- Hardcover: 208 pages
- Publisher: Viking Canada (Jan 21 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 067004525X
- ISBN-13: 978-0670045259
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,618,387 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Boyd (Any Human Heart, etc.) is difficult to pigeonhole. The 14 stories in this book include the supernaturally inflected ("A Haunting," "Visions Fugitives"), the Chekhovian bittersweet ("The Woman on the Beach with a Dog"), the PoMo urban spiel ("Beulah Berlin, an A-Z") and the comedy of dogged lechery. The last is represented by "Adult Video," which, in journal form, records the infidelity of one Edward, a cynical graduate student, and "Fascination," in which the same Edward, married to the girlfriend he cheated on, bungles a brief foray as a freelance journalist by making a pass at a young interviewee. "A Haunting" uses an old horror motif (a man is possessed by the spirit of another man) to illuminate the character of architect Alex Rief. While the story begins well, it concludes rather flatly with a pseudoscientific explanation. Dispossession is the more everyday horror that animates "The Ghost of a Bird," in which a Doctor Moran observes the brief recovery and sudden death of a young brain-damaged soldier, Gerald Gault. Gault, who published a short story shortly before being injured in 1944, has, in his brief recovery, confused his life with that story: "what became real to Gerald Gault was a consoling phantom, a dream, an urgent wish." Boyd's characters are, as a general rule, seeking—and mostly failing—to attain the intensity of some similar imaginative act.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Prizewinning author Boyd follows up his acclaimed novel Any Human Heart [BKL Ja 1 & 15 03] with a collection of 14 short stories, many of which feature artists, musicians, and writers as the central characters. In "Notebook No. 9," a film director going through a bad patch in his career reveals his obsession with the leading lady in his recently completed film. Although the director is uncommonly astute in his critical comments on the technical aspects of filmmaking, he seems blind (depressingly so) to much larger issues, such as the fact that the actress has lost all interest in him. Some of these stories are experimental in form, such as "Adult Video," in which perennial student Edward Scully, frustrated and self-absorbed, uses the cues of a video recorder (play, fast-forward, pause) to juxtapose his real life with an imagined one. The strongest story in the collection, "Incandescence," employs four narrators to tell the story of an ultrawealthy businessman reconnecting with his former flame and her new husband, a charming if oily con man who has drained the family coffers. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
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First Sentence
Springtime in Oxford is vulgar, anyway, but something about this particular spring in Oxford is having me on. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Springtime in Oxford is vulgar, anyway, but something about this particular spring in Oxford is having me on. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.6 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
He does the Police in voices, July 24 2005
By A. Hickman - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Fascination: Stories (Hardcover)
There's always something to like in a book by William Boyd. He is never less than a witty raconteur with an unswerving instinct for the mot juste. As the present collection of short stories, "Fascination," attests, he is also a brilliant ventriloquist, capable of embodying, alternately, an adolescent bicyclist, a 19-year-old asthmatic whose parents are both bodybuilders, a female performance artist, a writer named Edward with delusions of his own grandeur (in the collections's best two stories), and a host of dysfunctional middle-aged men. These are narrators who are driven largely by "fascination" for unattainable love objects, like the American publisher in 1940s Cape Cod who meets "The Woman on the Beach with a Dog" and is capable of forgetting his own marriage even when hers intrudes. The fascination here is in the unexpected twists and turns these stories take, including a side trip into Chekhovian territory in "The Pigeon." I enjoyed reading these stories; each is a testament to Boyd's mastery of the form; but I wasn't particularly engaged by any of them. The plotting, to put it bluntly, is perfunctory. I barely got interested in a character or situation, when the story concluded and I was shuffled on to the next character and situation. I got the impression that these might be sketches for books that Boyd never got around to writing--compressed novels, as it were. That being said, this is a much more satisfying collection than the earlier "The Destiny of Nathalie X," which, with the exception of the mordantly funny title story (an insider's take on Hollywood), is even sketchier than "Fascination." Boyd, as his fans know from "On the Yankee Station" (his first collection of stories), "A Good Man in Africa," and a raft of other books, is capable of so much more. I'm certain Boyd has another comic masterpiece like "Stars and Bars" up his sleeve. In the meantime, enjoy this collection for the jeu d'sprit it is.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A virtuoso performance, Nov 26 2007
By Philip Spires "Author of two African novels s... - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Fascination (Paperback)
Fascination by William Boyd is a set of sixteen short stories. This may not sound either surprising or original until one considers their form. The author uses at least nine different and clearly identifiable forms in which to present this work. One takes the form of a video. There are childhood memories, a diary, a journal, an A-to-Z listing. One story is a set of dialogues over lunch. Another is a set of monologues. And William Boyd's use of these different forms is not just a writer's trick to impress a critic. In each case to form complements the story, adds interpretation to the events and helps our understanding of the characters. Fascination is thus no less than a fascinating read, a tour de force in miniature by a great writer.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Studies in Humanity, Jan 2 2009
By Pesso - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Fascination: Stories (Paperback)
I generally don't like short stores - they are over before they begin. But I loved the character presentations in these. I was quickly involved in most of them right away. Not having read this author before, I started to think that Boyd must be very clever to create so many different stories under one roof. A wealth of riches so-to-speak. Can't wait to read his novels.
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