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"To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations -- such is a pleasure beyond compare."
The Folding Star
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The Folding Star
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This Book is Currently in the Wild!
1 journaler for this copy...
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The Folding Star tells the story of thirty-something year old Edward Manners, a pudgy, bespectacled English teacher living in an unnamed Flemish city (likely Antwerp) where he tutors two seventeen year old boys, Marcel Echevin and Luc Altidore. In short order the latter, a "blond Aztec" who has been expelled from his exclusive Jesuit school for truancy, captures Manners' imagination and becomes the focus of his obsessive sexual interest. Most of the novel chronicles Manners' deepening infatuation with Luc, and the increasingly outlandish lengths to which he goes to capture small pieces of his beloved (everything from camping outside Luc's home in the hope of catching glimpses of the boy through his bedroom window, to stealing his soiled underthings from the family laundry hamper while in the Altidore home for Luc's lessons). Luc, in the meantime, seems oblivious to his tutor's devotion. Or perhaps just distracted by his own complex relationship with his high school friends Sybille and Patrick. The Folding Star combines a modern story of love and sexual obsession with an exploration of the dark world of a late-nineteenth century artist, Edgard Orst (possibly based on James Ensor or Fernand Khnopff). Manners is introduced to Orst, a fictional Belgian Symbolist affiliated with the real-life group of painters and sculptors known as Les XX, by Paul Echevin, Marcel's father. The connection between the present-day story and the history of Orst's work brought to mind Michael Frayn's Headlong, and worked for me just about as well as it did in the latter novel -- it was interesting, but I ultimately found myself skimming quickly through the passages on Orst and his story. The most memorable thing about The Folded Star is Hollinghurst's intelligent, elegant writing style. The Folding Star was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize (beaten by James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late), and won the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial prize. You can read a 2004 Guardian interview with Alan Hollinghurst here, and reviews of The Folding Star in The Edge here (Top left: Fernand Khnopff, Caresses, 1896. Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.) |
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Released 4 yrs ago (4/16/2007 UTC) at Starbucks - Royal Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada WILD RELEASE NOTES:
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