The Abomination - Hardcover

Golding, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375410554 ISBN 13: 9780375410550

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2000

Synopsis

Tormented by conflicting impulses and memories of the past, Santiago Moore Zamora recalls his youth with a distant mother, his exile to an English boarding school, the sexual advances of two teachers, and the desperate stategies he adopted to survive.

About this title

Review:

High summer in a sweltering London club, and I'm getting into my drunken stride after midnight, rubbing sweat with the shoulders that pass by, and thinking vaguely about another drink, or about cruising the pissoirs

The opening lines of Paul Golding's first novel, The Abomination, set the scene and tone of this provocative and intimate, story. Dedicated to a "haunting, unspeakable variant of love", Santiago Moore Zamora begins, and ends, his sexual chronicle in the clubs and dungeons of the "outcast children of Sodom and Gormorrah": the boys and men, lovers and prostitutes, who, in this version of the contemporary sexual metropolis, work "like buggery for their treacherous futures" and live on the edge of "the troubles" that haunt Zamora's narrative.

The Abomination revels in sex and language, the texture and depth of bodies and words. Two relatively brief sections on the contemporary London scene frame the bulk of a narrative that takes its readers back into Zamora's childhood and youth: his privileged early years in Spain; the loneliness, and lusts, of life at an English boarding school (the analogy with the pleasures of the sexual dungeon is an overt theme of the book). Isolated, Zamora seeks redemption in the figure of Mr Wolfe: "I choose to lose my way back to the dormitory and find myself, instead, at his door. I'm nine years old. Don't look so shocked". In this way, Golding lets his readers know that he knows that his subject is controversial: childhood sexuality, love and sex between adult and child, its impact on sexual life in adulthood. Golding offers a tour de force for those with the stamina to make it through to the end. --Vicky Lebeau

Review:

"Stunning, angrily intelligent. . . . Paul Golding [is] a writer to reckon with." --The New York Times Book Review

"An astonishing, heart-rending tour de force." --Pat Barker

"Beautiful and profane. . . . [Golding's] brittle wisdom is difficult to dismiss." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Stylish, clever, experimental, ambitious, urbane." -Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375410554
• ISBN 13: 9780375410550
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 433