The Loves of My Life

Combining glittering wit, an atmosphere dense in social paranoia, and a breathtaking elegance and precision of language, White's first novel suggests a hilarious apotheosis of the comedy of manners. For, on the privileged island community where Forgetting Elena takes place, manners are everything. Or so it seems to White's excruciatingly self-conscious young narrator who desperately wants to be accepted in this world where everything from one's bathroom habits to the composition of "spontaneous" poetry is subject to rigid conventions.

In Edmund White's most moving novel yet, an American living in Paris finds his life transformed by an unexpected love affair. <BR><BR>Austin Smith is pushing fifty, loveless and drifting, until one day he meets Julien, a much younger, married Frenchman. In the beginning, the lovers' only impediments are the comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. In a desperate quest to save health and happiness, they move from Venice to Key West, from Montreal in the snow to Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

Guy hat es geschafft: Aus der Armut der französischen Provinz hat er den Olymp der Modewelt im New York der Achtziger erklommen. Reihenweise erliegen die Männer seiner Schönheit, die ihn im Sommer zur größten Attraktion Fire Islands macht. Wie ein moderner Dorian Grey scheint er niemals zu altern und wird von älteren Verehrern mit Geschenken überhäuft -- bis ihn die Zeit schließlich einholt und sein Leben für immer verändert.In seinem eleganten wie geistreichen Roman schwelgt Edmund White in der Magie der Schönheit, um im nächsten Moment ihre Oberfläche zu durchdringen und ihre Macht zu ergründen -- die Macht, zu faszinieren, zu täuschen, zu beherrschen.

Paris, das ist mehr als Notre-Dame und Moulin Rouge. Edmund White lädt uns ein zu einem besonderen Spaziergang durch die französische Hauptstadt: Fernab der großen Attraktionen führt er uns in verträumte Cafés, versteckte Museen und geheimnisvolle Orte wie das Hôtel de Lauzun, in dem der junge Baudelaire ein- und ausging. Auf den Spuren großer Schriftsteller wie Hemingway, Balzac und Rilke lässt White die Bohème vergangener Zeiten lebendig werden und beschwört zugleich das brodelnde Lebensgefühl einer multikulturellen, modernen Metropole. Eine leichtfüßige Annäherung an Paris und sein Lebensgefühl -- und ein Buch über den Genuss des Flanierens.

______________<BR><BR>'Paris may well be White's pearl, but he is in fact the real pearl ... This wonderfully eccentric, conversational and personalised cultural history contains the essence of Edmund White . Entertaining and wry, White is worldly-wise and wise' - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times<BR><BR>'Edmund White writing about his Paris years, with walk-on parts for Catherine Deneuve, Yves Saint-Laurent and other assorted members of the French glitterati? That'd be Inside a Pearl' - Scotsman<BR><BR>'We are lucky to have him still publishing . diverting, affectionate . and full of tips' - London Evening Standard<BR>______________<BR><BR>A literary treat of a memoir, covering Edmund White's years among the cultural and intellectual elite of 1980s Paris<BR><BR>Edmund White was forty-three years old when he moved to Paris in 1983. He spoke no French and knew just two people in the entire city, but soon discovered the anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. White fell passionately in love with Paris, its beauty in the half-light and eternal mists; its serenity compared with the New York he had known.<BR><BR>Intoxicated and intellectually stimulated by its culture, he became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet, wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. Frequent trips across the Channel to literary parties in London begot friendships with Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis and many others. When he left, fifteen years later, to return to the US, he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and as a journalist had made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves St Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He'd also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through whom he'd come to a deeper understanding of French life.<BR><BR>Inside a Pearl vividly recalls those fertile years, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.

23:B&W 6 x 9 in or 229 x 152 mm Perfect Bound on White w/Gloss Lam