In this short, masterful gem of a novel, David Plante’s seasoned narrator contemplates the connection between physical beauty and love, drawing on literary references and personal experiences to explore these themes.
The unnamed narrator of this brief, urgent novel, a young novelist making his way in the literary world, writes of his fascination with two enigmatic, troubled young men, one a Boston Brahmin and the other a lofty undergraduate at England’s Cambridge University whom the narrator meets during his writer-in-residency. With each young man the narrator engages in a complex relationship filled with intellectual and erotic tension and each relationship leaves him feeling unfulfilled. By contrast, the narrator relates the story of his deep and abiding romantic life with an English poet, who introduces him to the remaining members of The Bloomsbury group as well as E.M. Foster and who guides him toward the publishers who bring out his early work. However, the poet dies young, and the narrator is once against cast adrift and his quest to find new, intimate interactions with the tragic young men he encounters causes him to reflect on the nature of beauty, love, and the intellectual life, emphasizing the transient and often unfulfilled desires that drive human connections.
Über den Autor
David Plante grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, within a French-Canadian parish palisaded by its language, a dialect that dates back to the first French colonists, in the early seventeenth century, in La Nouvelle France—or what was then most of North America. His background is very similar to that of Jack Kerouac. Plante has been inspired to write novels rooted in La Nouvelle France, most notably in
The Family, which was nominated for the National Book Award. He has recently published two memoirs:
Worlds Apart and
Becoming a Londoner. His renowned
Difficult Women, a nonfiction work that profiles Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer, was reissued by New York Review Books in 2017. Plante has dual nationality, American and British, and resides in Lucca, Italy.
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