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Caracole
Gabriel, a teenager, is being introduced to the rites of adulthood, including sexual desire, social intrigue, and political power while his young lover, Angelica, is following a parallel course through life
342 pages, Hardcover
First published September 25, 1985
12 people are currently reading
215 people want to read
About the author
Edmund White
138 books914 followersEdmund Valentine White III was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. He was the recipient of Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
White was known as a groundbreaking writer of gay literature and a major influence on gay American literature and has been called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers."
White was known as a groundbreaking writer of gay literature and a major influence on gay American literature and has been called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers."
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
December 29, 2012
an attempt at creating a baroque novel of mind games and manipulation. unfortunately, it's an abortion. White eventually learned that there is no suspense when the author describes character motivation ad nauseum over the course of many, many pages... and so he simply gave up on suspenseful writing altogether. his strongest skill will always be in his oddly haunting descriptions of enigmatic activities undertaken by cyphers going on journeys the reader can barely understand. Caracole hideously squanders that skill.
December 11, 2025
I don't have the courage to give White less than three stars and judged purely as a literary artifact Caracole is amazing but also flawed. White always described Caracole as his non-gay novel (he also desccribed as his 'baroque' novel) which makes me wonder if all those GR reviewers who shelved it as LGBT both odd and amusing. Is it because everything written by a gay man is gay? Or maybe a sign that those shelving it as gay haven't actually read it? The 2010 edition from Vintage of the novel uses one of Herb Lists photographs of a masked boy on the shores of the Baltic which suggests the novel is a homo-erotic adventure but this is blatantly false advertising.
White deliberately wrote the novel with no gay/homosexual characters or themes. Although almost never recognised as such, I am sure the period when Venice and the Veneto were part of the Hapsburg empire post Waterloo, is the inspiration for the novel's setting. I read this novel, or read some of it, twenty five years ago when I had a lot more patience. I would not invest the time today. It is not a bad novel, but it is not gripping or even interesting read. As part of White's biography and development as an writer it is of course important but removed from that context? I don't know and I would say, if pushed, no it is not a novel worth reading.
White deliberately wrote the novel with no gay/homosexual characters or themes. Although almost never recognised as such, I am sure the period when Venice and the Veneto were part of the Hapsburg empire post Waterloo, is the inspiration for the novel's setting. I read this novel, or read some of it, twenty five years ago when I had a lot more patience. I would not invest the time today. It is not a bad novel, but it is not gripping or even interesting read. As part of White's biography and development as an writer it is of course important but removed from that context? I don't know and I would say, if pushed, no it is not a novel worth reading.
October 21, 2013
Thank god that's over.
Read
September 2, 2025A (non-blogging) literary friend and I decided to read this together; I’d never read White, and my pal had never read this one. He finished it first and was not impressed, citing the lack of structure, the way the dense language works against narrative momentum, and the paucity of characters about whom one cares. I was therefore expecting something like Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, one of the worst reading experiences of recent memory, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Caracole is better. It’s set in an unnamed city and country—in chapter one it feels like Garcia Marquez’s Central America, but the city seems approximately Venetian; at no point does it feel like ’80s New York, as the back cover claims—and follows the sexual and social escapades of a very young man, Gabriel, plus an orbiting group of characters that include his childhood sweetheart Angelica, his uncle Mateo, his uncle’s mistress Edwige, Gabriel’s own mistress Mathilda, and Mathilda’s adult son Daniel (oh, and Daniel’s mistress Claude). There’s quite a lot of ripely described sex, so have a care if you’re reading it on the Tube, but ultimately it’s a curiously conservative novel to my mind, in the sense that Tom Jones is: it’s very interested in family relationships, and the (false, but no one in the novel knows this) significance of a family name.
White is generally lauded as a writer of beautiful sentences. I found him hypnotic, but also pretentious and baggy. The middle sections in particular go on for far too long, and get repetitive, making proclamations about characters at length instead of letting the characters reveal themselves to us. What I’m really stuck on is the final chapter, which takes place at a masque and suddenly introduces revolution/resistance as a real concern; the implication on the final page is that a crime of passion, totally unpolitical, is about to serve as the spark (or excuse) for a people’s revolt. The entire book up til now has portrayed the resistance movement as peripheral and ineffective; it has been mentioned, but not taken seriously. Did White genuinely think he was writing a political novel? The ending, where Gabriel is about to be made into a folk hero through the connivance of Angelica and her friend Maurizio, despite having done precisely nothing—does that emerge organically in any way from the book’s apparent interests in the previous 340 pages (sex, loneliness, artifice)? Is the fact that our focus hasn’t been on the revolution at all an indictment of the collaborationist/intellectual capacity to be distracted? Or is it just bad plotting? Like pretty much everything about Caracole, it’s hard to tell. I need to read more White to see if this is representative. Source: bought secondhand from World of Books
White is generally lauded as a writer of beautiful sentences. I found him hypnotic, but also pretentious and baggy. The middle sections in particular go on for far too long, and get repetitive, making proclamations about characters at length instead of letting the characters reveal themselves to us. What I’m really stuck on is the final chapter, which takes place at a masque and suddenly introduces revolution/resistance as a real concern; the implication on the final page is that a crime of passion, totally unpolitical, is about to serve as the spark (or excuse) for a people’s revolt. The entire book up til now has portrayed the resistance movement as peripheral and ineffective; it has been mentioned, but not taken seriously. Did White genuinely think he was writing a political novel? The ending, where Gabriel is about to be made into a folk hero through the connivance of Angelica and her friend Maurizio, despite having done precisely nothing—does that emerge organically in any way from the book’s apparent interests in the previous 340 pages (sex, loneliness, artifice)? Is the fact that our focus hasn’t been on the revolution at all an indictment of the collaborationist/intellectual capacity to be distracted? Or is it just bad plotting? Like pretty much everything about Caracole, it’s hard to tell. I need to read more White to see if this is representative. Source: bought secondhand from World of Books
February 25, 2024
why are the comments filled with realist pseuds. this book rocks people are just mad the sex is heterosexual.
July 15, 2013
Edmund White’s novel Caracole can best be described as sublime nonsense. Whether it could also be described as worth reading is quite another matter, since a style that is perhaps best described as a stream of consciousness renders it simultaneously both poetic and utterly incomprehensible.
Caracole, at least in apparent intent, is not an abstract novel. Part fantastical and part historical, it attempts to present a plot based in a society portrayed as ‘tribal’, but where people also go to the opera. All right, so it must be Europe, but there is nothing either geographically or socially familiar, or indeed recognisable about this territory. It may have existed in the author’s mind, but the messages the reader receives are something less than clues. In Caracole it is not only the setting that sometimes leaves the reader confused. Quite often, by the time the end of the paragraph appears, it is hard to remember where it started or, indeed, where it has travelled in between.
Perhaps the best way to read Caracole is to treat it as a random poem, a musical meander through mellifluous language. Rather than beginning at the start and reading sequentially, it might be better approached via the random dip. A page here, a paragraph there would create disjointed but beautiful images that would stand alone. The experience may not actually prove more disjointed than an attempt at a sequential journey through the text.
Edmund White’s style is often breathtakingly beautiful and virtuosic. Free association alone would not produce prose as upredictable as this. If it were merely dream-like, then the narrative would perhaps be stronger, so that term does not work either as a description of the experience. What we have in Caracole is a written version of abstract expressionism, splash painted in sentences to convey often implicit, unstated, but deep emotions, with the illusory conformity of coherent syntax providing an apparent contradiction to the randomness. Beautiful it undoubtedly is, but is it a book? That is the more interesting question. Physically the answer is yes, but that does not address the question.
As ever with Edmund White there is copious sex that is both intricately described and deeply felt, right to the nerve ends. A vaguely nymphomaniac character adores being stung, as she puts it, and seeks all the pain she can achieve from such penetrations. Characters do reappear throughout the book as the story moves on through them, but so many of their attitudes and responses are products of their own immediate experience and stimuli that we hardly get to know any of them. Also, they all seem to inhabit different worlds with ease, their personas almost dissolving into the backgrounds that surround them.
Caracole is thus a strange book. Sometimes it feels like a medieval romance, sometimes like a Gothic novel, sometimes fairytale, sometimes erotic horror story. What unites the experience for the reader - if there exists any unity in this work - is the beauty and fluency of the writing. But it is this very quality, this virtuosity that also makes the book virtually unreadable. Do try, however, and see what you think.
Caracole, at least in apparent intent, is not an abstract novel. Part fantastical and part historical, it attempts to present a plot based in a society portrayed as ‘tribal’, but where people also go to the opera. All right, so it must be Europe, but there is nothing either geographically or socially familiar, or indeed recognisable about this territory. It may have existed in the author’s mind, but the messages the reader receives are something less than clues. In Caracole it is not only the setting that sometimes leaves the reader confused. Quite often, by the time the end of the paragraph appears, it is hard to remember where it started or, indeed, where it has travelled in between.
Perhaps the best way to read Caracole is to treat it as a random poem, a musical meander through mellifluous language. Rather than beginning at the start and reading sequentially, it might be better approached via the random dip. A page here, a paragraph there would create disjointed but beautiful images that would stand alone. The experience may not actually prove more disjointed than an attempt at a sequential journey through the text.
Edmund White’s style is often breathtakingly beautiful and virtuosic. Free association alone would not produce prose as upredictable as this. If it were merely dream-like, then the narrative would perhaps be stronger, so that term does not work either as a description of the experience. What we have in Caracole is a written version of abstract expressionism, splash painted in sentences to convey often implicit, unstated, but deep emotions, with the illusory conformity of coherent syntax providing an apparent contradiction to the randomness. Beautiful it undoubtedly is, but is it a book? That is the more interesting question. Physically the answer is yes, but that does not address the question.
As ever with Edmund White there is copious sex that is both intricately described and deeply felt, right to the nerve ends. A vaguely nymphomaniac character adores being stung, as she puts it, and seeks all the pain she can achieve from such penetrations. Characters do reappear throughout the book as the story moves on through them, but so many of their attitudes and responses are products of their own immediate experience and stimuli that we hardly get to know any of them. Also, they all seem to inhabit different worlds with ease, their personas almost dissolving into the backgrounds that surround them.
Caracole is thus a strange book. Sometimes it feels like a medieval romance, sometimes like a Gothic novel, sometimes fairytale, sometimes erotic horror story. What unites the experience for the reader - if there exists any unity in this work - is the beauty and fluency of the writing. But it is this very quality, this virtuosity that also makes the book virtually unreadable. Do try, however, and see what you think.
January 16, 2014
Some delicious ingredients are in this book—sex, politics, morality—but instead of cooking a wonderful dish, White creates an unappetizing hot mess. The first chapters promise a fanciful literary fictionalization of the sexual revolution of the 1970s and its end with Reagan's election in 1980, but soon the full-boil sexual plot and hallucinogenic political scene become too unrealistic. Adding to that, a confusing and contradictory morality where the reader is not sure exactly what is being criticized, and what is being promoted, leaves readers in a weird haze. Is he bemoaning the lack of love in erotic sex or exalting unrestrained promiscuity? Is he suggesting friendship is superior to love, or wishing the two could be combined? White sends mixed messages and refuses to throw us a bone to give some clue as to what is going on. When the book ends with a climactic assassination, figuratively marking the end of the sexual freedom of the 1970s, most readers will have long given up caring.
Certainly there are some recognizable characters from White's own life, such as his ward and nephew, and real literary figures he knew such as the feminist author Susan Sontag, sociologist Richard Sennett, and even himself. White does a good job in the early chapters setting the scene, an almost medieval New York, and creating these characters from life. But then he lets everything go out of control in the latter third of the book, leading the reader to someplace undefined and untrustworthy. Given White's literary ability and his direct experience with the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, he should have written a great book.
One of the reasons White fails embarrassingly in Caracole is because he completely excludes any gay characters and transfers all his extensive same-sex experiences to heterosexuals in some fruitless attempt to increase his audience. As the contemporary (1985) New York Times reviewer said, "His characters are colored pebbles in an erotic kaleidoscope he twists gleefully...But always males with females, as in Noah's own pairings! For a writer who has given us 'A Boy's Own Story,' which was at least ostensibly a novel about growing up homosexual, 'The Joy of Gay Sex' and 'States of Desire: Travels in Gay America,' there is something a little odd about the unvaried heterosexuality of this imaginary crew of nymphs and satyrs." If you are interested in Edmund White's work, try one of those instead, or any one of his many later books.
Certainly there are some recognizable characters from White's own life, such as his ward and nephew, and real literary figures he knew such as the feminist author Susan Sontag, sociologist Richard Sennett, and even himself. White does a good job in the early chapters setting the scene, an almost medieval New York, and creating these characters from life. But then he lets everything go out of control in the latter third of the book, leading the reader to someplace undefined and untrustworthy. Given White's literary ability and his direct experience with the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, he should have written a great book.
One of the reasons White fails embarrassingly in Caracole is because he completely excludes any gay characters and transfers all his extensive same-sex experiences to heterosexuals in some fruitless attempt to increase his audience. As the contemporary (1985) New York Times reviewer said, "His characters are colored pebbles in an erotic kaleidoscope he twists gleefully...But always males with females, as in Noah's own pairings! For a writer who has given us 'A Boy's Own Story,' which was at least ostensibly a novel about growing up homosexual, 'The Joy of Gay Sex' and 'States of Desire: Travels in Gay America,' there is something a little odd about the unvaried heterosexuality of this imaginary crew of nymphs and satyrs." If you are interested in Edmund White's work, try one of those instead, or any one of his many later books.
July 20, 2022
Edmund White is one of the most famous and prolific gay writers. A master of his craft. But, this book completely fell flat for me. It never engaged, and I never developed a bond with any of the characters. The style is definitely of its time, and that is definite proof that the fault lies on my shoulders because I enjoy more contemporary fiction. So much of it feels dated that I could not get absorbed into the material. All that said, I think it is a book I need to revisit in a few years because there were a few beautiful moments, and I am sure I will develop a greater appreciation for it as I get older.
Read
January 16, 2026DNF. Too slow, too monotonous, too heterosexual. Stopped reading after only 80 pages, about 25%. The book feels mythic and yet it evokes an ambiguous world that could be Venice, Rome, New York, or Paris in an indeterminate time period, from late 19th Century to the 1980s (the book was originally published in 1985). The characters were flat and therefore the sex scenes were clinical, not erotic. Why is it so uninteresting? Lack of voice, perspective, and subtext, key elements in fiction. Could White have fixed it? Well, a first person narrator (Gabriel, obviously) or just a bit of dialogue might have made the narrative more immersive, funnier, better paced, and more emotional. This is an unfunny, puzzling, and baroque book with occasionally pretty prose. I just didn’t dig it. Whatever White was attempting here was lost on me. Moving on.
January 27, 2018
Really enjoyed this book. In a strange way it slightly reminded me of Gormenghast, the characters and grotesques, the crumbling grandeur of the surroundings, the strangeness and the beautiful style of the description.
June 22, 2025
The concept and setting were very promising, but alas, it simply wasn’t engaging. The protagonist was just too dull.
September 11, 2025
Swooning sexy cerebral magical realism in a South American dream
October 16, 2025
“Strange, he thought, that in a world of so many people, just one of them should be able to hurt me so much.”
November 3, 2014
It started out so wonderful, with sentences like “The children jostled one another, ground knuckles into ribs, jabbed a black elbow into a scabby flank, sending a sibling toppling into the torn organdy duster fringing the bed or hurtling under the lace suspended from the vanity until, caged by cloth, the victim looked out through gray eyelets whitened by cobwebs.”
From there, however, the novel quickly descended into scene-less overdramatic descriptions of how the two main characters think…for almost four-hundred pages.
From there, however, the novel quickly descended into scene-less overdramatic descriptions of how the two main characters think…for almost four-hundred pages.
June 20, 2010
Again! Author famous for gay books! The ONE with straight characters! Ahhh!
I had no clue who Edmund White was when I bought this. I was just re-shelving it and reading the back and it had me at "erotic kaleidoscope." Weird little book but an interesting cast of characters, all swirling around each other (and then fucking each other).
I had no clue who Edmund White was when I bought this. I was just re-shelving it and reading the back and it had me at "erotic kaleidoscope." Weird little book but an interesting cast of characters, all swirling around each other (and then fucking each other).
October 6, 2008
I haven't read this book in years, but I still remember parts of it pretty well; my strongest memory is of White's writing style and how he tells this story of an occupied country in its most decadent phase and how a young boy grows into a man under the tutelage of his dissolute uncle.
August 3, 2023
Quite a departure for White, this novel explores lives of a heterosexual people, not gay men. Not quite a fan of fantasy, I found this novel difficult to navigate, but I cannot blame White for following his artistic inclinations. Maybe someday I’ll reread the book and get it.
October 30, 2015
Some good writing as always with Edmund White's books. The story though did not do much for me. I know that it was a style and story he was trying things out with as it is one of his early books, but it didn't work for me. I still enjoyed reading it...but it didn't drive me like his others.
June 16, 2007
"a new iconography of lesbianism."
March 22, 2010
His writing is lyrical, poetic, and sexy though the characters were odious! Still, I want to read everything else he has written.
January 21, 2015
A crashing disappointment. It just doesn't work, on any level, and the sex is just....yuk.
March 2, 2016
An immersive fantasy, it reminded me of Victor Hugo's The Laughing Man.
April 22, 2021
Truly awful.
November 18, 2011
Slow.
Lovely.
Sexy.
Fucked-up.
Did I mention it was slow?
Just read it.
Lovely.
Sexy.
Fucked-up.
Did I mention it was slow?
Just read it.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews