My last two reads have come from the book sale -- two very different books.
The Farewell Symphony by noted novelist Edmund White was a NY Times Notable Book of the Year -- "a novel of opulent sensuality and manifold sorrows that is at once the story of a writer's education (sentimental, erotic, and aesthetic) and an elegy for the gay world that flourished between Stonewall and the present.. . a work of Proustian richness, sadness, and wisdom . . . the premier chronicler of his generation." So says the back cover.
It's all of those things -- and more. A very intimate look at a segment of pre-AIDS gay society which I found fascinating -- as an anthropologist might find fascinating the interactions of some previously unknown tribe. I also found it beautifully written and profoundly unsettling.
So it was something of a relief to turn to Mary Stewart's My Brother Michael. I was a great fan of Stewart's romantic suspense back in the Sixties (this book was published in 1959) and I decided it would be interesting to see how it had held up.
At first I thought I wasn't going to enjoy it -- a slightly silly female protagonist becomes involved with a handsome mysterious man -- look at the cover, I thought, there she is in her dress and high heels, fleeing some unknown danger. Plus everybody was always smoking -- which no longer seems sophisticated and adult to me. (On the contrary . . .)
But then I remembered why I loved Stewart's books -- it's the settings and the descriptions. This one is set in Greece -- in and around Delphos.
"Bigger and bigger grew the circling hills, barer the land, drawn in with great sweeps of colour that ran from red to ochre, from ochre to burnt-tawny, with, above all, the burning, the limitless, the lovely light. And beyond all, at length, a grey ghost of a mountain massif; not purple, not faintly blue with distance like the mountains of a softer country, but spectre-white, magnificent, a lion silvered. Parnassus, home of the ghosts of the old gods."
Stewart spins a good yarn, as they say. But it's the descriptions, in the end, that make her stories places I want to revisit.
At first I thought I wasn't going to enjoy it -- a slightly silly female protagonist becomes involved with a handsome mysterious man -- look at the cover, I thought, there she is in her dress and high heels, fleeing some unknown danger. Plus everybody was always smoking -- which no longer seems sophisticated and adult to me. (On the contrary . . .)
But then I remembered why I loved Stewart's books -- it's the settings and the descriptions. This one is set in Greece -- in and around Delphos.
"Bigger and bigger grew the circling hills, barer the land, drawn in with great sweeps of colour that ran from red to ochre, from ochre to burnt-tawny, with, above all, the burning, the limitless, the lovely light. And beyond all, at length, a grey ghost of a mountain massif; not purple, not faintly blue with distance like the mountains of a softer country, but spectre-white, magnificent, a lion silvered. Parnassus, home of the ghosts of the old gods."
Stewart spins a good yarn, as they say. But it's the descriptions, in the end, that make her stories places I want to revisit.
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