Items related to The Married Man
‘Poignant and challenging...A love story, yet with an ambition and sweep that make it much more than that...subtle, complex, unsparing and profound’ Daily Telegraph
Austin Smith, a middle aged American, works out in a Paris gym - an ordinary day, except that he catches the eye of a stranger, Julien, a young French architect with a gleam in his eye. To Austin's amused astonishment, life takes on the colour of romance.
As they dash between Bohemian suppers and glittering salons, they deal with comic clashes of cultures, of ages, of temperaments. But there is sadness in Julien's past and a grim cloud on the horizon. Soon, with increasing desperation, their quest for health and happiness drives them to Rome, Venice, Key West, Montreal and Providence - landscapes soaked with feeling which lead, in the end to the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara where their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.
Austin Smith, a middle aged American, works out in a Paris gym - an ordinary day, except that he catches the eye of a stranger, Julien, a young French architect with a gleam in his eye. To Austin's amused astonishment, life takes on the colour of romance.
As they dash between Bohemian suppers and glittering salons, they deal with comic clashes of cultures, of ages, of temperaments. But there is sadness in Julien's past and a grim cloud on the horizon. Soon, with increasing desperation, their quest for health and happiness drives them to Rome, Venice, Key West, Montreal and Providence - landscapes soaked with feeling which lead, in the end to the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara where their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
Austin Smith, 49-year-old American cultural journalist and 18th-century French furniture specialist living in Paris, meets Julien, 29-year-old French architect, at the gym. Although Julien is The Married Man, it's not long before the two are an established couple, attempting to deal with Julien's unexpected illness, his mysterious family past and his conventional bourgeois mores--so distant from those espoused by 1970s gay product Austin--as they flit with "Aids-restlessness" between Paris and the French countryside, Italy, North Africa and the US.
Review:
Edmund White's fiction has always drawn on his own experience, from A Boy 's Own Story to The Beautiful Room is Empty to The Farewell Symphony--indeed, The Married Man reworks a final section of that last, monumental elegy. It's impossible to imagine Austin Smith, ageing HIV-positive American expatriate in Paris, without seeing Edmund White, expatriate HIV-positive American author in Paris, exploring his "posthumous, post-diagnosis, foreign days". And, thanks to Stephen Barber's biography, Edmund White: The Burning World, it's an easy enough job for the curious to make the more detailed connections. Yet White 's writing has never been lazily autobiographical and here, writing in the third person, he seems at even greater pains to distance himself from Austin, who is presented with no little comic irony. Partly, that comes with the territory of being an American in Paris: "Austin was a foreigner and what he did and said were thrown into relief." However, his foreignness, in turn, is a useful lens for viewing the US as an alien, a horribly unintellectual culture; some of the book 's finest moments come as Austin starts teaching in Providence, Rhode Island, painfully oblivious to the recent cultural shifts of his homeland, adrift and belligerent in a brave new world of political correctness and homeboys, unable to grasp that the simple fact of being a gay man does not necessarily make him a woman's best friend. The resultant distancing of author from hero makes for a far tauter, less self-indulgent writing--and a love story that is at times banal and irritating but never less than convincing and, at its climax, unbearably moving. White writes of "the tackiness of survival" that leads "inevitably" to forgetting and faithfulness; in The Married Man he has ensured that one great love story cannot be forgotten or betrayed. --Alan Stewart
"Written with the characteristic brilliance and the particular flair for poetic detail that so distinguishes his books, Edmund White's new novel is arguably his best to date... Heartbreakingly beautiful prose, so elegantly achieved it has the ring of a master...marvellously life-affirming... In short, nothing less than brilliant" (The Times)
"A superb novel" (Evening Standard)
"Undoubtedly one of his best novels. The prose is lyrical...writing that is truly supple, adapting itself to comedy or tragedy as required" (Sunday Times)
"The Married Man is Edmund White at his quintessential best" (Sunday Telegraph)
"Poignant and challenging... Candid and often painfully personal... A love story, yet with an ambition and sweep that make it much more than that...subtle, complex, unsparing and profound" (Daily Telegraph)
"A superb novel" (Evening Standard)
"Undoubtedly one of his best novels. The prose is lyrical...writing that is truly supple, adapting itself to comedy or tragedy as required" (Sunday Times)
"The Married Man is Edmund White at his quintessential best" (Sunday Telegraph)
"Poignant and challenging... Candid and often painfully personal... A love story, yet with an ambition and sweep that make it much more than that...subtle, complex, unsparing and profound" (Daily Telegraph)
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherVintage
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 0099285142
- ISBN 13 9780099285144
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages320
- Rating
Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace
Stock Image
The Married Man
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition. Seller Inventory # bk0099285142xvz189zvxnew
Buy New
£ 61.47
Convert currency