Falling in Love Again Short Film Edmund White
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An elderly man, and his forty years younger wife decide to break their vow never to discuss their past lives, and write their "confessions" - tell-all missives revealing secrets and lovers - meant to be burned after reading.
As I am a nosy person who's been married for over thirty years, I enjoyed snooping into the private lives of these two, shall we say, more libertine characters, and the large cas
What he fears most is that he'll be remembered chiefly as the man who ruined Edmund White's life.An elderly man, and his forty years younger wife decide to break their vow never to discuss their past lives, and write their "confessions" - tell-all missives revealing secrets and lovers - meant to be burned after reading.
As I am a nosy person who's been married for over thirty years, I enjoyed snooping into the private lives of these two, shall we say, more libertine characters, and the large cast of others with whom they interact, and frequently screw. Yes, that includes the author. And, yes, sex is both discussed quite frankly, and occasionally performed - rather pornographically. Know that going in, and you'll have less to complain about later.
If you're in the mood for an honest, warts-and-all evaluation of an (almost) modern-day relationship, this could be the book for you.
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And A Previous Life is no different. Being a playful—and at times poignant—piece of metatext that is, in other ways, so outlandish I'm still not quite sure how to process it. The book opens semi-reasonably enough with a husband (Ruggero) and wife (Constance) temporarily trapped together in a Swiss chalet after he breaks his leg skiing: of particular note are the differences between them, both in age (he's in his 70s, she her 40s) and cultural background (she's a mixed-race orphan from small-town America, he's a wealthy Sicilian aristocrat). Since they've never spoken about their past lives to each other, they decide to write their 'confessions' and read them aloud to pass the time. Hovering like a spectre over said confessions is the knowledge of Ruggero's previous love affair with the writer Edmund White, in his eighties at the time they were together. I should also note, the book is set in 2050—with White long dead, his legacy reduced to that of an obscure gay writer, from a future where queer liberation has become as passe as feminism.
Constance—terrified of the inevitable abandonment in loving someone significantly older than she is—ultimately leaves Ruggero for a staid, kind American lover of her own age who can give her the family that Ruggero refuses to. The second half of the novel drifts increasingly from the conceit of the first, as we delve—via emails and second accounts—into the details of Ruggero's intense but doomed affair with Edmund White. And finally still further into the future where both Constance and Ruggero have found their own happiness, apart from each other.
I mean, there's no getting away from the fact that this is intensely readable, intensely weird and—on occasion—intensely problematic? Because Constance and Ruggero are both bisexual there's a lot of examination, from both of them, in the early sections about the differences between men and women, sexually, emotionally, and socially. It was hard to pin down an exact time frame for what felt like quite outdated views of gender and sexuality, and to be fair those views do seem to change across the course of the book. Obviously, they're both very flawed characters, equally damaged in their different ways, and Ruggero a charismatic narcissist obsessed with his own masculinity, plus the idea that every character can only manifest whatever is currently deemed the appropriate view of their sexuality identity is nonsense. That is not what fiction is for. Even so, as a person … well … I don't identify as bisexual but gender identity doesn't play into attraction for me … it felt a bit odd to witness two people describing and articulating their fluid sexual identities in a way that was wholly alienating to me. I mean, I don't think I've ever sat there with a lover and made declarative statements, either to them, or in their own head of what men are like compared to women or vice versa. A person is a person is a person, right? (I also don't buy into the idea that sharing a set of genitals with someone else means you automatically know what to do with said genitals: everyone's genitals are different and people like them interacted with in different ways).
Plus there's a bit near the end where Constance mentions, in passing, her child is trans. Which, y'know, cool? But she also seems to be misgendering this child throughout the narrative. The reference to GnRH and vagino plasty makes me feel that Constance has a daughter, yet this is not the term she uses, nor does she use she/her pronouns. It's messy as all heck (and not the only passing piece of transphobia in the book, although the other example is restricted to a character we are not supposed to like).
The sections with Edmund White in them are … really hard to parse. Impossible not to admire the sheer bollocks of including yourself in a novel as the protagonist's great, impossible love. While also showing yourself as old, vulnerable and physically grotesque. Obviously, one shouldn't read too much into a narrative so deliberately intended blur the lines between what the world may be inclined to view as binary categories—homosexuality and heterosexuality, male and female, love and sex, past and future, fact and fiction (plus there's My Lives if you want honesty without the veil of fiction)—but sometimes I almost felt White was indulging in a kind of authorial masochism at my expense. Like the whole book is just an impish octogenarian wank fantasy. But, hell, if it is. Fair play. I don't mind getting Edmund White off. His writing is important to me, even when it goes to places I have no interest in or connection to.
I'm hard pressed to know how to end this review. This may be a difficult book to recommend because of *waves hands* all the things? I honestly did kind of relish it, fascinated in spite of my frequent discomfort, and in spite of not really knowing where it was going or what it was doing the half. Whatever else is going on, Edmund White (the actual writer, not his fictional counterpart) can still a story. Ruggero is a shameless narcissist and shamelessly charming; the book itself knocks him into a cocked hat on both counts. By contrast, poor Constance felt somewhat like an after-thought throughout, her sexuality increasingly feeling like a conduit for male desire than wholly belonging to her. And while she does find happiness in her choice to prioritise stability and tradition, she does also kind of end up doing the Eliza Hamilton thing of cataloguing Ruggero's affair with Edmund White. Ruggero, by contrast, seem to finally find peace in bisexual polyamory and getting done up the arse. Which is certainly one way of finding a happy ending.
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It all starts interesting enough: a married couple, 70-year old Sicilian aristocrat and narcissist Ruggero and his much younger American wife Constance, decide to write and then read aloud to each other their respective m
I had never read Edmund White before and did not really know what to expect. 'Shocked' is a big word, but it was certainly an unusual and surprising reading experience. Some of it worked very well, some parts where rather tedious and repetitive and I grew tired towards the end.It all starts interesting enough: a married couple, 70-year old Sicilian aristocrat and narcissist Ruggero and his much younger American wife Constance, decide to write and then read aloud to each other their respective memoirs. Both are very honest and open and of course they are especially interested in their partner's former lovers: why did they break up, does he/she think the same way about me? Both are bi-sexual which in a way brings in an interesting additional tension. But the biggest element of interest is the age difference, which is the main theme this novel explores. What is also interesting is that the novel is set in 2050, which gives them about 30 years to look back at our current times.
I could not help feeling though that this set-up, which as such is intriguing, served primarily a device for the author to expand on whatever it was he wanted to expand (or perhaps 'chat' is a better word) on. In this order his main interests are: (gay) sex, age and age difference, everything Italian (the Italian frequently interspersed in the text is ok but not great) and classical music. I felt the consistency of the characters was less important than giving them an extra hobby or extra lover just so that Edmund White could expand on/show off what he had recently learned.
Boredom set in when Ruggero's romance with the much older author Edmund White was described at length. The metafictional element had no real function for me, but perhaps it does for Edmund White. He doesn't spare himself (describing his diaper rashes and the fact he will be forgotten in 30 years), and is very open about his sexual preferences, but I fear I was neither offended nor interested.
So, 4 stars for the first half and 2 stars for the second makes 3.
Thanks a lot to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced reading copy!
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After reading this, I am still not fully sure what I read. I went into this really wanting to enjoy it based on the book blurb. However, the tangential nature of the writing with no chapters, headings, subheadings, etc made it difficult to follow at times. This was especially evident in the last half where the tale appeared to nosedive into a stream of conscio
Thank you to NetGalley, for this ARC. I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.After reading this, I am still not fully sure what I read. I went into this really wanting to enjoy it based on the book blurb. However, the tangential nature of the writing with no chapters, headings, subheadings, etc made it difficult to follow at times. This was especially evident in the last half where the tale appeared to nosedive into a stream of consciousness, where an additional draft could have aided in flow.
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I found A Previous Life scattered, disorganized, and confusing. It begins with a couple, Ruggero and Constance, agreeing to write down and share with each other their romantic/sexual histories. If I understood correctly, it was said thay prior to this agreement they did not share their pasts with each other. But as they were reading their stories to each other, it seemed both of them we
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.I found A Previous Life scattered, disorganized, and confusing. It begins with a couple, Ruggero and Constance, agreeing to write down and share with each other their romantic/sexual histories. If I understood correctly, it was said thay prior to this agreement they did not share their pasts with each other. But as they were reading their stories to each other, it seemed both of them were already familiar with most of what the other was sharing. It was hard to keep up with which of them was telling a story until the other character would say or think something as a response. I had to reread several parts to keep track of who was telling the story.
Ruggero shows narcissistic tendencies and was a character I instantly disliked, and other characters did bring up his narcissism many times throughout the book to reinforce that. Constance seemed very meek and in Ruggero's shadow during their relationship and I felt frustrated for her. Ruggero, throughout the book, treats others as objects or trophies, and consistently points out anything about them he sees as a flaw. It became exhausting for me to read.
After the main plot where Ruggero and Constance read their stories to each other, the book got almosf impossible for me to make sense of. The author of the book, Edmund White, is featured as a character that Ruggero has a several years affair with...and somewhere down the line Constance is writing a book about Edmund and Ruggero's relationship. There are a lot of graphic sexual details that include body shaming and degradation, which I just found uncomfortable to read.
Throughout the whole book there was misogyny, ageism, and various kinds of stereotyping of groups of people. I think it was possibly included to make the reader dislike the characters saying/thinking these things, but it was over the top for me and just not entertaining or interesting to read. None of the characters felt theee dimensional. Perhaps they were meant to be seen as caricatures. The book just wasn't what I had expected based on the blurb.
...more My thanks to Edelweiss/Above the Treeline for this free electronic copy in exchange for an unbiased review.
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'With each flattering supposition, he relaxed. He sat back down. He looked at her as if verifying her degree of sophistication. At last he smiled.'
...I knew then that I was already in trouble. I respect Edmund White and his long and important career, but I simply could not engage with this book at all. Wordy, verbose - call it what you will, but the two central characters and their sexual self-obsession just left me cold. I admired White's attempt
So when I read this particular section on page 1:'With each flattering supposition, he relaxed. He sat back down. He looked at her as if verifying her degree of sophistication. At last he smiled.'
...I knew then that I was already in trouble. I respect Edmund White and his long and important career, but I simply could not engage with this book at all. Wordy, verbose - call it what you will, but the two central characters and their sexual self-obsession just left me cold. I admired White's attempt to write himself into the narrative as a character, but somehow it felt just that, a literary device for the sake of it. Nope. Better people than I seem to have liked this, so I will just move on to something else that I will enjoy. Sorry, but only 2 stars from me.
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This is the first Edmund White book I have read and will look back into his library.
Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this advance copy .
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I can't remember how it was that I found out about Edmund White in the first place; just that I read his book of essays (Arts and Letters) and lost myself in his essay on Nabokov. I really need to make better note of how I find these authors, I swear... But. I do know that Edmund White writes autobiographical fiction—and so it came as no surprise to me that he is a character in his own novel that is about him only in the secondary way (yet is still
I loved it. Every minute and every word of it.I can't remember how it was that I found out about Edmund White in the first place; just that I read his book of essays (Arts and Letters) and lost myself in his essay on Nabokov. I really need to make better note of how I find these authors, I swear... But. I do know that Edmund White writes autobiographical fiction—and so it came as no surprise to me that he is a character in his own novel that is about him only in the secondary way (yet is still very much about him). The first half of A Previous Life centers around Constance and Ruggero, a married couple with a vast age difference between them, whereas the latter half of the book mirrors the fallout of Constance and Ruggero's marriage with the exposition of Ruggelo and Edmund's love affair.
The most interesting thing about this novel is how it manages to disrupt one's sense of time. It goes back and forth temporally but above all else, I think what messed me up the most is how the book, A Previous Life, is mentioned in the story itself as if it is a different book altogether. Or at least, that's what I want to think, given how much I'm struggling with the self-referential-ness of it all.
It amazes me how Edmund White (the writer) can talk about Edmund White (the character) in the way that he does in the novel. Self-effacing or self-aggrandizing? Who's to say?
But yes. I love how obscene and pornographic it gets in one page, and insightful and philosophical in another. I want to read everything Edmund White has ever written.
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A Previous Life is explicit and humorous, but off-balance. Ruggero's narcissistic voice is stronger than that of Constance, whose character comes across as a quick sketch by a disinterested author.
While set in 2050, the novel tracks back over several decades. Its overall flavour is very retro.
White's writing is engaging and, at times, ingenious.
My thanks to NetGall
A married couple, Ruggero and Constance, confess their lives and loves before they knew each other. On themes of sexuality and aging.A Previous Life is explicit and humorous, but off-balance. Ruggero's narcissistic voice is stronger than that of Constance, whose character comes across as a quick sketch by a disinterested author.
While set in 2050, the novel tracks back over several decades. Its overall flavour is very retro.
White's writing is engaging and, at times, ingenious.
My thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the ARC.
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The self-referential nature of it all seems bizarre when you begin the book, but for me, it soon transformed into something quite profound, almost as if Edmund White is playing out his deepest fears, insecurities and fantasies in these pages.
Fantasy appears heavily throughout, and the book is abs
This book is at turns both hilarious and deeply sad, charting the relationships between many characters, not least Edmund White himself, who appears as a character, and, at one point, so does this novel.The self-referential nature of it all seems bizarre when you begin the book, but for me, it soon transformed into something quite profound, almost as if Edmund White is playing out his deepest fears, insecurities and fantasies in these pages.
Fantasy appears heavily throughout, and the book is absolutely unapologetic and unflinching in its discussions of sex and sexuality, often getting incredibly graphic (about 5 pages in there is a detailed discussion of girth that is hilariously written). But again there is something deeper going on beneath its surface- the fantasies borne out in the book at the beginning start to be viewed through new eyes the further through the book you get, with sexuality feeling both liberating and also constraining, particularly when it comes to ageing and trying to assess one's own worth when your looks might place you outside of easy categorisation as 'attractive' or 'sexy'.
As White and his lover, friend and confidant Ruggero reveal more, told through Ruggero and Constance (and occasionally other characters) telling their stories, we piece together what White thinks of it all, told through the eyes of people writing about him after his death.
I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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I was intrigued by the idea of t
A Previous Life is a sprawling tale of love, sex, and beauty, as two bisexual lovers finally tell each other about their pasts. Sicilian musician Ruggero and his younger wife Constance have mostly kept their various pasts a secret, but after Ruggero is confined to bed, they decided to write out their memoirs and read them aloud to each other, sharing past loves and great affairs, until it is time to think about Ruggero's affair with the famous writer Edmund White.I was intrigued by the idea of the book, having read White's famous A Boy's Own Story. The concept of the novel, ignoring the metafictional element of having Edmund White as a character, is straightforwardly intriguing, a chance to read about how two people unfold their romantic and sexual histories, defying boundaries and telling their own stories in particular ways. Though reading it gets a bit confusing at times (the pair narrate what they've written, but it is interjected with the others' thoughts and occasional conversation), it has a classic feel, like 20th century novels about relationships, which is probably the intended tone given Ruggero at least is meant to be aging.
The Edmund White elements, though hinted earlier on, come out more in the later part of the novel, which changes format slightly, and felt quite different at times to the earlier part. As the 'present' of the novel is in the future, this is the part of the past that gets up to COVID, making it an even more surreal experience, and as I found the earlier part started to drag, I perhaps was less engaged by this part, and wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to make of the metafictional parts given that they discuss White's death in the 'future' and mainly showed Ruggero's narcissism.
A Previous Life is a hard book to define, but one that has a timeless feel to the writing style even as it projects into the future. It has some interesting explorations of sexuality and polyamory, concluding in a way that really brings these to the forefront and generally thinking about how people love and age and define things, though there were a few odd moments (right at the end there's a trans child referenced, seemingly for their parent to use as a reflection on if it was 'revenge' for their own polyamory/sexuality). Personally, I found the book started to drag, especially as it is almost two books in one, and possibly that's the danger with trying to tell the stories of two different characters who have a lot going on throughout their lives. It's a hard one to know what my lingering thoughts of it will be.
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by Edmund White
Review by Leo Racicot
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
Language: English
Hardcover, 288 pages
A Previous Life is unlike anything Edmund White
has written. In fact, for the first thirty pages or so,
I was sure the work couldn't be White's. But then
the hallmarks of his style emerged: the easy juggling
of plotline intricacies, the multi-character interactions,
the trademark allusions to world art, classical composers,
opera -- White could handily dethrone Any Schneider on
Jeopardy so
by Edmund White
Review by Leo Racicot
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
Language: English
Hardcover, 288 pages
A Previous Life is unlike anything Edmund White
has written. In fact, for the first thirty pages or so,
I was sure the work couldn't be White's. But then
the hallmarks of his style emerged: the easy juggling
of plotline intricacies, the multi-character interactions,
the trademark allusions to world art, classical composers,
opera -- White could handily dethrone Any Schneider on
Jeopardy so vast is his knowledge of culture, politics,
history.
At the center of his story -- a married couple, Ruggero and
Constance, two people very much in love who nevertheless
want and need to explore other desires.This opens the door
to multiple characters, each a composite drawn from those
people White has known, or now knows. As a writer, White
is possessed of sprezzatura, that magic act of inhabiting
so fully his characters, their milieus, the reader is easily,
instantly drawn to them. For example, with an economy of
brush strokes, White paints an indelible portrait of Ruggero's
grandfather. I will rememebr this fellow for years to come.
There are unafraid depictions of the first stirrings of male-male
adolescent lust, a lust never to be recaptured, the way a kid's
first Christmas morning or the first springtimes of our lives
can never be recaptured no matter how hard we try. Yet White
recaptures them in sentences so exquisitely executed, they
shimmer like the first rush of blood from a fresh wound.
White is a magician at encapsulating complex emotions in a
brief sentence or two: "We were as formal as strangers at a
funeral, mourners who've heard of one another but never
met, our grief all that we shared..."
In White's examinations of the various forms love can take,
gender is fluid, sexuality, more fluid. In fact, gender goes
the way of the wind as characters dive in and out of their
desires: hurting, forgiving, hurting, forgiving, learning,
understanding, not understanding, in an endless roundelay
of sexual exploration. White has never been shy about
tossing a paragraph or more of pornography into his
literature; he knows sex can get messy. For what does most
love become but a happy ascension into utter degeneracy?
White even incorporates himself as a character in his book.
In lesser hands than his, this could have been a crashing
conceit. In this master writer's hands, it is playful, mischievous,
epiphanal. Bravo!
With A Previous Life, the author has bottled the genie of that
most elusive of literary forms, the dual memoir, a splendid,
refreshing, freewheeling elixir. This treatise on love and lust,
on the limitations society imposes on the aged, the limitations
we, the aged, impose on ourselves, celebrates aging's refusal
to let go of the rope of love though the rope is beginning to
tatter. The book is racily articulate, intimately sophisticated
and knowing, fully actualized, its architecture sound, superb
even, its themes timeless. It goes down easy; I stayed drunk
on its many pleasures for days.
The "alternating life history" changes after Ruggero writes a letter to Edmund White (the author), and starts a sexual affair with White. White indulges in some vivid prose about how unattractive he (White) has become with age, and quite a bit of musing about whether R is faithful to him (it seems he is - up to a point).
An interesting point is that Ruggero emphasizes quite often that his occasional use of Sicilian words or dialect without thinking degrades his social status - very reminiscent of Ferrante's Brilliant Friend, where Elena is ostracized to quite an extent when she attends University in Turin, just because of her Neapolitan accent.
The prose style is pleasure to read - words exceedingly precise and accurate - a great deal of informed reference that (in my case) requires Dr Google eg Ruggero has done his "liceo classico" at school - a humanities education (that puts us to shame!!) (recall that Elena also did this course to get into university). After the skiing accident:
"Ruggero was floating into and out of consciousness, but amidst the falling, thickening veils he thought he could see someone picking his way carefully down through the air on a floating ladder, like an angel on the scala paradisi. Ruggero had a brief lapse of consciousness, as if several feet of celluloid were missing from a restored film— and suddenly the sepia register had abruptly switched to blue. Here was a bearded medical assistant with a young, handsome face bending over him and speaking Swiss German, which Ruggero could understand but didn't like to encourage. The medical assistant was listening to Ruggero's faint voice; he spoke in real German if with his Italian accent, not so unusual in the Ticino or among Italian-speaking executives working near here in Zurich."
The sexual descriptions might deter some readers, but its not difficult to just curb your imagination a bit.
...more It's not just that the structure is weak and cahotic (but not in a creative way - the metafictional aspect is poorly conceived and even worse executed) or that the characters are sketchy and stereotypical to the point of being embarrassing for the reader, or that the prose is stale and the plot almost illogical.
The worst thing is that this book is t
It's not just that the structure is weak and cahotic (but not in a creative way - the metafictional aspect is poorly conceived and even worse executed) or that the characters are sketchy and stereotypical to the point of being embarrassing for the reader, or that the prose is stale and the plot almost illogical.
The worst thing is that this book is totally irrelevant. As much as E. White had something to say in the 1980s and 1990s, his most recent three novels (at least, and this latest one in particular) show that he has totally exhausted his relevance as a writer and that he looks like the ghost of himself. This is the biggest problem of this book.
Of course White has been writing for some 60 years so he knows how to write a sentence (though not necessarily a whole novel) but that's not enough, especially when writing about genders and sexuality not just now but even in the future (2050?)
White's ideas of bisexuality or gender-fluidity are confused and sketchy and even the inter-generational sex aspect is surprisingly not convincing at all (it becomes just the doomed story an ailing old man being obsessed with a much younger, fitter, well-endowed guy - guess the end...)
In my opinion this book has nothing to say to anyone who's young(ish) today but it's even more disappointing for those who like me are a bit older and have read a lot of E. White and have to witness such a literary decline.
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Though I love Edmund White, this book came within a hair's breadth of #DNF. Set in the future, a man and his wife relate their pasts through letters they compose to one another and then read aloud. White appears in one of the stories. The #DNF nearly occurred because I was losing interest in both of them…and then, well, let's say it got interesting. White writes poetically with classical, literary and musical references (most unknown to me which make me feel like a rube…but tha BOOK REVIEW ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Though I love Edmund White, this book came within a hair's breadth of #DNF. Set in the future, a man and his wife relate their pasts through letters they compose to one another and then read aloud. White appears in one of the stories. The #DNF nearly occurred because I was losing interest in both of them…and then, well, let's say it got interesting. White writes poetically with classical, literary and musical references (most unknown to me which make me feel like a rube…but that's so White…I've long ago forgiven him.) If not for that Keep Reading moment I might have lost this book. It's a mixed bag for me.
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2022 đź“š 13 ...more
The premise sounded really interesting and, even if I liked the storytelling, I couldn't care for the characters that I found a bit too self-centered.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine I loved other books by Edmund White and was excited to read this one.
The premise sounded really interesting and, even if I liked the storytelling, I couldn't care for the characters that I found a bit too self-centered.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine ...more
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