The Folding Star: A Novel - Hardcover

Hollinghurst, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679436057 ISBN 13: 9780679436058

Publisher: Pantheon, 1994

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

sed exile in an ancient Flemish city, an embittered 33-year-old language tutor, Edward Manners, falls in love with his alluring 17-year-old pupil, Luc Altidore. As Edward pursues the elusive object of his infatuation--and plunges into affairs with two other men--this book interweaves past and present, history and memory, into a tapestry of unfulfillable desire.

About the Author:

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of The Swimming-Pool Library and The Spell. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. His most recent novel, The Line of Beauty, won the Man Booker Prize for fiction and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0679436057
• ISBN 13: 9780679436058
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 422