Allan Stein - Softcover

Stadler, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841151076 ISBN 13: 9781841151076

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 1999

Synopsis

Comic, poignant, richly imagined, effortlessly blending past and present, Allan Stein is a highly charged exploration of eroticism and identity.

After a sex scandal involving one of his students, an American high school teacher flees to Paris, only to find himself falling in love with the skateboarding son of the French family that has taken him in. To complicate matters, he is in France under an assumed name: that of his best friend, museum curator Herbert Widener. The real Herbert has bestowed upon his friend not only an identity but a mission: to track down Picasso’ s long-lost drawings of Gertrude Stein’s young nephew Allan.

As his search draws "Herbert" deep into the city’s art world – and into his own charade – the sad, gilded boyhood of Allan Stein comes to resonate with the narrator’s present infatuation in haunting, unexpected ways.

About this title

Review:

Allan Stein spent an enchanted childhood hovering at the elbow of his aunt, that most celebrated and littlest read of Americans in Paris, Gertrude Stein. In Seattle, 90 years on, schoolteacher Matthew needs something to fill his time after complaints from a boy's parents causes his school to dispense with his services. When he tires of afternoons with 15-year-old Dogan, Matthew steals the identity of curator friend Herbert Widener, and heads to Paris on the trail of some Picasso sketches that may, or may not, be of Allan Stein. And there he falls for another 15-year-old boy, Stephane.

Like Stadler's controversial last novel, The Sex Offender, Allan Stein's poetic but uncompromising sexuality will appal those to whom the notion of "age of consent" refers to age rather than consent. As Gertrude herself wrote, "What is the use of being a boy, if you grow up to become a man?" But this is no gay Lolita. Stadler's "boys" are erotic beings in their own right, described lovingly and at length, though the narrator archly gives his readers the chance to skip the sex scenes (how many will?). Allan Stein's eroticism is crucial, lying at the heart of its rebuilding of a gay literary heritage that uncomfortably straddles the West Coast and old Europe. Very little being written today is as fine as this. -- Alan Stewart

Review:

"A brave book which stands tall with a kind of marvellous deluded splendour." -- Independent

"A smart, brave, funny and sexy novel." -- Peter Cameron

"Blackly comic. Thrilling. Truly original." -- Spectator

"He is among a handful of first-rate young American novelists. The writing and the composition of this evocation of the Paris Cityscape and its seductive denizens are remarkable." -- New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1841151076
• ISBN 13: 9781841151076
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272