The Farewell Symphony
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4.9 • 9 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Following A Boy's Own Story (now a classic of American fiction) and his richly acclaimed The Beautiful Room Is Empty, here is the eagerly awaited final volume of Edmund White's groundbreaking autobiographical trilogy.
Named for the work by Haydn in which the instrumentalists leave the stage one after another until only a single violin remains playing, this is the story of a man who has outlived most of his friends. Having reached the six-month anniversary of his lover's death, he embarks on a journey of remembrance that will recount his struggle to become a writer and his discovery of what it means to be a gay man. His witty, conversational narrative transports us from the 1960s to the near present, from starkly erotic scenes in the back rooms of New York clubs to episodes of rarefied hilarity in the salons of Paris to moments of family truth in the American Midwest. Along the way, a breathtaking variety of personal connections--and near misses--slowly builds an awareness of the transformative power of genuine friendship, of love and loss, culminating in an indelible experience with a dying man. And as the flow of memory carries us across time, space and society, one man's magnificently realized story grows to encompass an entire generation.
Sublimely funny yet elegiac, full of unsparingly trenchant social observation yet infused with wisdom and a deeply felt compassion, The Farewell Symphony is a triumph of reflection and expressive elegance. It is also a stunning and wholly original panorama of gay life over the past thirty years--the crowning achievement of one of our finest writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Marked equally by erotic fervor and lyrical intensity, the final installment in White's autobiographical trilogy (following A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty) is also the longest, the most baroque and the most elegiac. It carries us from the heady days of the Stonewall Riots through the ravages of AIDS. As usual, White subordinates his interest in the larger matters of recent gay history to the task of vividly evoking the men in the narrator's life through whom those events are understood--usually in a sympathetic, Proustian effort at social taxonomy. The giggling, snobbish, closeted "White Russians" slumming at the Stonewall typify one kind of gay man, just as Brandy--a sequined and exquisitely theatrical drag queen--represents another. The narrator literally embraces many of them--he seems perpetually as surprised by his catholic tastes in men as he is by the fetishes of others. The novel is invigoratingly, rigorously artificial, flirting with mannerism even as it celebrates esprit and erudition in others (one James Merrill-esque poet dismisses some Japanese scrolls as "the usual swirls before pine"). Expatriate life, first in Rome and then (for a more extensive period) in an initially inhospitable Paris sharpens the narrator's sense of isolation; a rejection slip for his novel sends him into suicidal despair--from which salvation lies (typically) in a liaison with a Danish tourist. As the narrator's writing career flourishes, he finds himself in the rarefied company of powerful, learned editors, poets and novelists--company that intersects rather than stands distinct from the priapic habitues of Greenwich Village. Extended episodes involving his mother's decline into illness and dementia, his father's death and his sister's coming to terms with her lesbianism highlight the insularity of the narrator's world. The book is best enjoyed not for a strong story--indeed, the Brice for whom the narrator mourns at the beginning and close is rather peripheral--but for its luminous snapshots of New York, Paris and Rome and of the vital parade of men--dowdy, forbiddingly gorgeous, sylph-like, ephebic, closeted, defiantly and militantly out--that crowd its pages. BOMC selection; first serial to the New Yorker.
