The Sparsholt Affair - Couverture rigide

Hollinghurst, Alan

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1101874562 ISBN 13 : 9781101874561

Editeur : Knopf Publishing Group, 2018

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

“Call Me By Your Name meets Evelyn Waugh in a gorgeous novel about the generations-long aftershocks of a youthful tryst.” —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
 
“Beautiful; moving . . . A complex saga that takes us, in long leaps, from the Blitz to the age of smartphones. Hollinghurst writes classically beautiful prose: constantly intelligent, alert and mobile. Hollinghurst achieves [a] symphonic effect . . . he writes with subtlety and sympathy; wisdom and understanding.” —Adam Kirsch, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Alluring, virtuosic, cinematic. . . Hollinghurst wonderfully conveys the charged atmosphere of ordinary life rumbling under extraordinary circumstances. The traditional novel form seems as pleasurable and humanly true as ever in his hands.” —Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

“Satisfying . . . At the heart of The Sparsholt Affair are volatile secrets that can never be riddled into the light.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Utterly captivating and immersive . . . Hollinghurst remains one of our most gifted writers, unspooling sentences as precise and lyrical, deft and ingenious, as any in the English language.” —Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe

“Absorbing . . . displays a masterly grasp of psychological processes and a prickling awareness of minute betrayals and inarticulate desires. When Hollinghurst picks up an aspect of human experience, he is so exacting that it’s as if no one has described these things before.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Hollinghurst is a superb writer. Like Henry James, he writes prose so dense with lines of beauty that you can’t quite catch up to them in real time, lines that are razor close to human experience and yet — or therefore — retain a continual capacity for surprise. In The Sparsholt Affair, he has made it his project to describe the agonizingly long time it took for gay life to reach its present state of encumbered but unprecedented freedom . . . [The novel is] sad in the clear-eyed lonely fashion of Philip Larkin. Undeniably the work of a master. . . There’s nothing Hollinghurst could write that I wouldn’t read.” —Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune

“Fascinating, magisterial . . . It captures the nuanced textures of life. Hollinghurst is a literary master.” —John Powers, “Fresh Air,” NPR

“Epic, elegant, intricately constructed. An overarching theme of The Sparsholt Affair is the quest for love. Chance, temptation, time, loss, and change mark the decades; Hollinghurst builds an intricate web of relationships with stately, Jamesian precision and nuance. . . Moving, heartfelt—no novelist has chronicled [the] salubrious sea change in cultural attitudes [toward homosexuality] more beautifully than Hollinghurst. His exquisite prose rewards close attention.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR 

“Powerful, thrilling . . . The Sparsholt Affair is a work of characteristic subtlety and forthrightness. Hollinghurst is a writer for whom sex and fine art, sensual and aesthetic bliss, are not discrete activities, but points along a spectrum of delight.” —Giles Harvey, The New York Times Magazine

“A multigenerational tapestry, ingeniously constructed and delicately written; so achingly powerful, you’ll savor every page.” —Lauren Morgan, Entertainment Weekly
 
“A secret history of art and desire—and its effect on an iconoclastic English family—is at the heart of a novel shaped by the keen understanding of how we live and the repercussions of the previous generation’s actions.” —Megan O’Grady, Vogue

“A deeply pleasurable riffing on the repressed English novel—Forster, James, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Austen—written with poise, lucidity, and pathos.  A gay love story doesn’t have to be about thwarted longing anymore; in Hollinghurst’s hands, the traditional obstacles to romance—age, upbringing, inclination, society’s expectations—become sparks and, at length, a full-blown liberatory force blasting through the divisions in British society. Sex, he shows, can be about friendship and self-discovery, power, distraction, and comfort, among many other things. But love—well, love is rare. What Hollinghurst is hinting . . . [is] a desire to forget time, or, more accurately, to forget that our time is limited. . . . Beautiful.” —Joanna Biggs, Harper’s

“A study of how a single sensational event reverberates across the decades . . . Hollinghurst’s mellifluous prose is as fine and subtly shaded as ever, and his full, persuasive immersion of the reader in the book’s far-flung eras is impeccable. The Sparsholt Affair has a rich symphonic sweep as it makes its points and counterpoints.” —Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
 
“A wonder, full of wit and tenderness—a lusciously observant dive into 20th-century English life. The novel charts the great changes in gay life in Britain over the course of a lifetime. It also betrays a whiff of nostalgia—[and is] a memorial to a way of life that has vanished. There is no better stylist alive [than] Hollinghurst.” —Laura Miller, Slate

“Gorgeous . . . To read Alan Hollinghurst is to encounter beauty in its many forms. There’s the beauty of the sentences—Jamesian, somehow intensely shaped and effortlessly supple.  There are beautiful characters...beautiful houses, beautiful paintings, beautiful poems.  Hollinghurst is a wicked satirist and a delicious plotter, but I most admire the seriousness with which he takes beauty—its relationship to pleasure and power, secrecy and love. David Sparsholt and his beauty serve as the plot’s engine—the Chekhovian gun that you know will go off. And it does. [There is] sharp insight about time and loss, sharply expressed.” —Anthony Domestico, San Francisco Chronicle.
 
“Hollinghurst is clearly writing some of the most beautiful lines currently to be found in English.” —Emily Gould, Bookforum
 
"I had the distinct sense, on finishing Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel, that I might have read next year’s Booker-winner before this year’s had even been announced. The Sparsholt Affair is a sweeping and intimate masterpiece, full of sensual pleasures and observational wisdom." —Geoff Dyer


“Extraordinary . . . The joy and pain of The Sparsholt Affair is in revealing the locking and unlocking of secrets across generations. The joy Hollinghurst takes in life’s small shards of beauty...feel[s] like the joy of life itself—when Johnny and his French friend play in the sea as teenagers, the unpremeditated elation of their bodies is like a series of arrows into the heart. Hollinghurst’s oeuvre acts like a bridge for culture. As the realization dawns [that] Hollinghurst is on the side of life, the walls start to come down. Time passes and people die. The instants of pure splendor are what make life livable, make it writable. The Sparsholt Affair affirms them, again.” —Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic
“Dazzling . . . Several minor Sparsholt affairs glow around the scandal of the novel’s title; the [one] named in the title involves a minister of Parliament, political corruption, and a tryst between two businessmen friends. Rendered [with] consistently astonishing refinement.” —Christian Lorentzen, Vulture
 
“Beautiful, potent . . . rich with the kind of emotional detail that marks Hollinghurst’s best work.” —Mark Athitakis, Newsday
 
“A beautifully drawn portrayal of families (both given and chosen), memory, and the compromises that can make up a life.” —Adam Rathe, Town & Country Magazine

“An Alan Hollinghurst novel comes into the world with a whole heart. There’s so much honest living going on in his pages—desires, needs, regrets, sex, worries, beauty, ugliness, anxiety, humor: Hollinghurst is arguably the finest coiner of character at work today. Attention to sound and imagery can be found in every one of his famously gorgeous sentences. [But] if he’s a descendent of Henry James and Forster, he’s also one of Jean Genet and Edmund White. In The Sparsholt Affair, Hollinghurst takes aim at nearly a century of gay life in Britain, beginning in Oxford just after the start of WWII, and ending in the present, in a gay universe of dating apps and raising children. Hollinghurst writes some of his best lines about love, loss and memory in this novel.” —Christopher Bollen, Interview Magazine
 
“Cool is fine; Hollinghurst is great. Here as in his earlier works, the writer is interested in upper-crusty Oxbridge chaps making their way in society, getting entangled in art, in politics, and in bed (or a men’s room, or a sauna, or a nightclub) with one another. Sex, pleasure, and beauty are fundamental to human life; Hollinghurst is uninterested in an existence that doesn’t celebrate the three. Reading the author’s beautiful sentences on the matter, you can be persuaded that sex, too, is an art form.” —Rumaan Alam, 4Columns
 
“Tantalizing . . . The novel's primal scene is the glimpse, by Oxford students during the prescribed blackouts of the WWII blitz, of a transfixing nude male torso in a room across the quad. Hollinghurst’s style [is] sophisticated, with a diamond-cutter's feel for what qualifies as an edge . . . While his characters are averting their eyes, Hollinghurst sculpts their exact shapes. He sustains his subterranean human comedy with wickedly Wildean compassion; you neither put the book down nor reach for a single stone to throw at anyone.” —Tim Pfaff, Bay Area Reporter
 
“Brilliant . . . Evoked with confident richness: a seven-decade multi-generational chronicle of elite English gay life . . . Hollinghurst [holds a] commanding position, only strengthened by his latest novel, as a very contemporary English writer deeply formed by the tradition.” —Randy Boyagoda, National Review
 
“A big, bold, brassy, spectacular saga of the tectonic shifts in gay lives in Britain from 1940 to 2012. . . an exuberant, highly entertaining excursion into many lives over many years.” —Robert Allen Papinchak, The National Book Review
 
★ “Masterful—written in elegant, captivating prose. The story sweeps along in five interlinked sections, in which the characters move through different stages of their lives and their country’s history. Hollinghurst shines a clarifying light on the gay and art worlds through decades of British cultural and political change. In this magnificent novel, Hollinghurst is at the height of his powers.” —Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)

★ “Thrilling; fascinating . . . a novel full of life and perception. A man’s inability to be honest about his sexuality has scandalous, and brutally public, consequences for several generations. Hollinghurst tracks the vast, transformative changes in gay life over many decades. Part of Hollinghurst's bold talent in this novel, as in his previous work, is to make it evident that lust, sex, and who does what with whom in the bedroom (and even how) are fitting, and insightful, subjects of literary fiction.” —Kirkus (starred review)
 
“The Jamesian elegance and psychological acuity of Hollinghurst’s previous novels grace The Sparsholt Affair, a multigenerational saga focusing on the Sparsholts and the effect a highly public midcentury scandal has on their family and legacy. This is a moving work from one of modern literature’s finest authors.” —Michael Magras, BookPage

★ “Hollinghurst’s sprawling novel, suffused with lust and longing, movingly portrays the generational shift in gay experience and acceptance. Warmly recommended.”—Library Journal (starred review)

★ “Superlatives are made to describe this extraordinary work of fiction. Distinguished . . . a novel notable for its sophistication. The world of art and literature and the evolving world of gay society and culture in Britain [are] brilliantly realized. Hollinghurst is especially good at evoking yearning, and, indeed, his novel will inarguably leave his readers yearning for more.” —Michael Cart, Booklist (starred review)
Reviews from the U.K.

“Perhaps Hollinghurst’s most beautiful novel yet—a book full of glorious sentences by the greatest prose stylist writing in English today. The Sparsholt Affair is about gay life, about art, about family, but most of all it’s about the remorseless passage of time. There’s always something elegiac about the movement of time in a Hollinghurst novel; there’s an inevitable feeling of sorrow that comes with the end of each section. [Yet] The Sparsholt Affair is funnier and more warm-hearted than any of his books so far. Hollinghurst is wonderful on the ‘beautiful delay’ of university life, on the cloisters and the quadrangles, tentative intimacies building between friends and lovers: he can do an Oxford novel as well as Waugh. An unashamedly readable novel, undoubtedly the work of a master.” —Alex Preston, The Observer

“This book moves from strength to strength. The immense assurance of the writing, the deep knowledge of the settings and periods in which the story unfolds, the mingling of cruel humour and lyrical tenderness, the insatiable interest in human desire from its most refined to its most brutally carnal, grip you as tightly as any thriller. Hollinghurst layers situations that cumulatively portray a culture as it exists in time as well as in space: a constellation of longings and confusions. The novel keeps pulsing: an amazing amount of the passion and folly of the human comedy is woven in, all of it beautifully observed and memorably articulated.” —James Lasdun, The Guardian “
 
A novelist with a particular genius for inhabiting the past [and] an extraordinary gift for the condensing and enriching detail . . . Hollinghurst can give a tiny history of the high street and a thumbnail sketch of a life-story all in a few dozen words. His evocation of Oxford in wartime is ravishing in its detail, [and] it isn’t only the overtly gorgeous passages that shine . . . Ordinary actions are ushered from one sort of life into another, carried tenderly across in language that is unhurried and precise. [Hollinghurst’s writing] evokes Whistler’s brushwork, Henry James’s prose or Frank Lloyd Wright’s way with a building, but does not recognize a separation between high and low, past...

Extrait :

1 - A NEW MAN

The evening when we first heard Sparsholt’s name seems the best place to start this little memoir. We were up in my rooms, talking about the Club. Peter Coyle, the painter, was there, and Charlie Farmonger, and Evert Dax. A sort of vote had taken place, and I had emerged as the secretary. I was the oldest by a year, and as I was exempt from service I did nothing but read. Evert said, “Oh, Freddie reads two books a day,” which may have been true; I protested that my rate was slower if the books were in Italian, or Russian. That was my role, and I played it with the supercilious aplomb of a student actor. The whole purpose of the Club was getting well-known writers to come and speak to us, and read aloud from their latest work; we offered them a decent dinner, in those days a risky promise, and after dinner a panelled room packed full of keen young readers—a provision we were rather more certain of. When the bombing began people wanted to know what the writers were thinking.

Now Charlie suggested Orwell, and one or two names we had failed to net last year did the rounds again. Might Stephen Spender come, or Rebecca West? Nancy Kent was already lined up, to talk to us about Spain. Evert in his impractical way mentioned Auden, who was in New York, and unlikely to return while the War was on. (“Good riddance too,” said Charlie.) It was Peter who said, surely knowing how Evert was hoping he wouldn’t, “Well, why don’t we get Dax to ask Victor?” The world knew Evert’s father as A. V. Dax, but we claimed this vicarious intimacy.

Evert had already slipped away towards the window, and stood there peering into the quad. There was always some tension between him and Peter, who liked to provoke and even embarrass his friends. “Oh, I’m not sure about that,” said Evert, over his shoulder. “Things are rather difficult at present.”

“Well, so they are for everyone,” said Charlie.

Evert politely agreed with this, though his parents remained in London, where a bomb had brought down the church at the end of their street a few nights before. He said, rather wildly, “I just worry that no one would turn up.”

“Oh, they’d turn up, all right,” said Charlie, with an odd smile.

Evert looked round, he appealed to me—“I mean, what do you make of it, the new one?”

I had The Gift of Hermes face down on the arm of my chair, about halfway through, and though not exactly stuck I was already alternating it with something else. It was going to break my daily rhythm, and was indeed rather like tackling a book in a foreign language. Even on the wretched thin paper of the time it was a thick volume. I said, “Well, I’m a great admirer, as you know.”

“Oh, well, me too,” said Peter, after a moment, but more warmly; he was a true fan of A. V. Dax’s large symbolic novels, admiring their painterly qualities, their peculiar atmospheres and colours, and their complex psychology. “I’m taking the new one slowly,” he admitted, “but of course, it’s a great book.”

“Any jokes in it?” said Charlie, with a hollow laugh.

“That’s never quite the point,” I said, “with a Dax novel.”

“Anyway, haven’t you read it?” said Peter, going over to the window to see what Evert was looking at.

Poor Evert, as I knew, had never read more than the opening pages of any of his father’s books. “I just can’t,” he said again now, “I don’t know why”—and seeing Peter join him he turned back into the room with a regretful look.

After a moment Peter said, “Good grief . . . did you see this, Dax?”

“Oh . . . what’s that . . . ?” said Evert, and I was slow to tell the new confusion from the other.

“Freddie, have you seen this man?”

“Who is it?” I went across. “Oh, the exhibitionist, I suppose you mean,” I said.

“No, he’s gone . . .” said Peter, still staring out. I stood at his shoulder and stared too. It was that brief time between sunset and the blackout when you could see into other people’s rooms. Tall panes which had reflected the sky all day now glowed companionably here and there, and figures were revealed at work, or moving around behind the lit grid of the sashes. In the set directly opposite, old Sangster, the blind French don, was giving a tutorial to a young man so supine that he might have been asleep. And on the floor above, beneath the dark horizontal of the cornice and the broad pediment, a single window was alight, a lamp on the desk projecting a brilliant arc across the wall and ceiling.

“I spotted him the other day,” I said. “He must be one of the new men.” Peter waited, with pretended patience; and Evert, frowning still, came back and looked out as well. Now a rhythmical shadow had started to leap and shrink across the distant ceiling.

“Oh, yes, him,” Evert said, as the source of the shadow moved slowly into view, a figure in a gleaming singlet, steadily lifting and lowering a pair of hand-weights. He did so with concentration though with no apparent effort—but of course it was hard to tell at this distance, from which he showed, in his square of light, as massive and abstracted, as if shaped from light himself. Peter put his hand on my arm.

“My dear,” he said, “I seem to have found my new model.” At which Evert made a little gasp, and looked at him furiously for a second.

“Well, you’d better get a move on,” I said, since these days new men left as quickly and unnoticed as they came.

“Even you must admire that glorious head, like a Roman gladiator, Freddie,” said Peter, “and those powerful shoulders, do you see the blue veins standing in the upper arms?”

“Not without my telescope,” I said.

I went to fill the kettle from the tap on the landing and found Jill Darrow coming up the stairs; she was late for the meeting at which she might have liked to vote herself. I was very glad to see her, but the atmosphere, which had taken on a hint of deviancy, rather changed when she came into the room. She hadn’t had the benefit of ten years in a boys’ boarding school, with all its ingrained depravities; I doubt she’d ever seen a naked man. Charlie said, “Ah, Darrow,” and half stood up, then dropped back into his chair with an informality that might or might not have been flattering. “We want Dax to ask his father,” he said, as she removed her coat, and took in who was there. I set about making the tea.

“Oh, I see,” said Jill. There was a natural uncertainty in Evert’s presence as to what could be said about A. V. Dax.

At the window Evert himself seemed not to know she had come in. He and Peter stood staring up at the room opposite. Their backs were expressive, Peter smaller, hair thick and temperamental, in the patched tweed jacket which always gave off dim chemical odours of the studio; Evert neat and hesitant, a strictly raised boy in an unusually good suit who seemed to gaze at pleasure as at the far bank of a river. “What are you two staring at?” Jill said.

“You mustn’t look,” said Peter, turning and grinning at her. At which she went straight to the window, myself close behind. The gladiator was still in view, though now with his back turned, and doing something with a piece of rope. I was almost relieved to see that the scouts had started their rounds. At one window, and then the next, a small black-coated figure appeared, reached up to close the shutters, and removed all sign of life. Across the way the scout came into Sangster’s room, half-hidden by the oblong screen he carried through into the bedroom, and after a minute reappeared, edged round the two occupants, and kneeling on the window seat gazed out for a curious few seconds before pulling the tall shutters to. By dinner time the great stone buildings would be lightless as ruins.

“Ah, Phil,” said Charlie—behind us my own scout had come in to do the same for us.

I said sternly, “Do you know who this fellow is, Phil?”

Phil had fought at the Battle of Loos, and after that earlier war had spent fifteen years in the Oxford police. He was affable and devoted to the College, but seemed sometimes to regret that he’d ended up in an apron, dusting and washing dishes for young men he was powerless to discipline. “What was it, sir?” He propped his screen against the wall, and came over eagerly, as if I’d spotted a miscreant. I noticed now that our own reflections were hanging very faintly between us and the view of other windows. I pointed upwards.

“This . . . ridiculous fellow,” I said.

“Oh, him, sir,” said Phil, a bit disappointed but trying for a moment to share our own interest in the luminous figure. “I happen to know there was a bit of trouble there.”

“What sort of trouble?” said Peter.

“Well, the noise, sir. Dr. Sangster’s been complaining about it.”

“Oh . . . ?” said Evert. “Noise . . . ?”

“Rhythmical creaking, apparently, sir,” said Phil, with a grim look.

“Oh, goodness . . .” said Evert.

“He’s not one of ours, though, in fact,” said Phil.

“Ah,” I said.

“No, he’s one of the Brasenose men,” said Phil. In the vast gloomy College, its staircases half-deserted since the start of the War, new members of requisitioned colleges had been slipped in here and there, disoriented freshmen who found themselves also evacuees. Brasenose had been seized by a ministry of some kind, who according to my tutor were rather unsure what to do with it. “If you could just excuse me, Mr. Green?”

“Of course, Phil.”

“You don’t happen to know his name?” said Jill.

“He’s called Sparsholt, miss,” said Phil, with a small cough as he swung the shutters to and dropped the iron bar safely in its slot.

“Spar . . . sholt,” said Peter, weighing the word and smiling slyly at Evert. “Sounds like part of an engine, or a gun.”

Phil looked at him blankly for a second or two. “I dare say you’re right, sir,” he said, and went through into the bedroom. I set out my best Meissen cups, which I hoped might please Jill, and in the new closeness of the panelled and shuttered room we settled down to have tea.

jill stayed on, as my guest, for dinner in hall, and afterwards I went down to the gate with her. “I’ll see you back,” I said. She was at St. Hilda’s, a fifteen-minute walk away, but in the blackout a bit more of a challenge.

“There’s absolutely no need,” she said.

“No, no, take my arm”—which she did, touchingly enough. We set off—I held the taped-over torch, which, with her elbow squeezed snugly against my side, we seemed to turn and point together. Even so, I sensed some reluctance in her. In a minute she freed herself to put on her gloves, and we went on like that past the tall railings of Merton, the great bulk of its chapel and tower sensed more than seen above us in the night. Jill glanced upwards. The darkness seemed to insinuate something between us, and though I think she was glad of my company it was awkwardly as though she had agreed to something. As I knew, it could be easier, once your eyes had adjusted, to walk without the startlements of the torch. Oddly, you moved with more confidence. All the same, we spoke nearly in whispers, as though we might be overheard. Often on those nights you did brush suddenly against other people passing or waiting entirely unseen.

Now the lane was a little black canyon, its gabled and chimneyed rim just visible to us against the deep charcoal of the sky. Clouds, in peacetime, carried and dispersed the colours of the lights below, but in the blackout an unmediated darkness reigned. I thought I knew this street I’d walked along a hundred times, but memory seemed not quite to match the dim evidence of doorways, windows, railings that we passed. I asked Jill about her work, and she at once grew less self-conscious. She was reading History, but her interests were in archaeology, and in the remarkable things revealed by the London Blitz. She explained how bombs that knocked down City churches sometimes cut through the layers below, Tudor, medieval, Roman, exposing them in ways no organized human effort could have done. The human aspects of the devastation, the loss of life and home, clearly struck her rather less. She spoke excitedly about coins, coffins, bricks, fragments of pottery. I said it must be frustrating for her that Oxford itself had barely been damaged, and watched, if one can watch in the dark, her recognition, and disposal, of a joke. From the start she’d been one of those who pass through student life with their eyes set firmly on the future: it was an urgent process, not a beautiful delay. Now the future for all of us had changed, the town pervaded by a mood of transience, and of near-readiness for action which it never saw. Did other friends share my feeling we might lose the War, and soon?—defeatist talk was rare, and censored itself as it began. Jill had made her choice, for the army, but her mind was on the great things she would do once the War was won.

At the gate of St. Hilda’s I stood half-illuminating our parting. “Good night then,” I said, with a humorous tremor.

Jill seemed to look over my shoulder. “I wonder if Peter will paint that man.”

I turned. “Who’s that?”

“The new man,” she said, “Sparsholt.”

“Oh, him.” I laughed. “Well, Peter generally gets what he wants.”

“A good subject, anyway, I’d have thought,” said Jill, and we shook hands. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, and as I walked alone across the bridge, and then once more down Merton Lane, I worried at my own timidity and planned more confident advances when we met next time. I turned her face to mine, and found beauty in its symmetry. She had grey eyes, the strong chin of a Wagnerian soprano, and small white teeth. She gave off, close to, a tantalizing scent. For the moment, this would have to do.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Knopf Publishing Group
• Date d'édition: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1101874562
• ISBN 13: 9781101874561
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 432