He’s constantly out of his depth: when he appears to be keeping his head above the water, he isn’t really. One of the things I like about it now is Nick Guest, and the way he tries to fit into a social milieu that is, at heart, indifferent to him. Duke University Press.I first read this six or seven years ago when it had just won the Booker Prize and I can remember enjoying it then. No future: queer theory and the death drive. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Įdelman, L., 2005. The letters of Henry James, volume 4: 1895–1916. Inoperative Ironies: Jamesian Aestheticism and Post-modern culture in Alan Hollinghurst’s the line of beauty.
Working the room: essays and reviews 1999–2010. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.ĭyer, G., 2010. Varieties of secularism in a secular age. Completing secularism: the mundane in the neoliberal era. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.ĭuras, M., 1987, La Vie matérielle. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors.
The aim is to avoid forcing the supple elegance of The Line of Beauty into a procrustean model, while simultaneously being attentive to the way Hollinghurst turns a phrase-with a specific emphasis on the way his phrases turn.
Better to explore the way the line, straight and (as it were) queer, signifies in the larger, fluent, curving flow of the text as a whole, from examples of ’ogee’ lines in the novel, and the various excursus where characters discuss the significance of that line, to the magazine Nick sets up with Wani’s money (called, of course Ogee), to the way the movement and proportion of the ogee informs both form and content of the novel.
But to read this complex, subtle novel in terms of ‘lines’ is to run the risk of reducing it to a linear exercise, to have it fall into a grid as ‘an historical novel of 1980s Britain’, or ‘a political novel’, or ‘a gay novel’. Hollinghurst uses the ‘ogee’, the Hogarthian ‘line of beauty’ variously in his novel of that name, from structuring his fiction so as to reproduce in textual form its dips and swells, to more specific art-historical, erotic and drug-usage reflections.
0 kommentar(er)
