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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
"I want to live, live like others live.", 2 Jun 2004
Henry James (1843 – 1916) was the first American writer to envision his vocation in global terms. He desired to be a literary master, but his recognition, however, did not come into its glory until the time between the world wars. The delicate, scrupulous, The Master, set during the four years of his life from January 1895 to October 1899, so beautifully portrays a period of melancholy, loneliness and longing, that one cannot help but be moved by James' life of self-imposed confinement.Complex and emotional, the narrative, at once, centers on James' life in England, where he reflects, with a sense of wistful regret, on his childhood growing up in Newport and Boston, where ideas were sacred, second only to good manners, and where there was a pull between "an ordered community who knew god and an idealism." Henry's father was an unconventional independently wealthy philosopher and religiously imaginative. Henrys older brother William was the first American psychologist of notable status and was also a very astute and influential philosopher. Consequently, Henry and his siblings were constantly exposed to museums, libraries, theaters and art galleries. Henry's time abroad gave him a mastery of the French language suitable enough to get him started in the study of its literature. Toibin's focuses on a period called "the treacherous years" when as the nineteenth century waned, and the influence of Victorianism diminished, the giant of American letters, then in his 50s, was trying to reinvent himself as a playwright. James did not feel at home in America, Europe, his profession, or his own skin. Drawing on a combination of rigorous fidelity and intelligent guesswork – Toibin recreates James' platonic relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, his adolescent attraction to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and his surreptitious crush on the young artist Hendrick Anderson. The reader witnesses the events of James' life before he wrote his final masterpieces. Toibin beautifully portrays an elegant world of Edwardian drawing rooms, lavish parlors, slowly burning candles, and masked balls. James feels the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he is alone, and an outsider. He is far too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed the morals to be able to participate. The Master is a graceful, terribly sad story of a lonely, introverted homosexual fated to spend his life almost connecting, staring through parlor windows, and recording with crystalline exactitude the minute struggles of the societies that surrounded him. From his apartment in Kensington, to his self-imposed seclusion in Lamb House, Rye, all he hears is the "vague cry in the distance, of his own great solitude." As he writes, his memory works like grief, the past coming to him with its arm outstretched looking for comfort. Toibin's achievement - the depiction of James that is in all its nuance, detail and tenderness, totally Jamesian - is absolutely extraordinary. Mike Leonard May 04.
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