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Title: Allan Stein by Matthew Stadler ISBN: 0-8021-3662-1 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.38 (21 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: The American Answer to Alan Holinghurst
Comment: While reading the book, I was struck by all the similarities to Hollinghurst's amazing "The Folding Star". Both books feature a teacher who lusts after teenage boys, a trip by this teacher to a non-English speaking "old world" country and an unusual blend of historical fiction, unabashed erotica, and Proustian pyrotechnics.
The writing is quite wonderful in this book, but is not as dense or as high-brow as Hollinghurst's. Instead of impressing us with his vocabulry, Stadler brings a unique gay American sensibility to the novel, which gives it quite a different sensibility than Hollinghurst's.
While both writers will obviously be compared to Proust and to Mann, I find both Holinghurst and Stadler to be reminiscent of A.S. Byatt. Just like in some of Byatt's writing, the search for historical truth also parallels the search for truth in one's own life. I definitely recommend this book, although If I were to only read one of them, I would read the better book, The Folding Star
Rating: 5
Summary: "Boy Leading a Horse"
Comment: I really enjoyed this very funny, erotic and different novel. Matthew Stadler is probably one of the most gifted young novelists writing today. Even though his books are disturbing, they have a way of captivating you so that you can't wait to read the book right through. I lost some sleep over this one.
This is the story of a young teacher's journey to Paris to uncover the sad history of Gertrude Stein's troubled nephew Allan. The teacher travels to Paris under an assumed name, after being fired from his job because of a sex scandal. In Paris he becomes enchanted and obsessed with a 15 year old boy. Thus the story continues from there.... Forget the pedophiliac part of the story, this should not frighten you away from Matthew Stadler's excellent writing & descriptions of this time and place. His writing is so elegant at times its like reading a classic or it will be in time.
Whether he is shocking the reader, or enticing us with beautiful prose, Matthew Stadler, certainly know how to keep a reader's attention, and take you places you might not dare go alone. This is perhaps his best book yet.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Abbey Road of Transgressive Literature
Comment: Stadler is in his ornate phase. The usual development of an artist in any medium is toward the baroque and ornate, a place the Beatles arrive at with St. Pepper's or Abbey Road in the late 1960s. It is, I confess, my favorite phase. Some may prefer the surreal comedy of Stadler's "Sex Offender," a novel simpler in theme: exotic sexuality vs. prosaic society's love-hate response to it. From my point of view, this is Stadler's masterpiece.
Stadler's sentences are lush and meandering. His descriptions, perhaps overlong, reward with poetic grandeur and learned reference. He is a prose-poet of the senses, akin to Arthur Rimbaud or Garcia Lorca, the latter of whom his lead character uses to seduce a Seattle high school boy he tutors.
His lead character is on paid leave from the school under a cloud of suspicion. He uses the hiatus to investigate an artistic mystery, the life of Allan Stein, famous Gertrude's nephew and the possible model for a famous painting. Matthew moves from rainy Seattle to sumptuous Paris, where the sensual descriptions continue to impress. In a piece of droll postmodern self-referencing, Stadler describes his own style and aims while ostensibly talking about Lorca's: "Lorca's poem might appear to be unreal, but its dreamlike consistency can supplant waking reality by the force of a new coherence & logic."
Edmund White, who soaked himself in all things Parisienne while writing the biography of Jean Genet, admires this book. It is, like White's writing, extremely sophisticated and sensual. Like Stadler's previous novel "Sex Offender," "Allan Stein" shows the ways in which, to use a Nietzschean paraphrase, "Sexuality penetrates the loftiest reaches of the intellect." "Allan Stein's" 15yo boys are described in the same way: as lean and smooth, as having near-visible hearts beating close to their ribcages, as being more interested in sex than Matthew's intellectual observations.
Stadler's response to his disgraced teacher's ephebophilia and the turbulence it may well provoke in him and in society is a relentless romanticizing. If this kind of love is unnatural, Stadler embraces the unnatural, as found in florid writing, art museums, and exotic Francophilia. As such, he does not attack this taboo directly. What is a loss for advocacy is a gain for literature.
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Title: Man About Town by Mark Merlis ISBN: 0007156111 Publisher: Fourth Estate Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Elf Child by David M. Pierce ISBN: 1560234288 Publisher: Harrington Park Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Avoidance: A Novel by Michael Lowenthal ISBN: 1555973671 Publisher: Graywolf Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Geography Club by Brent Hartinger ISBN: 0060012218 Publisher: HarperTempest Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.99 |
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Title: An Arrow's Flight by Mark Merlis ISBN: 0312242883 Publisher: Stonewall Inn Editions Pub. Date: 24 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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