the swimming‑pool library

Will takes Phil to visit Staines, a successful studio photographer who echoes Cecil Beaton. He has since written The Spell and The Line of Beauty, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004. He is the author of one of the most highly praised first novels to appear in the 1980s, The Swimming-Pool Library, and was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists 1993. He has not been there for many months and there are vivid descriptions of a night on the gay ‘scene’. Phil wants sex but is too shy so Will seduces him. Phil is idealised and objectified. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hollinghurst, Alan. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2018. A literary sensation and bestseller in both England and America, The Swimming-Pool Library is an enthralling, darkly erotic novel of gay life before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with total impunity. ebook. Trapped in close confinement with Arthur, Will begins to resent him. Buy The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst online at Alibris. Finally, Will borrows trashy homoerotic novels from one of the lifeguards at the Corinthian club. 162 likes. In this series. The adults watch as their respective children play at the far end of the pool, one of them with a shark fin strapped to her back. On the train, Will cruises a young man whom he takes home; they engage in sexual intercourse. This is a brilliantly constructed, multi-layered novel rich in both interesting characters and history. friend, James, picking up various young men (emphasis on the "young") around town and chumming around with his preternaturally mature 6-year old nephew, Rupert, a character who is not only endearing but exceedingly wise and sophisticated. Something went wrong. The opera is Billy Budd. Finally, the boring repitition of the sexual conquests and the uninteresting journals of the story inside the story were way too much to overcome. How many reviewers, for example, would start out by referring to, say, Sense and Sensibility as a "heterosexual novel"? Series. Arthur has accidentally killed a friend of his brother Harold's, after an argument about drugs. Will agrees to shelter Arthur. p. cm.—(Vintage international) eISBN: 978-0-307-80660-4 I. His lover is a "school tart" grown old; a kept man drinking too much. The Swimming-Pool Library focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and Lord Nantwich, an elderly man searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions. He begins to read Charles's papers. Charles's diaries have entered the Second World War; he is entering middle-age and the tone is melancholy. Afterwards, Will goes to Arthur's address in a working class area of London and calls but there is no answer. In the cellar, they look at some Roman mosaics and Charles asks Will to write his biography for him. Title. As a student, Charles goes on a spree with some friends in the country. Related Books. The Swimming-pool Library 作者 : Alan Hollinghurst 出版社: Vintage 出版年: 1998-01-03 页数: 304 定价: GBP 7.99 装帧: Paperback ISBN: 9780099268130 豆瓣评分 ISBN: 9781409002260. This chance meeting ultimately requires Will to re-evaluate his sense of the past and his family's history. Share to Pinterest. Add to Cart Buy Now Add to Wishlist. I could not imagine anyone in real life behaving and acting as the narrator supposedly did, but that may be more due to living in rural England for most of my life. Unable to add item to List. The Swimming-Pool Library Imprint: Vintage Digital. Despite his rank, Charles is ruthlessly prosecuted by a conservative politician of the time, who wants to make an example of him. He was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995. The book focuses on the homosexual life of the main character. Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! As a straight man I endeavored to give all the gay sexuality the same distance I gave the sexuality of "straight" characters whose taste differs from mine--cf. Lewis is curt, even slightly aggressive and seems jealously protective of Nantwich. Will goes to Phil's hotel. Lolita or anything by Pynchon. At the Corry, Will is attracted to Phil, a young bodybuilder. Will goes to the opera with James and his grandfather. So, I could even have lived with the soft porn effect and kept reading because of the literary skill, but, ultimately, not only are almost all the characters unlikable, the narrator is completely self centered and wildly unsympathetic. 1989 American Academy of Arts and Letters E.M. Forster Award; 1988 Somerset Maugham Award; References to actual history. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. But after the crash of ’29, when Lois and Judith’s father killed himself to escape his debts, the family turned the summer home into a fulltime retreat from the world. … Staines poses Phil bare-chested and oiled, as pornography. Disoriented, he leaves and wanders to James's and then the Corry, where Charles Nantwich reveals his designs in giving Will the diaries. As the novel opens, Will is currently seeing a young, working-class, black man named Arthur. At the Corry, Will meets the old man again and learns that he is Lord (Charles) Nantwich. Title. Shop now. The book focuses on the homosexual life of the main character. The Swimming-Pool Library, his sex-drenched first book, published in 1988, mapped the gay world before and after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, … Author won the 2004 Man-Booker Prize for "The Line of Beauty" "The Swimming Pool Library is an enthralling, darkly erotic… Read more. The swimming-pool library/Alan Hollinghurst.—1st Vintage international ed. The Swimming-pool Library 作者 : Alan Hollinghurst 出版社: Vintage 出版年: 1998-01-03 页数: 304 定价: GBP 7.99 装帧: Paperback ISBN: 9780099268130 豆瓣评分 Add to Cart Buy Now Add to Wishlist. Whilst cruising a young man in a London park, Will enters a public toilet to find a group of older men cottaging. For Will, the Swimming-Pool Library is slang for the changing-room to which he and his friends would slip in the middle of the night for illicit sexual activities. 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