- Audio CD
- Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks; Unabridged edition (November 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 078618275X
- ISBN-13: 978-0786182756
- Product Dimensions: 15 x 13.1 x 3.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 408 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Tóibín, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of success. The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ranges seamlessly back and forth over James's life, from his memories of his prominent Brahmin family in the States-including the suicide of his father and the tragic early death of his troubled sister Alice-to his settling in England, in a cherished house of his own choosing in Rye. Along the way it offers hints, no more, of James's troubled sexual identity, including his fascination with a young English manservant, his (apparently platonic) night in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes and his curious obsession with a dashing Scandinavian sculptor of little talent but huge charisma. Another recurrent motif is James's absorption in the lives of spirited, highly intelligent but unhappy young women who die prematurely, which helped to inform some of his strongest fiction. The subtlety and empathy with which Tóibín inhabits James's psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world are beyond praise, and even the echoes of the master's style ring true. Far more than a stunt, this is a riveting, if inevitably somewhat evasive, portrait of the creative life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* This distinguished Irish novelist boldly offers a fictional depiction of the last two decades of the life of the great god of American letters, Henry James. We come in on James at a low point in his career, the 1895 failure on the London stage of his play Guy Domville. This setback ignites "months of lethargy and pain and disappointment." What Toibin has so boldly done--and done so brilliantly and successfully--is forge a sympathetic but not mushy imagining of James' interior life at this crossroads, a picture that renders "the Master" astonishingly lifelike. Toibin gives him ordinary human qualities, such as fear and loneliness and longing, in a shaping and shading process that has not been an easy task, even in the most thoughtful, scrupulously researched biography. Obviously, by Toibin's illustration, fiction is the best way to achieve such a result, the best approach to infusing this somewhat cold, distant, and removed-from-real-life literary icon with an embracing degree of warmth and humanity. Even the reader who knows little about Henry James or his work can enjoy this marvelously intelligent and engaging novel, which presents not on a silver platter but in tender, opened hands a beautifully nuanced psychological portrait. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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First Sentence
Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead-familiar faces and the others, half-forgotten ones, fleetingly summoned up. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead-familiar faces and the others, half-forgotten ones, fleetingly summoned up. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Dry and Disappointing,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Master (Hardcover)
I've read all of HJ's fiction, his Notebooks, Prefaces, Letters, travel writing and a shelf of biographies and I'm finding this book lifeless and "studied." It does not animate HJ, but makes him a waxwork--I found the (fairly) recent biography of HJ in relation to Fenimore and Minnie far livelier and better written. It's being hyped to the stars, but does not live up to the hype, and if you read the long NYTBR review carefully, the reviewer there isn't wild about it either, noting its mechanical quality and its anachronistic view of HJ.
5.0 out of 5 stars
wow .. and wow,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Master (Hardcover)
i only skimmed some of the reviews but to the one who said the author has no gay sensibilities - huh? i had never read james before but this book intrigued me enough to get them and start. i thought it was provoking and in it's own way intoxicating. as the author colm toibin had the choice to put in what he wanted and he kept it to a minimum. you follow henry james' life in sporadic intervals but it all flows evenly and fluidly. i recommend to fans of everyone - toibin - james and newbies to them both. you'll be enriched in numerous ways.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Portrait Of A Gentleman,
By
This review is from: The Master (Hardcover)
I bought and read this novel, not so much because it's about Henry James as that is is written by Colm Toibin, one of my favorite contemporary writers. I am certainly no authority on Mr. James, having read only two of his novels-- many years ago-- both required in an English course, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY and THE TURN OF THE SCREW. Having finished this fine novel, however, I'm encouraged to read more James, particularly his letters and maybe a biography about him. Mr. Toibin's novel has the flavor and nuances, as best I can recall, of a Henry James novel, no small accomplishment. Toibin's James, though a bit like Eliot's Prufrock, is nevertheless a likable person and not so different from a lot of people I know. His sexuality is repressed, he has friendships with women whom he doesn't want to get too close to, he is the second child in a family of brilliant people-- William James being his older brother-- his father drinks too much, his beloved sister Alice suffers from emotional problems, he is attracted to men but doesn't act on his feelings, he is cowed by alcoholic servants, and he has a pushy woman friend from whom he has to hid a tapestry he has bought for his home because she told him he shouldn't purchase it. On the other hand, Toibin's James takes comfort in writing, in decorating a new home in Rye-- and while he sometimes may be lonely-- often enjoys solitude, something altogether different. "He loved the glorious silence a morning brought, knowing that he had no appointments that afternoon and no engagements that evening. He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment."James through Toibin has poignant observations about life and death. "He realized that he did not even want the past back, that he had learned not to ask for that. His dead would not return. Being freed of the fear of their going gave him this strange contentment, the feeling that he wanted nothing more now but for time to go slowly." About his cousin Minny Temple who dies at an early age, James says that he "could control her destiny now that she was dead, offer her the experiences she would have wanted, and provide drama for a life which had been so cruelly shortened. He wondered if this had happened to other writers who came before him. . ." What a wonderful way to become immortal, to be fictionalized by a great writer. Near the end of this novel James tells Edmund Gosse that "'I am a poor storyteller. . .a romancer, interested in dramatic niceties. While mly brother [William] makes sense of the world, I can only briefly attempt to make it come alive, or become stranger.'" The same can be said of Toibin, himself. In this finely wrought novel, he has make Henry James, the master, come alive.
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