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"Edward Manners - thirty-three, disaffected, in search of a new life - has come to an ancient Flemish city to teach English. Almost at once he falls in love with one of his pupils, the seventeen-year-old Luc Altidore, recently expelled from school for some mysterious offense. Condemned to a mounting but incommunicable obsession with the boy, Edward becomes involved in affairs with two other men: one a heartless but seductive fraud, the other a young drifter with a deeply possessive streak." "Then Edward is introduced to the world of the enigmatic and reclusive Symbolist painter Edgard Orst. Gradually he is drawn toward an understanding of the artist's own obsession with a famous actress, drowned off Ostend at the turn of the century, and of the ambiguous circumstances of Orst's own death under Nazi occupation." "The events of The Folding Star are played out amid the silent streets and canals of a city that seems locked in the past, and across the northern landscape of out-of-season resorts and abandoned houses that lies beyond. But in the central panel of the novel's triptych Edward returns home for a funeral and is caught up in memories of his own late adolescence and his first love affair: an English pastoral already threatened by the experience of betrayal and loss."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)
User reviews
The Folding Star gives a very interesting portrait of gay life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, while its theme of pondering an longing for unattainable beautiful boys, whether really beautiful or just beautiful in the minds, gives the novel a longer lasting appeal among major works with gay themes.
The writing is good, don't get me wrong on that account. I want to read something else by this author, though. The Folding Star manages to be both slow and predictable, with an unhealthy dose of obscure. If I hadn't read some reviews of the book, I wouldn't have known
Much sooner than I knew anything about the narrator, I knew he would fall for one of his students. It's possible I'm overestimating how much of an angst-bucket the narrator will become, but I don't think so. If I want to wallow in angst, I'll play in an angsty RPG - at least then it's angst I'm writing, and doesn't involve children.
I really, really wanted to like this book. But I don't, not enough to slog the rest of the way through it.
So, the plot bad. The writing is dull. The Englishman is boring. The female characters (17-year-old's mom, his friend, and the tutor's co-worker) are extremely one-dimensional. I plodded through this because it's on the 1001 books list (why?!) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (how?!).