The Line of Beauty has ratings and reviews. Jessica said: I started this last night, heading home after one of the most dreadful evenings in. Alfred Hickling on sex and snorting in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Everyone who has read The Line of Beauty will recall the party at which the young protagonist, Nick Guest, dances with Mrs Thatcher. Before.
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At the beginning of the next he is walking home, “[f]rowning again, at having done something so vulgar and unsafe”.
Especially the main character felt rather anemic to me, pathetic even, in his strange insistence on politeness without integrity, which of course sets off the shallowness of some of the other characters but still had the effect that there was no one to root for. Hollinthurst ogee ogee, oi oi oi.
The Line of Beauty
The Line of Beauty is a novel of eventful gatherings rather than propulsive action, and in these situations Hollinghurst proves to be one of the sharpest observers of privileged social groupings since Anthony Powell.
Nick helps Cat through a crisis when she considers cutting herself, and when her parents return they suggest he stay on indefinitely, since Cat has become attached to him and Toby is moving into his own place. How do they do it? And as in Fitzgerald, there’s no redemption. But the phrase also stands for that fatal line of attraction that leads from one love object to another, or towards some ideal of the beautiful life, that comes crashing down on the characters’ heads at the end of this social comedy which turns out to have been a tragedy after all.
Nick is moving his few possessions out of the Feddens’ house; in the afternoon he is to have an HIV test: And when I thought of reading more of this novel, I got really excited. As Leo lives with his religious mother and Nick feels restricted in the Fedden household the two conduct their sexual affair almost entirely outside in public parks and side streets. Though Nick is finishing up his doctorate on Henry James, he spends most of his time living a decadent lifestyle of drugs and sex with Wani who lavishes him with money and expensive gifts.
Having never moved out Nick is now a permanent member of the Fedden household.
The Line of Beauty
The writing was supposed to by lyrical and graceful, but it was just long-winded and poorly executed. Retrieved 8 February I recommend it to anyone who likes quality writing, gender studies, books about the English upper crust, or a literary quality beach read. The thin thread that binds and shapes Nick’s muddling way through his life is beauty, and his trajectory is in a way a test of its strength and worth.
Try the book Two Boys Kissing instead—and always, always check if something won the Booker Prize before picking it up: Feb 28, David rated it it was amazing.
Going slowly and in short spurts. The only reason McEwan’s more famous must be because his TMI sex scenes tend not to be gay, and a lot of people really are inexplicably freaked out by gay male sex. Now he is a practised operator, able to fit a tryst into an unexpected gap in his day. These are minor quibbles, however, about a book I was often reluctant to put down.
But we can as well sense the spirit and the mood of E. May 06, Kimberly rated it it was ok. But they’re like, well, what choice do we have? But hollinghuest so, it attracted the perfect target audience.
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Isn’t the main character in that Nick too? But, I would suggest reading the book first so you can create your own images of the characters. It’s like smooth white gold, a dream mouthful, delicious. He goes into a bar and sees someone he had a relationship with earlier in the book. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Having a tough time getting through this one. I was struck by a paragraph where Nick is trying to justify his vision of an artistic film of a James book The Spoils of Poynton to a rich but philistine potential backer who has just told him that the story “kinda sucks”: Recommended to Jessica by: The preceding section ended with Gerald Fedden apparently triumphant, seeing the prime minister to her car after his party.
Every circumstantial detail, the peculiar beauty of a London street, is given a strange intensity by the premonition.
The Line of Beauty is actually the first book I don’t finish. It’s about thinking that you are accepted and welcomed, and then suddenly those that you thought loved you, turni Hollinghurat took me a little while to get into this book, but when I did, I couldn’t stop.
The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinyhurst. It is difficult to know whether the author sees these elements as a heightening of the sexual charge, or whether they are deliberately introduced as an antidote to romanticism, and as much an emblem of decadence as the increasingly frequent use of “charlie” cocaine by the narrator and his friends. If Henry James could brave one more curtain call, he’d find a more encouraging audience than the one that booed him off stage after “Guy Domville.
He recalled how one tabloid headline greeted his Man Hollingjurst Prize by announcing, “Gay Sex Wins Prize” — “a rather different award” from the famous literary prize itself, the author reflected. Here, structures of class and heterosexism pervade relationships, but Hollinghurst only offers beautty in the way Fitzgerald offers images of an unwholesome lifestyle he can’t escape.
But, then, I think about all the readers and all the books out there and I realize how small of a difference I make.