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The Master: A Novel
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 338
Publication Date: April 19, 2005
Publisher: Scribner
Studio: Scribner
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Editorial Review:
Like Michael Cunningham in The Hours, Colm Tóibín captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Brilliant and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America's first intellectual families two decades before the Civil War. James 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, 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 and incapable of reconciling his dreams of passion with his own fragility.
Tóibín is "a great and humanizing writer" who describes complex relationships in "supple, beautifully modulated prose" (The Washington Post Book World). In The Master, he has written his most ambitious and heartbreaking novel, an extraordinarily inventive encounter with a character at the cusp of the modern age, elusive to his own friends and even family, yet astonishingly vivid in these pages.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A Delightful Book
What a pure delight! I have only read one Henry James book, but I can truly appreciate how Toibin captured the rhythm and flow of James's prose. The story is moving and coherent, although it does move from episode to episode with few initially discernable ties. The Master is a wonderful study about life in the late nineteenth century. How much of it is fact and how much is fiction is unclear, especially to this reader who is not seeped in the James mystique. But this really doesn't matter. ... Read More
Rating:  - Soul Searching
To paraphrase Fitzgerald, great artists are different from you and me; they have more drive. Charlie Parker played only the high notes of chords in melodic line to build an expressive storyline. John Coltrane composed by first blowing scales. "Basics man", he'd say, "start with the basics; the song will come out." Surely, Da Vinci and Michelangelo would agree. So would Henry James, known in his day as the Master. In this eponymous book---what to call it?--- historical-novel-biography by Toibin, the ... Read More
Rating: - Most highly recommended
I most hightly recommend this book to anyone who, like this reader, adores the work of Henry James but has found the many (often very good, even excellent) biographies of him curiously lacking in nuance. Toibin supplies this through the use of his creative imagination--we have a picture of James that finally seems really true, precisely becuase it has been re-imagined by a very sensitive and intelligent artist. Indeed, it would be hard to overstate the intelligence, as well as the artistry, of this ... Read More
Rating:  - Beautiful, but Slow
To start, I know almost nothing of Henry James. For me the novel worked as a beautiful character study with some absolutely haunting and stunning scenes. Toibin is a great writer.
And yet the book took me six weeks to finish. Though each chapter was wonderful, there was a such a total lack of forward momentum that I rarely felt compelled to continue. I made myself finish, out of respect for the author.
Rating: - THE REAL LINE OF BEAUTY
After the dreary, inconsequential "Story of the Night," Colm Toibin's superlative new novel "The Master" represents a gratifying jolt forward for this fine gay writer. The subject is the interior life of Henry James, who may have gone to his grave a virgin--a gay virgin. His entire life and work were deeply closeted and every loved one who sniffed around him, trying to open what was closed, found themselves stiff-armed brusquely. If James wrote today, out of the closet, I am convinced he would have emulated ... Read More
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