay literature genre. His stories have great characters, and he is able to capture the most ordinary of interactions, and people's reaction to them, in such an insightful and authenticate way. If you haven't read him yet, I'd start with the Line of Beauty. It is a little dense, but totally worth it.
Older men fall in love with and lose their heads over younger men, and lose track of their values. Lots of stereotypes. Nevertheless, most of the characters are interesting, and their motivations are revealed with reasonable subtlety, good pacing and dialog that felt natural. If the reader cares about strata of English society, I suppose it is a good portrait of them, and the book can be interesting on that front, as well.
Not quite as riveting as The Swimming Pool Library, but still great story-telling and lots of naughty fun. The gay relationships are complex, and the frequency of betrayal occasionally is appalling. Everyone is rich, and handsome, and randy. Not for the faint of heart, and unlikely to win over many straight readers. A perfect end-of-summer gay-boy reading vacation, though. Now back to more serious literature.
Hollinghurst has a knack for writing about gay men in way that makes them well-rounded and human. It's sexy without a single sex scene being written. He is also is a writer in the tradition of EM Forester-- very British in his use of the city/country dichotomy. This particular story didn't have quite the compelling drive of his other books, but it was definitely a pleasant read.
I loved In the Line of Beauty. But I suspect that this may be the last book I read from Alan Hollinghurst.
The writing style is beginning to wear thin. Dont get me wrong, I love a destructive depressing book. IM just not a fan of reading them over and over by the same author.
Same thing happened wioth Edmund Hite. Gave up on him ages ago.
Hollinghurst is a fantastic author who can't write a bad book -- but it sure seems like he tried to with The Spell. The novel focuses on the interconnected loves and lusts of four gay men who travel in various social circles within London and in the surrounding countryside. It had all of the trappings of a guilty-pleasure inducing romance novel, but Hollinghurst -- ever literary -- takes his shallow, self-absorbed characters way too seriously. They obsess over their romances but are rarely ro...more
I loved his "Line of Beauty" and found much to admire in "Swimming Pool Library". He has a real knack for treating questions of aesthetics seriously, and creating complex characters with interesting relationships. Very vivid images here of both urban gay rave culture and life in a thatched English cottage!!
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Hmmm this book was slow to start but fairly absorbing....if I wasn't reading it for the LGBT book group I wouldn't have bothered finishing it! I have come to the conclusion that I would be a terrble gay man, after reading this book.
I'm not sure how I happened on this book. Perhaps it was because he was a Booker Prize winner. It's the first one I've read that gave me an inner view of gay life and loves. It focuses on four men whose lives are intertwined by their love and connection to one or more of the others. All four were very interesting characters in their own right, but the story moved too slowly for me. In fact, as I was nearing the end, each night as I started to read and had sufficient of time to finish, based on ...more
I really like this book because all the characters are so believable. The story covers many emotions, from love, jealousy, lust and the pain of being abandoned without understanding why.
I read this novel about eight years ago, but it was a great re-read.
Verbose use of language. It's full of very British words that sometime take some looking up.
But a very honest look at gay lives across generations and all of their own struggles at connecting.
Verbose use of language. It's full of very British words that sometime take some looking up.
But a very honest look at gay lives across generations and all of their own struggles at connecting.
Fabulous book, I would recommend it to you especially if it is you first Hollinghurst book.
Check out our review at KindleClay:
http://clayscottbrown.biz/kindle/2011/06...
Check out our review at KindleClay:
http://clayscottbrown.biz/kindle/2011/06...
I don't normally care for his writing--MUCH too precious. This novel, though, is lovely. It reminded me of a 21st "Jane Austen" about 4 gay men. It's not really a "gay" novel, though; rather, it's a novel about 4 men who happen to be gay.
Beautifully written looked forward to reading it everyday, conveys a sense of compassionate sensuality without the miasma of underlying distaste so often found in writers who describe the physical detail of the world
Not one of his stronger books. Too much gay male angst.
great characterisation.....pretty sexy
Brilliant.
4 stars becuz of the extremely lengthy descriptions of environment.
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Alan Hollinghurst is an English novelist, and winner of the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty.
He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford graduating in 1975; and subsequently took the further degree of Master of Literature (1979). While at Oxford he shared a house with Andrew Motion, and was awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1974, the year before Motion.
In th...more
More about Alan Hollinghurst...
He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford graduating in 1975; and subsequently took the further degree of Master of Literature (1979). While at Oxford he shared a house with Andrew Motion, and was awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1974, the year before Motion.
In th...more
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