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The Folding Star
 
 
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The Folding Star [Kindle Edition]

Alan Hollinghurst (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
Print List Price: £8.99
Kindle Price: £6.17 includes VAT* & free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
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Product Description

Review

'As is typical of the best classics, he has fashioned a universal tale of sexual obsession, love and death out of a particular life' (Marie Claire )

'Even in its sexiest moments, it never loses its intellectual poise. Dry witticisms intersperse sweaty couplings...The Folding Star is a novel of considerable breadth.What gives it its depth is the candour, wit, sensuous immediacy and melancholy intelligence applied to it' (Peter Kemp Times Literary Supplement )

'Few writers' prose can throw a party as easily as retire to the library as Hollinghurst's...[He ] is on as fine a form in this novel as his first' (Tom Shone Spectator )

'Grand 19th-century fin-de-siècle lusciousness, a seamy 20th-century carnality and a generous pinch of true wit' (Sunday Times )

Book Description

'An extraordinary book which takes the reader into a world of obsession and mystery...The Folding Star is lit by insight and humour' Evening Standard (20050324)
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Product details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 707 KB
  • Print Length: 450 pages
  • Page Numbers Source ISBN: B00507IE06
  • Publisher: Vintage Digital; New Ed edition (30 Sep 2010)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B0042JSSWW
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • X-Ray: Not Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #59,703 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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Alan Hollinghurst
Erroll McDonald

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars I may just be nitpicking but.... 29 Feb 2008
By Phil Shanklin
Format:Paperback
"The Folding Star" appeared six years after Hollinghurt's first book "The Swimming Pool Library". It was shortlisted for the Booker prize (he later won it with "The Line of Beauty") and is often on the list of the Greatest Ever Gay novels. It certainly deserves its reputation, it is a superbly written, rich dense novel yet I don't think I enjoyed it as much as his stunning debut book. Edward Manner's obsession with the boy he is tutoring is something I have always found just a little disturbing. I find him more objectionable as a character than I'd like to and the strange thing about this book, which stops me giving it the five stars it probably deserves is that it seems to work better for me when it moves out of its Flemish central location. The writing when Edward follows Luc, the teenager he is obsessed by and a couple of friends on their weekend in France, is just superb, as is the section in England when Edward returns home for a funeral, but the pace at other times in the novel can be a little sluggish. I don't really get any real sense of this Flemish city, and maybe that was the author's intention, but it seems to lack the real sense of place which is evident in "The Swimming Pool Library" and "The Line of Beauty". I do notice, however, that other reviewers have praised this aspect of the book, including a reviewer who has lived in Belgium and feels that Hollinghurst got it just right. Maybe it was differences of opinion like these which prevented it getting The Booker Prize. That said, this book demands to be read.
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52 of 59 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it 8 Oct 1999
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
This one of those rare novels you have to read from beginning to end - an achievement in itself. You won't get the flavour of it by simply dipping into it, and you cannot claim to have read it unless you have read the whole thing. In fact, to be honest, I was suspicious about it for much of the time, even while I was enjoying it. True, the Flemish city in which it is set is beautifully evoked; there is a marvellous sense of desolation in the juxtaposition of an ancient medieval burgher town and a North Sea resort out of season - a perfect setting for the central tale of frustrated, self-absorbed, beached love; and the whole thing is always beautifully crafted and paced. But I did think the main character was superficial and needed nothing more than a good slap, and the Symbolism, which forms the sub-text, is so heavy-handed that it makes irony look ironic - the narrator's first love was named Dawn, for God's sake, and the object of his Flemish obsession is called Luc(ifer), the Morning, Evening, Falling, Folding Star - otherwise known as the planet Venus. However, very suddenly, towards the end, just when you think there might be a neat resolution, the surface begins to shatter and break up, the ground collapses beneath you and the selfish farce becomes a universal tragedy. The author leaves you with a startling image that reminded me, strangely, of Tarkovsky: Symbolism suddenly made profound. You realise that this is a novel, not only perfectly-formed, but powerful and profound. It was shortlisted, but it didn't win the Booker prize that year; there must have been an embarrassment of masterpieces. Strangely, I don't recall.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A sense of place 9 Jan 2008
By Vicinal
Format:Paperback
As a long-term Belgian habitué I'd like to add another comment to the perceptive reviews of this superb novel, its profound sense of place. More than Hollinghurst's other novels, THE FOLDING STAR brilliantly evokes its locale, an anonymous Flemish city which is in fact an often uncanny amalgam of Brugge and Gent. It also evokes the strange multi-cultural aspects of the city and country, the distinctive quality of life in well-to-do Belgian homes and schools, and an almost eerie characterisation of Belgian teenage life.

More than any native novel which I know this book encapsulates the quality of lowland Belgium in the 1980s. It is far more than a 'gay' novel.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars A unique classic
From the very start of "The Folding Star" we are aware that Ed Manners is a flawed character. For all his intelligence and good breeding he is just a little too willing to indulge... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Steve Kindleson
5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific sense of genius loci
It is difficult to add to the complimentary comments already made. I loved this book. The descriptions of the Flemish town and its people is so real, and the preoccupation with the... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Reviewer Pete
2.0 out of 5 stars A novel for a particular niche of readers
There are passages in "The Folding Star" which demonstrate that apt vocabulary and rich and informative expression come very easily to Alan Hollinghurst. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Skylark
3.0 out of 5 stars Too much detail
It is difficult to fault Alan Hollinghurst in terms of his writing. His dialogue is authentic and often inspired. His sense of place and context are both excellent. But... Read more
Published 20 months ago by P. Burnard
4.0 out of 5 stars Folding Star
Well written, but with an occasional tendency to describe in detail matters of little relevance. The author is not afraid to portray both good & bad aspects of the main charaters.
Published 22 months ago by pedro
5.0 out of 5 stars Hauntingly beautiful
Edward Manners takes up his position as private tutor in English to a couple of boys in Flanders. One boy, Marcel, the son of an expert in the fictitious painter Orst, the other... Read more
Published on 17 Jan 2010 by Benjamin
4.0 out of 5 stars slow start but hard to put down afterwards
At the start i found this book intensly dull and after a couple of chapters stopped reading it and read another book instead but then after i had finished that book i decided ro... Read more
Published on 22 May 2008 by FUTURESTARdelux
1.0 out of 5 stars Keep looking!
After reading The Line of Beauty, I thought I'd read more by this author, and I did. This one is not his best by a long shot. Read more
Published on 10 Mar 2008 by Gerald T. Walford
4.0 out of 5 stars By far his best . . .
"The Folding Star" is undoubtedly Mr Hollinghurst's best work I have read (out of his three, since I have not as yet done "The Line of Beauty"). Read more
Published on 22 Jun 2005 by Angel (male)
5.0 out of 5 stars The Folding Star
not much to say really. This book has captured me totaly, making me place an order for the author's other titles. Read more
Published on 28 Dec 2004 by Andrew Scarff
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Popular Highlights

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&quote;
‘The star that bids the shepherd fold? As when the folding star arising shows His paly circlet? . . . &quote;
Highlighted by 4 Kindle users
&quote;
There was always something lacking in those men who had never had a queer phase as boys, it showed in a certain dryness of imagination, a bland tolerance uncoloured by any suppression of their own, a blindness to the spectrum’s violet end. &quote;
Highlighted by 3 Kindle users
&quote;
In one poem I’d seen that first star referred to as the folding star, and the words haunted me with their suggestion of an embrace and at the same time a soundless implosion, of something ancient but evanescent; I looked up to it in a mood of desolate solitude burning into cold calm. I lingered, testing out the ache of it: I had to be back before it was truly dark, but in high summer that could be very late. I became a connoisseur of the last lonely gradings of blue into black. &quote;
Highlighted by 3 Kindle users

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