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The Master

A Novel

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

Named by AudioFile magazine as one of the Best Audiobooks of 2005, this unforgettable audio performance represents the best of what the medium can do.

Colm Tóibín tells the story of Henry James, the famous novelist born into one of America's intellectual first families two decades before the Civil War, and who left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.

In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, who never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of Tóibín's portrait of James is riveting. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Colm T—ib’n's novel of Henry James's life starts at his watershed moment in 1895 with the devastating failure of his play, GUY DOMVILLE, which ends his hope of lucrative writing for the stage. Then it moves back in James's memory and forward in real time, showing how events from the life provided first a kernel, then more and more layers, as James evolves his novels. You don't have to be a Jamesian to find this subtle and beautifully structured book mesmerizing. Geoffrey Howard takes the arguably cerebral story from the page and renders it a fully staged, walking, talking drama without a single false note, so you haven't just heard it, you feel you've seen it. Superb. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award 2005 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from April 19, 2004
      It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Tóibín, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing
      and The Blackwater Lightship
      , has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of success. The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ranges seamlessly back and forth over James's life, from his memories of his prominent Brahmin family in the States—including the suicide of his father and the tragic early death of his troubled sister Alice—to his settling in England, in a cherished house of his own choosing in Rye. Along the way it offers hints, no more, of James's troubled sexual identity, including his fascination with a young English manservant, his (apparently platonic) night in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes and his curious obsession with a dashing Scandinavian sculptor of little talent but huge charisma. Another recurrent motif is James's absorption in the lives of spirited, highly intelligent but unhappy young women who die prematurely, which helped to inform some of his strongest fiction. The subtlety and empathy with which Tóibín inhabits James's psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world are beyond praise, and even the echoes of the master's style ring true. Far more than a stunt, this is a riveting, if inevitably somewhat evasive, portrait of the creative life. Agent, Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge & White (June)

      Forecast
      :
      This is too subtly shaded and leisurely for some fiction readers, but James's many admirers will be drawn to its many insights and its uncanny recreation of his world. Five-city author tour.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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