(no subject)
Oct. 12th, 2008 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oritsu_luvIt's raining this morning. A thin cold rain on a pearly grey morning. It's the kind of morning I'm glad to be able to stay in my nice warm apartment, curled up with a cup of coffee, a home-made muffin and a book.
I just finished the book, actually. It was called 'Who was that man? A present for Mr. Oscar Wilde', by gay British author Neil Bartlett. I first got into Mr. Bartlett when I read his book 'The House on Brooke St'. It was strange meandering novel, switching back forth through time period and point of view from chapter to chapter, paragraph to paragraph, never linear, hinting at people and events before the fact only to explain them pages, chapters later. It was not easy reading, but it was rewarding. The way it all unraveled and came together so perfectly, so beautifully in the end made it all worth while.
'Who was that man?' is non-fiction but written in much the same style, the meditation of a gay Londoner in the 1980's searching for himself and the gay world of the 1890's that Oscar Wilde lived in (or visited, really). Bartlett weaves his own experiences and those of Wilde, of rent boys and drag queens together with quotes from books, plays and newspaper articles, police reports together with descriptions, musings and dialogue. A dense dreamlike maze of a book full of glittering prose.
I definitely recommend either.
I just finished the book, actually. It was called 'Who was that man? A present for Mr. Oscar Wilde', by gay British author Neil Bartlett. I first got into Mr. Bartlett when I read his book 'The House on Brooke St'. It was strange meandering novel, switching back forth through time period and point of view from chapter to chapter, paragraph to paragraph, never linear, hinting at people and events before the fact only to explain them pages, chapters later. It was not easy reading, but it was rewarding. The way it all unraveled and came together so perfectly, so beautifully in the end made it all worth while.
'Who was that man?' is non-fiction but written in much the same style, the meditation of a gay Londoner in the 1980's searching for himself and the gay world of the 1890's that Oscar Wilde lived in (or visited, really). Bartlett weaves his own experiences and those of Wilde, of rent boys and drag queens together with quotes from books, plays and newspaper articles, police reports together with descriptions, musings and dialogue. A dense dreamlike maze of a book full of glittering prose.
I definitely recommend either.
