Description
Description
In this short, masterful gem of a novel, David Plante's seasoned narrator contemplates the connection between physical beauty and love, drawing on literary references and personal experiences to explore these themes.
The unnamed narrator of this brief, urgent novel, a young novelist making his way in the literary world, writes of his fascination with two enigmatic, troubled young men, one a Boston Brahmin and the other a lofty undergraduate at England's Cambridge University whom the narrator meets during his writer-in-residency. With each young man the narrator engages in a complex relationship filled with intellectual and erotic tension and each relationship leaves him feeling unfulfilled. By contrast, the narrator relates the story of his deep and abiding romantic life with an English poet, who introduces him to the remaining members of The Bloomsbury group as well as E.M. Forster and who guides him toward the publishers who bring out his early work. However, the poet dies young, and the narrator is once against cast adrift and his quest to find new, intimate interactions with the tragic young men he encounters causes him to reflect on the nature of beauty, love, and the intellectual life, emphasizing the transient and often unfulfilled desires that drive human connections.
About the Author
About the Author
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Plante's novel beautifully explores unquenchable and bittersweet queer desire, and a uniquely felt "passion for a world that was a world of men." It's a gem."
-Publishers Weekly
Praise for David Plante
American Stranger (2018)
"This emotionally gripping and mystery-swathed novel will keep you entranced, uncertain and feel compelled to read on. We may all be strangers ultimately, and Plante nails that vision in his beautiful, often lyrical prose." -- Providence Journal
"Plante's exquisitely sensitive novel of displacement, isolation, loss, and longing is rendered in intimate, darkly enrapturing scenes of snow, haunted rooms, and desolate wanderings." --Booklist
"Plante's new novel, while modern in setting, seems to exist in a timeless parallel universe. A questing new work from an accomplished writer - elegant, cerebral." --Kirkus Reviews
"Plante manages to capture the sense of disconnectedness . . . in this riveting novel of wandering souls." --Library Journal
"American Stranger is a beautiful novel, profound and subtle, on the rootlessness of people in worlds foreign to them and their search for self, or what remains of them in that search...incantatory." -- Le Monde
"The novel bathes in a strange light, like an aquarium whose water is scandalously clear. It is modern, fast, painful, reminiscent of some small independent movies, stylish and smart movies like John Yates'1969 film John and Mary. The author has an uncanny ability to slip into the shoes of a woman, to know what she is thinking, what she feels." -- Le Figaro
Worlds Apart, a memoir (2015)
"Absorbing, illuminating and hugely entertaining . A vivid memorial to an entire era." ― Times Literary Supplement
"A window onto a changing world ... Powerful as a portrait of mutual love."― Guardian
"David Plante is the ideal diarist: he has a fascination with the famous, a relish for anecdote and gossip, an ability to capture people in a few words, and the essential self-awareness. The treat of the year." ― Spectator Books of the Year
"Sharply observant, drily witty diary." ― The Times (London) Books of the Year
Becoming a Londoner (2013)
"Entries take on the languid feel of the floating world...A seamlessly charming narrative both evocative and sensual."―Publishers Weekly
"Love and life among literary lions . . . .[Plante is] a crafter of limpid prose, possessed of keen insight and sympathy. He also displays a rare gift for finely wrought characterization. . . . A richly detailed document of the London art scene of the '60s and an affecting memoir of the artist as a young man." ―Kirkus Reviews
"In this lapidary yet flowing volume, which runs from 1966 to 1986 and is charged with keen attentiveness and dazed astonishment, Plante meticulously records a perpetual carousel of luncheons, dinners, parties, and vacations punctuated by encounters with Bloomsbury artists Duncan Grant and Ben Nicholson, David Hockney, Edna O'Brien, Bruce Chatwin, and many others. Writing with supple exactitude, Plante sidesteps the diarist's usual habit of obsessive self-analysis to create a living history of this artistically dynamic time and place. And to think, this is just one small part of Plante's immense, half-century-spanning diary. More, please." ―Donna Seaman Booklist
"Always elegant, Plante's prose wi
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
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