The Beholder: A Novel - Softcover

Farber, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312421826 ISBN 13: 9780312421823

Publisher: Picador, 2003

Synopsis

In the words of Isabel Allende, “Here is a poet who writes with economy and precise beauty of desire, love, and the irrevocable loneliness of the heart.” In his first novel since the highly acclaimed Curves of Pursuit, Thomas Farber has created his own language of love, in this rapturous evocation of an obsessive and erotic relationship.

He is a writer, middle-aged, thoughtful, long engaged in a project that involves observing and describing the female form. She is young, married, and beautiful, an art historian who wants to write.

The writer recounts an increasingly charged series of trysts in which he and the young woman create a heady other-world where there are no husbands and no limits. No longer merely subjects for conversation, the passions shared by the writer and the young woman—for art, storytelling, and experience—fuel a transgressive vision of love that cannot, in the end, compete with the demands of the ordered world, and someone must lose.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Farber is the author of the highly acclaimed novel Curves of Pursuit (1984), four works of nonfiction, and four collections of short stories. A former commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered, he lives in Berkeley and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

From Publishers Weekly

After a long silence, Farber (A Lover's Question; Curves of Pursuit) turns out a new novel, about a middle-aged writer's affair with a beautiful, sexy, married young art history scholar, offering a substantial investigation of illicit pleasures. Having first met informally to discuss a manuscript, the writer and the student fall deeply in lust after several brief, clandestine encounters. The student tells her dull, invisible husband that she is at her aunt's house, and the lovers "all the pleasures prove" with great abandon. They even take Polaroids of each other, in increasingly erotic poses, all elegantly described in the book's pages, a smart metaphor for their awareness of their own violation and the pleasure they take in it. Of course, the relationship moves beyond sex, as the lovers become well versed in each other's pasts. The writer must also come to terms with a heart condition, a sign that his body could age beyond his capacity to love. Farber's dialogue-heavy style, with its brief episodes, works perfectly in concert with the dance of flesh that drives this book like a well-paced film. The story itself is not new, and there are some unbelievable crannies here, such as the writer's project, a verbal study of nude models who come to his apartment to pose for him, or his decision to think of his lover as his daughter, a device reiterated throughout the second half of the book without any kind of substantial reckoning, even though it is the book's most controversial element. Nevertheless, Farber knows the heart, the groin and the conscience equally well, and this novel is an impressive display of his wisdom.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0312421826
• ISBN 13: 9780312421823
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208