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Lädt ... De herdersster (Original 1994; 1995. Auflage)von Alan Hollinghurst
Werk-InformationenThe Folding Star von Alan Hollinghurst (1994)
Lädt ...
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. Why do all the books that feature gay persons have to circle around sex, sexuality, desire and be so descriptive? If other books were like these, I'd never read a book again! This one I started, but gave up after an hour of listening to it. I just gotbtired of a book (again) jumping from sex scene to sex scene, which to me made all other content disappear or seem irrelevant. I won't touch a similar book for quite a while, hoping the new one will be different. I'm tired of it! Ugh. A 33-year-old Englishman moves to a Flemish city to work as a tutor. He promptly "falls in love" with one of his 17-year-old students. And seduces him. In the end we find out maybe it was the student seducing the tutor, but who cares, the tutor is the adult. A 17-year-old is not (no matter what the age of consent might be, this 17-year-old was still a boy). Maybe I would have found this plot line less disturbing when I was 20, but as a middle aged mom with teenage sons, no. I have never read Lolita for a reason--grown men interested in children is just not OK. So, the plot bad. The writing is dull. The Englishman is boring. The female characters (17-year-old's mom, his friend, and the tutor's co-worker) are extremely one-dimensional. I plodded through this because it's on the 1001 books list (why?!) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (how?!). I didn't finish this book. The writing is good, don't get me wrong on that account. I want to read something else by this author, though. The Folding Star manages to be both slow and predictable, with an unhealthy dose of obscure. If I hadn't read some reviews of the book, I wouldn't have known where it took place, or who the narrator was. Really, everything happens inside the narrator's mind, which would be fine if I'd had some context. Much sooner than I knew anything about the narrator, I knew he would fall for one of his students. It's possible I'm overestimating how much of an angst-bucket the narrator will become, but I don't think so. If I want to wallow in angst, I'll play in an angsty RPG - at least then it's angst I'm writing, and doesn't involve children. I really, really wanted to like this book. But I don't, not enough to slog the rest of the way through it. The Folding Star, published in 1994, was Alan Hollinghurst's second novel. The novel tells the story of Edward Manners, who makes a living as a tutor to two Belgian students. Being gay, Edward is more attracted to Luc than to Marcel, although Luc seems to be rather naughty. In between and after classes, Edward frequents the gay scene where is is attracted to the North-African Cherif, who seems to be an unstable character of neither particularly good looks nor manners, and often disappears for short times. While Edwards obsession with these three boys wanders, his mind often strays to a youthful lover who died many years earlier. In a sense, none of the young men are within his reach, either separated by age, social circumstances or death. Edwards obsession with the beauty of the boys is reflected in the obsession of Luc's father for the painter, Edgard Orst. Edward helps Luc's father making a catalogue of the works of the painter. The Folding Star gives a very interesting portrait of gay life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, while its theme of pondering an longing for unattainable beautiful boys, whether really beautiful or just beautiful in the minds, gives the novel a longer lasting appeal among major works with gay themes. keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
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"Edward Manners - thirty-three, disaffected, in search of a new life - has come to an ancient Flemish city to teach English. Almost at once he falls in love with one of his pupils, the seventeen-year-old Luc Altidore, recently expelled from school for some mysterious offense. Condemned to a mounting but incommunicable obsession with the boy, Edward becomes involved in affairs with two other men: one a heartless but seductive fraud, the other a young drifter with a deeply possessive streak." "Then Edward is introduced to the world of the enigmatic and reclusive Symbolist painter Edgard Orst. Gradually he is drawn toward an understanding of the artist's own obsession with a famous actress, drowned off Ostend at the turn of the century, and of the ambiguous circumstances of Orst's own death under Nazi occupation." "The events of The Folding Star are played out amid the silent streets and canals of a city that seems locked in the past, and across the northern landscape of out-of-season resorts and abandoned houses that lies beyond. But in the central panel of the novel's triptych Edward returns home for a funeral and is caught up in memories of his own late adolescence and his first love affair: an English pastoral already threatened by the experience of betrayal and loss."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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Het bovenstaande laat niet zien wat ik zo goed aan het boek vond: ofschoon de vertaling mij de eerste paar 100 bladzijden geregeld de plank net mis leek te slaan, vond ik de rest wel een rehabilitatie. De beschrijvingen van seksuele spanning en seksuele situaties vond ik zeer realistisch, herkenbaar en meeslepend (veel Engelse lezers klagen dat de homoboeken altijd seks moeten hebben zonder zich te realiseren dat heteroboeken altijd seks moeten hebben). Maar ook de weemoedige terugblik op Edwards jeugd met een vader die professioneel zong, een dorp waar de wereld nog onbedorven leek en zijn al jong ontluikende gevoelsleven zijn meesterlijk. De obsessie voor Luc en de onophoudelijke zoektocht naar sekscontacten zijn twee kanten van dezelfde medaille: het mateloze verlangen naar de ene geliefde dat nooit vervuld kan worden. Concessies zoals een vaste verhouding met zijn havenarbeider of zoals zijn jeugdliefde Dawn deed met vriend in een burgermansbestaan doet Edward niet. De rol van het thema van de schilder die blind wordt en uiteindelijk alleen nog witte doeken schildert kon ik niet helemaal peilen, maar zeker is dat ook daar de verdwenen geliefde van de schilder die de zee in zwom en nooit terugkeerde essentieel is. Natuurlijk zit het boek ook vol subtiele kruisverwijzingen en verbanden zoals je van Hollinghurst verwacht. ( )