The Master: A Novel by Colm T oib in see more by Colm T oib in Studio ScribnerLabel Scribner

Closer Look List Price: £15.61 From: Scribner From: Scribner Salesrank: 2699336 Released: 2004-06-21 You Save: £ (%)! Lowest New Price: Click Here  Pages: 352 Format: Hardcover Customer Rating: Also Shop International: (Not all items available internationally)          Customer Reviews: an imaginative feat, BUT... One of the 1001 books you must read before you die (international edition) but one which I'd prefer to have given a miss to. This is a considerable imaginative feat - and I can really believe that Henry James was like this and his life was like this. But Henry James was a private person and he led a quiet life...so the novel gives you: the failure of his play Guy Domville, trouble with the servants (too much given to drink), difficulties with his famous brother (doesn't understand his art), and recollections of earlier life (protected by his mother from the civil war due to largely imagined ailment; death of a favourite cousin later recreated in his books). I can remember it all, some weeks after reading, BUT still think I might have spent my time better elsewhere!... Portrait of a writer In The Master, Colm Toibin offers the reader a style and content quite different from his other novels. In a sense, the book is an act of homage to Henry James, a recognition of a creative debt, perhaps, owed by Colm Toibin to the great American writer. On another level, like Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, it is an attempt to enter an iconic writer's own creativity to highlight its insecurity and doubt. Current writers know full well that their offerings are rightly subject to critical analysis and comparison, with some critics apparently taking delight in automatically belittling contemporary efforts. But when we read a book that has achieved `classic' status, we often forget that in its own time it was treated no more reverently than current new issues. In The Master Colm Toibin manages to penetrate the creativity of Henry James, bringing his character to life via the creative process that seems to be at his very core. Thus The Master is part biography, part family history, part observation of late nineteenth century society in England, America and in expatriate enclaves in Europe. It remains a novel, however, and its main character a fiction, despite the historical reality of both the setting and the achievement. And this becomes one of the book's strengths. The story is a series of reflections from the past married with often apparently mundane family or personal events. Chapters are dated, beginning in 1895 and ending in 1899, but there is no linearity of plot, no story, as such, apart from the development of the writer as he responds to reflections on his family, life and relationships. At the start, a play of his has just failed. Oscar Wilde's trial is in the news, commented upon alongside reports of London society and its opinions. It is here that Henry James laments the death of his sister, before soon describing his brother's participation in the American Civil War, a war that he, himself, declined to fight. A suicide, that of a fellow writer, Constance Fennimore Woolson, has a profound effect on him. She was in Venice, a city that James then visits to assist her relatives with the necessary details. As ever, he is less than effective. In a later encounter with a sculptor called Andersen, James again comes close to standing idly by as events run past him. The author is always on the outside, it seems, an apparently uninvolved, disinterested observer, always apart from experience he could potentially share. He prefers to retain this role, the observer, the listener, making as few comments as possible. He sees life as a mystery, with only sentences capable of beauty. Ultimately, Henry James is cast as a selfish absorber of other's experience, the raw material he stores to regurgitate later as plot and content. He lives his own rather self-centered life through the recording and later embroidery of other's experience, others' emotion. His psyche is a writer's notebook, with human contacts neatly entered and filed for later literary use, his own emotions not revealed, or perhaps suppressed, his presence predatory. The Master is a remarkable achievement, a book whose writing mimics Henry James's own literal but complex style, itself a discipline. A rewarding read. I loved this book. Henry James really comes alive and although it is a novel about a major literary figure it is not heavy going, but flows along beautifully. I would recommend this book to any reader, but I imagine if you already had some knowledge of Henry James it would be even more interesting. A fine biography of Henry James A pleasant fictionalised biography of the novelist Henry James in which the author concentrates not so much on dates and events but on James's relationship with his family and friends. Actually Colm Toibin deliberately chose to write about a specific period of James's life, namely from January 1895 to October 1899 with a few flashbacks to tell about his youth in America before he settled in England. We learn about the failure of his theatre play Guy Domville while Oscar Wilde was enjoying a raging success with an Ideal Husband, his subsequent departure to Ireland, the death of his wife Alice. Then he followed Wilde's imprisonment and the exile of his wife and children which impressed James very much. Often Colm Toibin describes how ideas for a new novel or short story matured in James's mind and how they were related to his daily encounters and impressions. James could write and read at leisure after the purchase of Lamb House in Rye where he enjoyed his solitude between the visits of his friends, his brother William, his sister in law Alice and Peggy, his niece. But it was after meeting the young and impetuous sculptor Hendrik Andersen in Rome that James realised that he himself was ageing slowly because he saw that Andersen was too young to know how memory and regret mingle, how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost. England or life Colm Toibin has written an extremely readable fictional account of Henry James. No knowledge of James or interest in his work is necessary to enjoy this book. It's just a wonderfully written human drama. Toibin examines the myth that James chose Art over Life. This was a theme which seemed to preoccupy the artists and writers of the late nineteenth century. Toibin suggests that Henry James' decision to live in dull, insipid England, rather than Italy, Paris, America or Ireland was for his art. In the same way that a hostage tied to a radiator in a dark room for months develops an impossibly rich and vivid imagination so James chose England. I loved this book Related Categories: >> >>Books >>Subjects >>Fiction >>By Period >>General AAS