If there was a need to label love by typologies (as it ends up being in condemnation for our intellectual or even moral condition in the worst case), hollingshurst He then speaks in a homosexual vision of that love awaiting labels. Something like what it does sarah waters with his novels loaded with lesbian eroticism.
Perhaps under other parameters the works of one or other authors would lower their erotic condition to focus on their historical condition. But that's what it is when something stands out from the standards of "normality."
Be that as it may, Hollingshurt is much more than the homosexual anecdote that ends up covering everything. Because in the end in all his novels passions, sexual tension or eroticism accompany a plot that has much more. Much to reveal about life in its various aspects that branch out between humor and tragedy with that knowing how to expose and locate characters capable of leading us to that clairvoyant encounter with who we are and what we do in this fleeting passage through the scene.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Alan Hollingshurt
The son of the stranger
Time, or memories more than time (with what this differentiation entails of idealization, mythology and melancholy) sometimes seems to get trapped in a photograph found by chance, in an aroma that assails us unexpectedly ...
But better still is a handwritten poem that testifies to the beauty and perfection of a span of time sustained in absolute bliss. From there, everyone's imagination can recreate, hypothesize ... And so the legend grows bigger and bigger. Until everything seems to revolve around verses as fleeting as they are eternal.
In the summer of 1913, George Sawle, a Cambridge student, returns to spend a few days with his family and brings a guest. Cecil Balance, aristocrat and poet. The two friends are lovers, secretly, as befits the times. Before leaving, Cecil wrote a poem in George's sister's autograph notebook that would become mythical for a generation, a poem inspired by the very young Daphne or by George, it is not known.
And the secrets and intimacies of that weekend will become mythical events in a great story, told in different ways throughout the century by critics and biographers, in a story about the seduction and secret of Cecil and the enigma of desire. and literature.
The Sparsholt case
A great novel that moves in its particular genealogy intertwined between passions, transforming historical events, clandestine loves, survival and a sensation of everything as a cycle, of the repetition of life as an echo that points towards eternity.
In October 1940, the handsome David Sparsholt arrives as a student at the elite Oxford University. He does not belong to the upper class, but he will befriend a group of young people of higher position who have set up a literary club to which they intend to invite renowned writers such as Orwell, Stephen Spender, Rebecca West or the father of one of them, AV Dax.
His son, Evert Dax, will be one of the friends who will be attracted to Sparsholt's magnetism, at a time when homosexuality had to be lived in a clandestine way. While London suffers the hell of the Blitz and the future of the country is uncertain, Oxford is a kind of limbo where young people explore the pleasures of culture, friendship and desire, knowing that at any moment they can be called up.
But this is only the beginning of this vast and highly ambitious novel, which spans more than half a century of British life and reaches our days through three generations, composing a dazzling historical fresco. Because Sparsholt will marry and have a son, Johnny, who will become a prestigious painter specializing in portraits, will maintain a love affair with a young Frenchman and then will have a daughter named Lucy ... And with them a wide range of characters will appear that they reflect changes in attitudes, customs, social structures, and sexual morals in a society.
Written with an elegant and enveloping prose, and an insightful capacity for observation of human attitudes and the intimacy of people, this novel once again demonstrates the immense literary talent of Alan Hollinghurst, one of the essential writers of the current British narrative.
The pool library
The author's most carefree novel. If Hollingshurst can call any of his works "lighthearted." Because without a doubt they are always very elaborate novels, enveloping in their multiple layers and nuances to be discovered. Openly gay in terms of the defense that this sexual condition requires, the best thing is the naturalization of a sexuality that simply advances against everything and everyone from the simple inertia that there is no other possible way to seek love than the one that is dictated from within, nor is there a more foolish endeavor than homophobia.
William Beckwith is a twenty-five-year-old homosexual and aristocrat. Flirting in public toilets saves the life of Lord Nantwich, also homosexual but very old, who came to remember past glories and has suffered a cardiac arrest.
They meet again days later. Lord Nantwich, a former Crown official in Africa, who knew Ronald Firbank and other leading figures in English gay culture, wants young Beckwith to write his biography. He invites him to his house and entrusts him with his diaries.
The pool library unfolds as a joyous and sometimes bitter chronicle of gay life and culture in England, where past and present showcase their objects of desire, fetishes, more or less secret codes, sexual and love habits and customs.
