"Elegant, filthy – and quite possibly the queerest thing you will read all year." -Guardian"Intriguing and inventive." -Electric Literature, "Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of the Year""A dizzyingly enticing and kaleidoscopic take on the spectrum of sexual experiences." -Publishers Weekly, starred review_____________A daring, category-confounding, and ruthlessly funny novel from National Book Award honored author Edmund White that explores polyamory and bisexuality, aging and love.Sicilian aristocrat and musician, Ruggero, and his younger American wife, Constance, agree to break their marital silence and write their Confessions. Until now they had a ban on speaking about the past, since transparency had wrecked their previous marriages. As the two alternate reading the memoirs they've written about their lives, Constance reveals her multiple marriages to older men, and Ruggero details the affairs he's had with men and women across his lifetime-most importantly his passionate affair with the author Edmund White. Sweeping outward from the isolated Swiss ski chalet where the couple reads to travel through Europe and the United States, White's new novel pushes for a broader understanding of sexual orientation and pairs humor and truth to create his most fascinating and complex characters to date. As in all of White's earlier novels, this is a searing, scintillating take on physical beauty and its inevitable decline. But in this experimental new mode-one where the author has laid himself bare as a secondary character-White explores the themes of love and age through numerous eyes, hearts and minds.Delightful, irreverent, and experimental, A Previous Life proves once more why White is considered a master of American literature.
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A Previous Life Another Posthumous Novel
von Edmund White
"Elegant, filthy – and quite possibly the queerest thing you will read all year." -Guardian"Intriguing and inventive." -Electric Literature, "Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of the Year""A dizzyingly enticing and kaleidoscopic take on the spectrum of sexual experiences." -Publishers Weekly, starred review_____________A daring, category-confounding, and ruthlessly funny novel from National Book Award honored author Edmund White that explores polyamory and bisexuality, aging and love.Sicilian aristocrat and musician, Ruggero, and his younger American wife, Constance, agree to break their marital silence and write their Confessions. Until now they had a ban on speaking about the past, since transparency had wrecked their previous marriages. As the two alternate reading the memoirs they've written about their lives, Constance reveals her multiple marriages to older men, and Ruggero details the affairs he's had with men and women across his lifetime-most importantly his passionate affair with the author Edmund White. Sweeping outward from the isolated Swiss ski chalet where the couple reads to travel through Europe and the United States, White's new novel pushes for a broader understanding of sexual orientation and pairs humor and truth to create his most fascinating and complex characters to date. As in all of White's earlier novels, this is a searing, scintillating take on physical beauty and its inevitable decline. But in this experimental new mode-one where the author has laid himself bare as a secondary character-White explores the themes of love and age through numerous eyes, hearts and minds.Delightful, irreverent, and experimental, A Previous Life proves once more why White is considered a master of American literature.
Aktuelle Rezensionen(1)
Rezension von ken2024: I'm trying this thing where I re-read more books than I normally do because the dead authors in my head keep insisting that it's The Thing To Do. I was in Agincourt Library when I saw this book and without thinking much about it, plucked it off the shelf and carried it out in my arms (along with three John Williams books which so far feels like a mistake). I still loved every minute of it, though this time around I paid closer attention to the music references to find out that I'm not into the sound of the harpsichord. But that might just be cultural propaganda in favour of the piano. 2022: I loved it. Every minute and every word of it. I can't remember how it was that I found out about Edmund White in the first place; just that I read his book of essays ([b:Arts and Letters|109719|Arts and Letters|Edmund White|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328856065l/109719._SX50_.jpg|16186764]) and lost myself in his essay on Nabokov. I really need to make better note of how I find these authors, I swear... But. I do know that Edmund White writes autobiographical fiction—and so it came as no surprise to me that he is a character in his own novel that is about him only in the secondary way (yet is still very much about him). The first half of <i>A Previous Life</i> centers around Constance and Ruggero, a married couple with a vast age difference between them, whereas the latter half of the book mirrors the fallout of Constance and Ruggero's marriage with the exposition of Ruggelo and Edmund's love affair. The most interesting thing about this novel is how it manages to disrupt one's sense of time. It goes back and forth temporally but above all else, I think what messed me up the most is how the book, <i>A Previous Life</i>, is mentioned in the story itself as if it is a different book altogether. Or at least, that's what I want to think, given how much I'm struggling with the self-referential-ness of it all. It amazes me how Edmund White (the writer) can talk about Edmund White (the character) in the way that he does in the novel. Self-effacing or self-aggrandizing? Who's to say? But yes. I love how obscene and pornographic it gets in one page, and insightful and philosophical in another. I want to read everything Edmund White has ever written.