Yulia's review
The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
Okay, sold! I am a sucker for Thatcher-era England and for coming-out novels, and this is a very enticing review.
Have you read E. M. Forster's Maurice? This sounds a bit like that, wonder if it's supposed to....
I haven't actually, though now I will look into it. In fact, the author most spoken of in this work is Henry James, whom the protagonist wrote his thesis on. But, dare I say it, I think James inspired generations of writers who were better than he. I believe the same thing about Woolf, actually. I know, it's blasphemy, and where would the new generation be without their elders?
so glad you approve of Coetzee too, my personal hero.
This is a lovely review Yulia. I'm expecially intigued by your comment about James: gives me something worthwhile to ponder.
Yes, I do love Coetzee, though I've stayed away from his post-Nobel work. I still have to read Life and Times of Michael K., actually.
Yulia's review
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Yulia's review
rating:
bookshelves:
gay-lit
An unusually powerful and deserving winner of the Man Book Prize, this is one of the few books that took me over a year to read, not because it was ever boring or sluggish, but because each sentence was so beautiful, I wanted to give every passage its due attention. I rarely say such things about books, so Hollinghurst must be a magician or a hypnotist. As it took me so long to read, I spent an embarrassing amount of time repeating to people who asked me what I was reading that it was Line of Beauty, about a young homosexual during Thatcher's 80s England, staying at his straight friend's home, making a life for himself after Oxford, and that they just had to read it. In fact, after I'd caught myself recommending it to him for the second or even third time, my doctor no longer asks me what I'm reading: he must think I actually don't read many books after all or that I have a secret agenda to get him to come out of the closet. My brother said it'd been done before, the story o...more
Okay, sold! I am a sucker for Thatcher-era England and for coming-out novels, and this is a very enticing review.Have you read E. M. Forster's Maurice? This sounds a bit like that, wonder if it's supposed to....
I haven't actually, though now I will look into it. In fact, the author most spoken of in this work is Henry James, whom the protagonist wrote his thesis on. But, dare I say it, I think James inspired generations of writers who were better than he. I believe the same thing about Woolf, actually. I know, it's blasphemy, and where would the new generation be without their elders?
so glad you approve of Coetzee too, my personal hero.
This is a lovely review Yulia. I'm expecially intigued by your comment about James: gives me something worthwhile to ponder.
Yes, I do love Coetzee, though I've stayed away from his post-Nobel work. I still have to read Life and Times of Michael K., actually.
