The Master: A Novel
by Colm Toibin | Literature & Fiction | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 0743250419 Global Overview for this book
ISBN: 0743250419 Global Overview for this book
Registered by k00kaburra of San Jose, California USA on 3/26/2008
This book is in a Controlled Release!
This book is in a Controlled Release!
1 journaler for this copy...
Rec'd via paperbackswap.com.
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From Publishers Weekly
It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Tóibín, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of success. The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ranges seamlessly back and forth over James's life, from his memories of his prominent Brahmin family in the States-including the suicide of his father and the tragic early death of his troubled sister Alice-to his settling in England, in a cherished house of his own choosing in Rye. Along the way it offers hints, no more, of James's troubled sexual identity, including his fascination with a young English manservant, his (apparently platonic) night in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes and his curious obsession with a dashing Scandinavian sculptor of little talent but huge charisma. Another recurrent motif is James's absorption in the lives of spirited, highly intelligent but unhappy young women who die prematurely, which helped to inform some of his strongest fiction. The subtlety and empathy with which Tóibín inhabits James's psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world are beyond praise, and even the echoes of the master's style ring true. Far more than a stunt, this is a riveting, if inevitably somewhat evasive, portrait of the creative life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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From Publishers Weekly
It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Tóibín, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of success. The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ranges seamlessly back and forth over James's life, from his memories of his prominent Brahmin family in the States-including the suicide of his father and the tragic early death of his troubled sister Alice-to his settling in England, in a cherished house of his own choosing in Rye. Along the way it offers hints, no more, of James's troubled sexual identity, including his fascination with a young English manservant, his (apparently platonic) night in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes and his curious obsession with a dashing Scandinavian sculptor of little talent but huge charisma. Another recurrent motif is James's absorption in the lives of spirited, highly intelligent but unhappy young women who die prematurely, which helped to inform some of his strongest fiction. The subtlety and empathy with which Tóibín inhabits James's psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world are beyond praise, and even the echoes of the master's style ring true. Far more than a stunt, this is a riveting, if inevitably somewhat evasive, portrait of the creative life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Cleaning out Mt. TBR. I don't think I'll be reading this book anytime soon, so I might as well find another home for it!
Journal Entry 4 by k00kaburra at PaperBackSwap.com, A book trading site -- Controlled Releases on Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Released 14 yrs ago (6/17/2009 UTC) at PaperBackSwap.com, A book trading site -- Controlled Releases
CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
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sent to Emily Stetler in Mishawaka, IN to fulfill a request on Paperbackswap.com!
sent to Emily Stetler in Mishawaka, IN to fulfill a request on Paperbackswap.com!
