The Folding Star

The 1995 Booker Prize finalist finally back in print. Alan Hollinghurst's hypnotic and exquisitely written novel tells the story of Edward Manners, a disaffected 33-year-old who leaves England to earn his living as a language tutor in a Flemish city. Almost immediately he falls in love with one of his pupils, but can only console himself with other, illicit affairs. With this n...

The 1995 Booker Prize finalist finally back in print. Alan Hollinghurst's hypnotic and exquisitely written novel tells the story of Edward Manners, a disaffected 33-year-old who leaves England to earn his living as a language tutor in a Flemish city. Almost immediately he falls in love with one of his pupils, but can only console himself with other, illicit affairs. With this novel, Hollinghurst exposes us fearlessly to the consequences of unfulfillable, annihilating desire. Alan Hollinghurst is the author of "The Swimming-Pool Library" and "The Spell." He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. His most recent novel, "The Line of Beauty," " "won the Man Booker Prize for fiction and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in London. Finalist for the 1994 Booker Prize Alan Hollinghurst's hypnotic and exquisitely written novel tells the story of Edward Manners, a disaffected thirty-three-year-old who leaves England to earn his living as a language tutor in a Flemish city. Almost immediately he falls in love with one of his pupils, but can only console himself with other, illicit affairs. With this novel, Hollinghurst exposes us fearlessly to the consequences of unfulfillable, annihilating desire. "An immense pleasure to read, filled with] funniness and poetry, handled with amazing sensitivity and accuracy."--"The New York Review of Books""" "Alan Hollinghurst may be the best living writer of erotic fiction, gay or straight . . . he renders with haunting precision love's merging of language and lust."--"The Boston Phoenix" "His fluid prose, with its dense accruing of detail and richly allusive quality, is that of an early modern writer. Hollinghurst is closer to Mann or Nabokov than to his contemporaries."--"The Boston Globe""" " This novel] splendidly evokes an airless, achy melancholy set off by unrequited love in a story as laden with emotion as it is shaped by artistry."--"Newsday" "Hollinghurst's prose is a genuine achievement--lavish, poised, sinuously alert."--"The New Republic" "Middle-aged Edward comes to a Flemish city to teach English only to fall in love with one of his pupils and to become involved with an obsessive artist who is playing a dangerous psychological game. Readers who relish psychological depth will find this includes plenty of drama and intrigue."--"The Midwest Book Review" "Sensibility overwhelms narrative in this story of homoerotic obsession, a second novel from the British Hollinghurst (The Swimming-Pool Library, 1988). Pudgy, bespectacled Edward Manners is a 32-year-old gay Englishman just arrived in an unidentified Flemish town, where he will give English lessons to two students, pursue his own 'bits of writing, ' and check out the gay scene--a Continental adventure before the onset of middle age. In short order, he finds a sex partner (Cherif, a hot young Moroccan) and falls in love with one of his students, 17-year-old Luc Altidore, 'a blond Aztec' expelled from an exclusive Jesuit school for serious truancy. Edward does not declare his love, though his theft of his beloved's underwear is a symptom of his obsession, an obsession he finds paralleled in the life of local Symbolist painter Edgard Orst (1865-1944) while working on a catalogue for the Orst Museum. Orst became obsessed with a Scottish actress. Though their affair was cut short when she drowned at sea, Orst painted her for the rest of his life. Edward starts to see Luc's eyes as those of an 'Orst temptress;' he is fascinated by the story, appropriately, for he is a pedant/aesthete whose most passionate outburst is reserved for a Muzak rendition of Mozart in a hotel dining room. Edward's cultural and sexual history is detailed further when he returns to England for the funeral of his one great love; as teenagers, they made love beneath Milton's 'folding star.'"--"Kirkus Reviews" "Hollinghurst's ("The Swimming Pool Library") erotic novel of a language tutor's obsession with his teenage pupil was a Booker Prize finalist."--"Publishers Weekly"

獲得2004年英國布克獎的作者Alan Hollinghurst而言，今年50歲的他是大獲全勝的一年。他的作品大都是以男同志的小說為主，卻又帶點Henery James的簡潔風格。

這本1995年發表的小說作品《The Folding Star》也不例外，故事主角是一位33歲的語言學老師Edward Manners，情不自禁的愛上了他年僅17歲的學生Luc Altidore，迷戀與渴望讓Edward Manners不停的窺視並追蹤Luc的一舉一動。

Alan Hollinghurst對於性、愛與美的主題，作了最真實且大膽的處理。