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  A Matter of Life and Sex (1992)
Posted by: Simon - 12-16-2025, 03:29 PM - Replies (1)

   


Hugo was a liar. Of course, he lied to escape punishment and ended up being punished for lying, but he was also a fantasist whose lies invented a world where everything was extraordinary. At primary school while toying with the rose-hip syrup slopped in the middle of his semolina, he would entertain the girls with stories of his youth in India (the large pink place on the classroom map) and explain how the vestigial third ear joined to his real left ear was the swelling of a poison bee sting.
Everyone lied at primary school. Rosemary’s father was Batman and her brother was Robin. Mandy’s father had a stable of horses (in addition to the polite pony she trotted around Hadley on Saturday mornings), and Jonathan’s father was always about to move up the ladder of the monopoly board and buy a house in Mayfair. Hugo soon countered that with the lie that his father had bought a house in Curzon Street, and when a new boy arrived late at St Monica’s C. of E. Primary School for girls and boys, Hugo and his little sister together lied about the two houses their parents owned in Hadley. One large and one small. They always seemed to go back to the small one but that was explained by their father’s constant absence in foreign parts. Somehow he was always back in time for PTA meetings and the school play.
At this stage Hugo still had a rough idea what was true and what wasn’t and his classmates also had a rough idea that everything he said was untrue. He was already an odd fish, always skipping with the girls and never playing football with the boys. Quick-witted and smart-lipped he had no real friends and no real worries. Except for money. He had no real money either and that worried him. It worried him even more that his parents didn’t seem to share his concern.
Hugo had always been convinced that he was born to greatness. But at seven years old Hugo’s idea of greatness had little to do with the world arena and much more to do with social notch-counting on the Hadley yardstick. A lot of things counted as notches in Hadley, and each one was etched on Hugo’s mind: a big house with more than four bedrooms and a long garden with an optional pool (indoor was beyond comprehension, outdoor was useful only to show off with), model cars with pedals, roller skates with fibreglass wheels, two cars (one Jag) and a two-car garage, holidays in Gibraltar or Majorca and a pony for the eldest daughter. Later of course the eldest son would get a moped then a motorcycle and, if he was still alive by seventeen, driving lessons. Several sons of Hadley never made it to the driving lessons. That was the down side of the notch-counting. But Hugo was too young to understand about teenage death and parental irresponsibility. He just wanted his father in a bigger car and the family in a bigger house.
Some might balk at a child so precocious, so aware of the accoutrements of wealth before his pocket money had reached double shillings, but Hadley was in large part to blame.
The daily walk to school was enough to instil in Hugo a keen sense of social lacking. Hadley was a hill and the Harveys lived at the bottom of the hill. As Hugo walked up the hill every morning with his sisters and his satchel, he watched the houses get larger and the cars get newer. He spotted (and notched or etched) the Jaguar on the red-gravelled drive that belonged to Mandy’s father (Laura’s father had one too but Laura didn’t have long hair) and the Mini that her mother drove (Laura’s mother had one too but her mother wasn’t called Bunty and wasn’t a social yardstick). He clocked and ingrained Clifford’s Raleigh Chopper abandoned in front of the door to the garden extension and Simon’s Scalextrix visible through the window of the den. He even winced slightly as he noticed that David (whose parents hadn’t been that rich last year but then took him by surprise by leapfrogging up the social ladder to a top of the hill house) was no longer walking up the hill to St Monica’s, but had a new purple uniform and cap and was walking down the hill towards the tube station.

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  Hotel De Dream (2007)
Posted by: Simon - 12-16-2025, 03:23 PM - No Replies

   


Edmund White, gratefully, is a prolific writer, a gifted man of letters who has become one of America's more important authors. While much of Edmund White's oeuvre is about gay life, he does not confine his talent to the one topic: he is a brilliant biographer, a fine man of research, and a poet with prose. HOTEL DE DREAM: A New York Novel is his latest foray into fictional biography and for this reader the book succeeds on every level.

The short novel is ostensibly a 'biographical' account of the sadly brief life of novelist Stephen Crane, a nineteenth century literary giant who is best known for THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, but who also wrote a few other short novels and story collections. Basing the concept of this novel on both fact and fantasy, Edmund White gives us the last days of Stephen Crane's life, a tortured existence as he succumbed to tuberculosis, nursed by his beloved mistress Cora, an ex-Madame who had run a bordello in Florida called the Hotel de Dream. Crane had in fact befriended a poor youth who happened to be a male prostitute infected with syphilis: White takes this fact and uses it as a unique approach to explore the mind of Crane, using the fragment of thought that Crane was planning to create a story 'Flowers of Asphalt' based on the sad lad as the impetus for this brilliant book, the composition of a final novel called 'The Painted Boy.'

The novel deals with myriad aspects of Crane's life, but in the end it focuses on Crane dictating to Cora a 'fictionalized' story about a married banker, Theodore, who becomes enamored with a teenage, poor, syphilitic hustler named Elliott, only to find that his coming to grips with buried secrets of lust (tenderly satisfied by the very lovable Elliott) plunges him into a downward spiral that ends with a series of tragedies that parallel Stephen Crane's own consumptive death from tuberculosis. As Crane lies dying he shares his ideas for the conclusion of the story with the stalwart Cora, asking her to present the manuscript to Crane's respected colleague Henry James to complete after Crane dies. The story ends with a surprise that traces a circle to the beginning: the period of the turn of the century simply was not the time a story such as 'A Painted Boy' could be published.

Edmund White's ability to create a novel within a novel in such a fascinatingly credible manner is matched only by his gift for writing some of the most beautiful prose before us today. He understands character development, he knows the agony of personal tragedy, and his intellectual honesty dissects history so smoothly that his novel feels like true biography. And yet he takes the time to pause for moments of writing that are so touching they make the reader reflect with respect: 'He glanced down and saw that his sheet was stained yellow. He must have pissed himself. He started to cry. So it's come to this, he thought. He'd gone back to infancy and incontinence - with this difference: an infant has everything ahead of him and a loud tamtam is beating in his heart with anticipation, where as he, Stephen, felt the rhythm slowing into a valedictory murmur./ He was so ashamed of himself.'

Continue reading..

  Hotel De Dream (2007)
Posted by: Simon - 12-16-2025, 03:20 PM - Replies (1)

   


Edmund White, gratefully, is a prolific writer, a gifted man of letters who has become one of America's more important authors. While much of Edmund White's oeuvre is about gay life, he does not confine his talent to the one topic: he is a brilliant biographer, a fine man of research, and a poet with prose. HOTEL DE DREAM: A New York Novel is his latest foray into fictional biography and for this reader the book succeeds on every level.

The short novel is ostensibly a 'biographical' account of the sadly brief life of novelist Stephen Crane, a nineteenth century literary giant who is best known for THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, but who also wrote a few other short novels and story collections. Basing the concept of this novel on both fact and fantasy, Edmund White gives us the last days of Stephen Crane's life, a tortured existence as he succumbed to tuberculosis, nursed by his beloved mistress Cora, an ex-Madame who had run a bordello in Florida called the Hotel de Dream. Crane had in fact befriended a poor youth who happened to be a male prostitute infected with syphilis: White takes this fact and uses it as a unique approach to explore the mind of Crane, using the fragment of thought that Crane was planning to create a story 'Flowers of Asphalt' based on the sad lad as the impetus for this brilliant book, the composition of a final novel called 'The Painted Boy.'

The novel deals with myriad aspects of Crane's life, but in the end it focuses on Crane dictating to Cora a 'fictionalized' story about a married banker, Theodore, who becomes enamored with a teenage, poor, syphilitic hustler named Elliott, only to find that his coming to grips with buried secrets of lust (tenderly satisfied by the very lovable Elliott) plunges him into a downward spiral that ends with a series of tragedies that parallel Stephen Crane's own consumptive death from tuberculosis. As Crane lies dying he shares his ideas for the conclusion of the story with the stalwart Cora, asking her to present the manuscript to Crane's respected colleague Henry James to complete after Crane dies. The story ends with a surprise that traces a circle to the beginning: the period of the turn of the century simply was not the time a story such as 'A Painted Boy' could be published.

Edmund White's ability to create a novel within a novel in such a fascinatingly credible manner is matched only by his gift for writing some of the most beautiful prose before us today. He understands character development, he knows the agony of personal tragedy, and his intellectual honesty dissects history so smoothly that his novel feels like true biography. And yet he takes the time to pause for moments of writing that are so touching they make the reader reflect with respect: 'He glanced down and saw that his sheet was stained yellow. He must have pissed himself. He started to cry. So it's come to this, he thought. He'd gone back to infancy and incontinence - with this difference: an infant has everything ahead of him and a loud tamtam is beating in his heart with anticipation, where as he, Stephen, felt the rhythm slowing into a valedictory murmur./ He was so ashamed of himself.'

Continue reading..

  Tim - That Eye, The Sky (2002)
Posted by: Simon - 12-16-2025, 03:16 PM - Replies (1)

   

Ort knows that the sky is watching. He knows what it means to watch. Things are terribly wrong. His father is withering away, his sister is consumed by hatred, his grandmother is all inside herself, and his mother, a flower-child of the 1960s, is brave but helpless. Then a strange man appears at their door. That Eye, the Sky is about love, about a boy's vision of the world beyond, about the blurry distinctions between the natural and the supernatural. All this, and more, begins at the moment the ute driven by Ort Flack's father ploughs into a roadside tree, throwing the whole world out of kilter.

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  The Big Water (1971)
Posted by: Simon - 12-16-2025, 03:08 PM - Replies (1)

   


The Big Water is the first English language translation of the prize winning Macedonian novel, Golemata Voda, by author Zhivko Chingo.

Set in post-war Macedonia, it tells the stories of children orphaned by World War II and their lives in an orphanage. Full of characters and incidents, the book gives a child's view of life without parents that is both humorous and bleak and by its surprise ending, very powerful.

At a metaphoric level, the novel presents a strong critique of the authoritarianism of both institutional life and the Communist system, and their inability to reconcile with the needs and nature of the individual.

At the human level, The Big Water is a very positive and moving story of the emotional development of children, and of the fundamental and irreplaceable role of the mother. Readers will remember this story and its climax long after they have finished the book.

The translator, Sydney lawyer Elizabeth Kolupacev Stewart, has previously translated another prize winning Macedonian novel, Black Seed (Crno Seme) by Tashko Georgievski. Both translations are notarble for being true to the authors' direct, poetic and very readable narratives. 

Quote: To my mother Verga
    Deciding to tell you about Isaac, the son of Kejtin, has brought back to me such beautiful, delicate and unforgettable memories, such pure and bright moments I don’t think I’ll ever forget. I am so proud when I think of the son of Kejtin, proud as Jesus Christ himself. But I only want to relate to you those hours in the Home, just the cursed hours we passed until we reached the Senterlev mountain. That was a mysterious mountain, the Senterlev. They said that was the mountain the sun was born from; impossible, the mountain from which the sun is born. Does anyone know a similar place, such a mountain from which the sun is born? I do not believe, you know, that the Senterlev mountain was the only such mountain. There must have been some unspoken thing in that; but not even the Headmaster, our dear fatherly Headmaster, Ariton Jakovleski, knew it to be the truth. Whatever it was, one thing became certain — the road to the Senterlev mountain was horribly steep, like the road into hell. And all we had to do was go along the road — curse me — and now, I do not know from where I got all the strength, will power and courage for such a horrible, difficult road. At the beginning I will just say this: the passion for life and freedom was many times greater, a thousand times greater, a million times greater, an infinite amount greater. Curse me if it did not keep us going, kept us from being afraid of the dreadful punishments. Oh, eternal sweet dream. Curse me, it was the voice of the Big Water.

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