 
|
|
 |
|
The Line of Beauty: A Novel
by Alan Hollinghurst
| List Price: |
$15.95 |
| Price: |
$10.85 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
| You Save: |
$5.10 (31%) |
|
|
Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
ISBN13: 9781582346106
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER, WINNER OF THE 2004 MAN BOOKER PRIZE FOR FICTION, AND NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST Winner of 2004’s Man Booker Prize for fiction and one of the most talked about books of the year, The Line of Beauty is a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money that brings Thatcher’s London alive. A New York Times Bestseller (Extended) · A LA Times Bestseller List · A Book Sense National Bestseller · A Northern California Bestseller · A Sunday Times Bestseller List · A New York Times Notable Book of the Year And chosen as one of the best books of 2004 by: Entertainment Weekly · The Washington Post · The San Francisco Chronicle · The Seattle Times Newsday · Salon.com · The Boston Globe · The New York Sun · The Miami Herald · The Dallas Morning News · San Jose Mercury News · Publishers Weekly
Interview with Alan Hollinghurst
 Alan Hollinghurst's extraordinarily rich novel The Line of Beauty. has garnered a new level of acclaim for the author after winning the 2004 Man Booker Prize. Hollinghurst speaks about his work in our interview.
| Customer Reviews: |
|
| |
| A Tale of Two Novels |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
 |
|
For me, The Line of Beauty has a sharp dividing line between a novel I was bored by and a novel I enjoyed very much.
The entire novel is very well written. Hollinghurst conceives what is a very interesting concept. The main character, Nick Guest is a middlish class young man who has graduated from Oxford and is now staying with a very rich family of an univesity classmate headed by a Conservative member of parliament. Nick is openly gay and just beginning to act on his desires.
The world of the rich that Nick inhabits consists of characters that could have existed in any Jane Austen novel despite the time being the late 20th century. The Lords, Ladies, Dukes etc. don't seem to act much differently than their families have for centuries. This backdrop contrasted with Nick's journey into gay sexual promiscuity should make for an interesting combination. It doesn't really work for me though. I found the focus on the societal norms of the circle he interacts with to be frightfully boring. I found the first 250 or so pages to be really hard work. If I'd reviewed the book after 250 pages, I would have said well written, good concept but poor execution.
The last third of the novel really turns things around. The plot points are more interesting. The spectre of AIDS becomes a big part of the picture. Additionally scandal touches the family and friendships are tested. Nick's societal acquaintances really start to realize that perhaps he isn't the right quality of person to be interacting with.
The great scene that marks the turning point is when the head of the family that Nick is staying with holds a large party where Margaret Thatcher is the guest of honor. It is an very well written extended scene where 1980s Thatcher Britain is captured at a point in time. From this point on, I very much enjoyed The Line Of Beauty.
Several people have remarked that there's a lot of gay sex. I'd simply say the lead character is a young gay man who is learning to express his sexuality. What the heck would you expect? The gay sex scenes are not particularly explicit and fit quite well in the story.
Overall, I recommend the book but the boredom factor in the first part make it a reserved recommendation.
|
| Lovely rendering of a young man learning to love and live in his 20s encompassing the bigger themes in 1980s London |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
 |
|
The Line of Beauty... It's difficult to find words that do it justice. Nick Guest is a young man just out of Oxford, one who doesn't quite belong to that rarified world of his classmates, and who yearns for it in a way only someone who doesn't belong can. At the start of the book he has just moved in with one of his Oxford's classmate's family, the Feddens, in a gorgeous house in a posh part of London. Gerald Fedden, the patriarch, is a rich charismatic MP (though not titled) and his wife Rachel is elegant, serene, the daughter of an Earl, and a wonder to Nick. Their son, Toby, Nick's friend, is the picture of good-natured British privilege - he takes it all for granted and his simplicity is a foil to Nick's complexity. The Fedden's daughter Catherine is emotionally closest to Nick. She is self-destructive, an ex-cutter, and scorns the world her parents and brother so easily move in. Hollinghurst paints a stunning and absolutely exacting portrait of the world these characters inhabit and their interactions with each other. Nick meanwhile is also discovering his own sexuality and falls in love with a young man Leo during these formative years. The book occurs in three parts, skipping forward first 3 years and then 1 year, covering the formative years of Nick's life. This plot device is incredibly moving as it highlights the contrasts of Nick's younger self with how he changes throughout the years. As stated in the book's blurb, The Line of Beauty is a stunning examination of the issues of class, money, and sex, but it's also about beauty, the way beauty manifests itselfs and is heart-breakingly thrilling but ultimately fleeting. Beauty which is pure and shining in a brief moment of time. It is also that rare book that so perfectly captures the human condition - love, yearning, jealousy, self-loathing, fear, uncertainty, envy, lust, heartbreak, and grief.
|
| On the Outside, Looking In |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
|
|
One of the biggest challenges of any novelist is to provide a perspective that's accessible to us and helpful in understanding what's being portrayed. Alan Hollinghurst has achieved remarkable results by stationing his narrator, Nick Guest, outside of all the worlds he inhabits. Guest is like a spirit rising amused over the action that can draw us a picture while recording every sound that's created or uttered.
Here are the worlds that Guest helps us explore:
-Tory MP life during the Thatcher years
-Young Oxford graduates looking for a place
-A young man exploring his homosexuality
-Wealthy British on the make for more
-Middle-aged married life
-Inner life of a young manic-depressive
The book's overall theme is about everyday hypocrisy and the large price that has to be paid by those who pretend to be other than what they are and believe.
The story evolves in three time periods: 1983, 1986, and 1987. In all three years, Nick Guest resides with the family of an Oxford friend where the father is a rising conservative MP. Nick has an unofficial role as low-cost lodger to keep on eye on the friend's troubled sister. The family knows that Nick is looking for a boy friend and is open about accepting his sexuality. The three years give us a chance to learn more about the characters and to see how their relationships change. The 1987 period brings all that had been known in private into public with large consequences for all.
The book is filled with great scenes where nuances of knowledge, awareness, perception, accent, and perspective separate and unite the characters. Often, contrasting scenes occur back-to-back so that the contrasts are even more obvious. You'll gain a deeper insight into British society than you could on your own.
Ultimately, I feel that a work of fiction must be judged by how successfully it takes you into a world you have never been in before and allows you to understand that world much better. Any novel that can help me understand what it's like to be gay during the AIDS epidemic while giving me a strong sense of Thatcher's leadership has to be pretty terrific because those dimensions are outside my experience and normal reading.
As a person who enjoys art, I was most impressed by the way that the ogee was worked into the story to provide a connecting metaphor for our common humanity.
Bravo!
|
| Life among the plutocrats. |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
|
|
On one level, this exquisitely wrought novel is a social satire -- a wickedly frank view of the monetarily and politically privileged in Thatcher-era England as seen through the eyes of an insider Outsider. On a more personal level, it might be called a tragedy of manners, the first-person account of an all-too-flawed (some might say parasitic) hero whose hubris is his desire to belong. The rather too obviously named narrator, Nick Guest, seeks his place in the world among the sexually active homosexual set, the wealthy movers and shakers crowd, the aestheticist/intellectual exclusivists and the secret coterie of drug culture initiates. Nick's fall from grace stems from his careless disregard of the boundaries that separate them. AIDS, Margaret Thatcher, Henry James (Nick's thesis subject and literary godfather) and Cocaine are the spirits that reign over the proceedings, but they are not spirits who reside comfortably together.
Nick's sexual initiation with a lower-class black man takes place in the within the exclusive gated community where his hosts, the wealthy, politically ambitious Feddens, reside. Prophetically, this relationship is consummated in a chilly garden, the participants warmed by the compost heap they use for leverage. Sexual prowess and, later, drug use lead Nick to carelessness, blurring his sense of propriety. And although drugs and sex are the great equalizers that allow Nick entree into the world of his social betters, they ultimately bring about his expulsion from Society. Everything he desires, either betrays him or is betrayed by him. His college mate's family, of which he so desperately wants to be a member, actually regards him as a servant, the sister's keeper (a position at which he finally, catastrophically fails). His first lover casts him aside without explanation and his long-term partner, the stunningly handsome, wealthier-than-is good-for-him Wani, is too drug-addled and promiscuous to be capable of real love and regards their relationship as one of sexual convenience. It is this relationship that will, in the end, prove to be the undoing of Nick and those he most admires.
Hollinghurst's themes are appropriately Jamesian: the dilemma of the artist in an artless society (Wani's money-worshipping, boorish father incessantly refers to Nick as "the aesthete"), and the clash between an independent innocent and a corrupt though attractive feudal establishment. Symbolic details are handled delicately and effectively as in the case of photographic references. Nick is disappointed when a photo of his crowning moment in Society, his dance with the Prime Minister, does not appear in the tabloids. When a photo of him is, in fact, published, it is the scandalous catalyst of his expulsion from that society. And, as he leaves his long-time residence, he comes across a snapshot of his sexually unavailable schoolmate, Toby, for love of whom he came to stay in the Fedden household in the first place. The photo shows a beautiful, sexually alluring Toby as he once appeared in a school play, but whose real-life, indolent subject has subsequently gone to fat.
Nothing is what one hopes it will be and all desire is betrayal. The line of beauty is only skin deep, leaving "The Line of Beauty" a lovely portrait of unlovely, ultimately unlovable people.
|
| What a Beauty indeed. |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
|
|
In my estimation this will go down as one of the best pieces written in the English language this or any other century. I found the charaters believable and highly entertaining. I would imagine that many, many people, particularly gay men, would find Nick to be alot like themselves. I wanted to keep going back to the book, night after night as I was entranced with the story and the characters. Well written and thought provoking, what a beauty indeed.
|
|
