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علاقات حميمية
Book by Rathbone, Julian
325 pages, Unknown Binding
First published December 31, 1995
14 people want to read
About the author
Julian Rathbone
69 books24 followersJulian Christopher Rathbone was born in 1935 in Blackheath, southeast London. His great-uncle was the actor and great Sherlock Holmes interpreter Basil Rathbone, although they never met.
The prolific author Julian Rathbone was a writer of crime stories, mysteries and thrillers who also turned his hand to the historical novel, science fiction and even horror — and much of his writing had strong political and social dimensions.
He was difficult to pigeonhole because his scope was so broad. Arguably, his experiment with different genres and thus his refusal to be typecast cost him a wider audience than he enjoyed. Just as his subject matter changed markedly over the years, so too did his readers and his publishers.
Among his more than 40 books two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Both were historical novels: first King Fisher Lives, a taut adventure revolving around a guru figure, in 1976, and, secondly, Joseph, set during the Peninsular War and written in an 18th-century prose style, in 1979. But Rathbone never quite made it into the wider public consciousness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_R...
The prolific author Julian Rathbone was a writer of crime stories, mysteries and thrillers who also turned his hand to the historical novel, science fiction and even horror — and much of his writing had strong political and social dimensions.
He was difficult to pigeonhole because his scope was so broad. Arguably, his experiment with different genres and thus his refusal to be typecast cost him a wider audience than he enjoyed. Just as his subject matter changed markedly over the years, so too did his readers and his publishers.
Among his more than 40 books two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Both were historical novels: first King Fisher Lives, a taut adventure revolving around a guru figure, in 1976, and, secondly, Joseph, set during the Peninsular War and written in an 18th-century prose style, in 1979. But Rathbone never quite made it into the wider public consciousness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_R...
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 19, 2023
"David Querubin, soprano and castrato, is plagued by memories of an affair with his mother. These precious memories have been dismissed by doctors as fantasy, so destroying his reason to live. A young woman, obsessed with becoming his pupil, sets out to determine the truth of his recollections."
From the reverse of one of the many paperback editions of this novel not listed on Goodreads.
I was utterly charmed and delighted to discover this author, he is probably not known in the USA, (but maybe he was for he is the great-nephew of Basil Rathbone of Hollywood fame) and is entirely forgotten in the UK (he died in 2008 and if any one wishes to contradict my assessment of 'forgotten' I will be delighted to be told I am wrong). He was a writer of great talent and highly admired and offer the following testimonials:
"Julian Rathbone’s prose is resonant and sedate at the same time; he is not young, neither is he groovy in an ephemeral way. However, Rathbone has managed what many literary upstarts have failed to do: namely to subvert. And he has achieved this through signally avoiding the temptation to shock." Naomi Delap, Spike Magazine, June 1996.
"Julian Rathbone belongs to a tradition of English writing that has always been consistently radical, thoughtful and endlessly inquisitive about the world. During the last couple of decades
we’ve become accustomed to the categories imposed by the book trade, where the pressure on authors is to be one-trick ponies, confining themselves to one genre or the other. In much the same way, the commercial marketplace has little patience with authors’ tendency to experiment with changes in mood or style; and this has generally narrowed writers’ perspectives, imposing a parochial tone on much of contemporary English writing. In contrast, Rathbone has maintained his desire to explore the limits throughout a lifetime of work. The Indispensable Julian Rathbone offers up a wide selection of his work – crime, science, erotic and historical fiction." Mike Phillip's, 2003, in a piece on Julian Rathbone published by the (now defunct) 'The Do-Not Press'.
In the light of the above what I am about to say may seem odd but it it no way deflects from my high admiration for the author nor my intention to read and if necessary buy his other novels (I would have bought this novel except that I discovered it was available in my Library - if I had bought it I would not think my money wasted). The novel has a number of flaws, the most basic is with the castrato nature of the main character. The author, like many others, seems to imagine that if a boy with a good voice is castrated before puberty that voice will be preserved and he will automatically be a castrato singer. One of the terrible horrors about the practice of castrating boys to provide singers was that it was very hit and miss with many of the castrated boys, once they reached puberty (another misconception is that these boys did not go through puberty) have loose their singing voice, and be condemned to a life teaching others to sing. Ironically any position in the Catholic Church was bared to them as only fully functional males could become monks or priests. In any case only a tiny fraction of the estimated 4,000 boys castrated in the 17th and 18th centuries ever had careers in opera. Also castration was only practised on boys from the very poorest families usually but not exclusively from the various Italian states. It was an act of desperation, or greed, to surrender a son to the knife. Also castration did not mean that the boy remained a child physically, there was wide range of physical deformities that castrati had and, although they might not have children they could achieve erections and have sex.
The other area of weakness is the treatment of incest between the mother and her youngest son. The relationship is treated in a very beautiful, erotic and non-judgemental way but the mother is a very problematic character. Before the youngest boy ends up in her bed she had an obviously unhealthy erotic interest in her two older boys. Insisting that they not waste water she insisted the boys bath sequentially oldest to youngest in the same bath water and she took an active role in washing and drying the boys even when the oldest was sixteen. The two older boys were aware that her presence at their bath time and interest in their naked bodies was not maternal and certainly not normal. It is perhaps not surprising that both boys end up with deeply ambivalent feelings towards their mother though the eldest son takes it to extremes when he supplies his mother with views of his naked body not simply at the bizarre bathing ritual but by coming home from school going straight to his room stripping naked and masturbating while his mother watched from his open bedroom door.
When the two older boys eventually exact a terrible revenge on their mother and brother it is hard to see them as monsters and not as very abused and broken individuals.
Overall my problem with the novel is that the the mother's sexual obsession with her sons and incestuous relations with one is all tied up with the first Spanish Republic and its attempts to overthrow the repressive hold of conservative attitudes, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca, psychosomatic blindness, loss of memory, the theories of how to perform baroque music, etc. There is great passion here particularly with regards to the Civil War and what happened in Spain, it was subject very close to the author and he wrote excellently about it and also about the end of Franco's rule in other novels. But overall it is simply too much for this relatively brief novel.
That I still recommend it is a tribute to the author's skills in handling complex and challenging subjects. In this case he could have done better but even so he is still a million miles ahead of almost any other author I can think of his generation and despite the passage of time he can teach an awful lot to more recent authors.
From the reverse of one of the many paperback editions of this novel not listed on Goodreads.
I was utterly charmed and delighted to discover this author, he is probably not known in the USA, (but maybe he was for he is the great-nephew of Basil Rathbone of Hollywood fame) and is entirely forgotten in the UK (he died in 2008 and if any one wishes to contradict my assessment of 'forgotten' I will be delighted to be told I am wrong). He was a writer of great talent and highly admired and offer the following testimonials:
"Julian Rathbone’s prose is resonant and sedate at the same time; he is not young, neither is he groovy in an ephemeral way. However, Rathbone has managed what many literary upstarts have failed to do: namely to subvert. And he has achieved this through signally avoiding the temptation to shock." Naomi Delap, Spike Magazine, June 1996.
"Julian Rathbone belongs to a tradition of English writing that has always been consistently radical, thoughtful and endlessly inquisitive about the world. During the last couple of decades
we’ve become accustomed to the categories imposed by the book trade, where the pressure on authors is to be one-trick ponies, confining themselves to one genre or the other. In much the same way, the commercial marketplace has little patience with authors’ tendency to experiment with changes in mood or style; and this has generally narrowed writers’ perspectives, imposing a parochial tone on much of contemporary English writing. In contrast, Rathbone has maintained his desire to explore the limits throughout a lifetime of work. The Indispensable Julian Rathbone offers up a wide selection of his work – crime, science, erotic and historical fiction." Mike Phillip's, 2003, in a piece on Julian Rathbone published by the (now defunct) 'The Do-Not Press'.
In the light of the above what I am about to say may seem odd but it it no way deflects from my high admiration for the author nor my intention to read and if necessary buy his other novels (I would have bought this novel except that I discovered it was available in my Library - if I had bought it I would not think my money wasted). The novel has a number of flaws, the most basic is with the castrato nature of the main character. The author, like many others, seems to imagine that if a boy with a good voice is castrated before puberty that voice will be preserved and he will automatically be a castrato singer. One of the terrible horrors about the practice of castrating boys to provide singers was that it was very hit and miss with many of the castrated boys, once they reached puberty (another misconception is that these boys did not go through puberty) have loose their singing voice, and be condemned to a life teaching others to sing. Ironically any position in the Catholic Church was bared to them as only fully functional males could become monks or priests. In any case only a tiny fraction of the estimated 4,000 boys castrated in the 17th and 18th centuries ever had careers in opera. Also castration was only practised on boys from the very poorest families usually but not exclusively from the various Italian states. It was an act of desperation, or greed, to surrender a son to the knife. Also castration did not mean that the boy remained a child physically, there was wide range of physical deformities that castrati had and, although they might not have children they could achieve erections and have sex.
The other area of weakness is the treatment of incest between the mother and her youngest son. The relationship is treated in a very beautiful, erotic and non-judgemental way but the mother is a very problematic character. Before the youngest boy ends up in her bed she had an obviously unhealthy erotic interest in her two older boys. Insisting that they not waste water she insisted the boys bath sequentially oldest to youngest in the same bath water and she took an active role in washing and drying the boys even when the oldest was sixteen. The two older boys were aware that her presence at their bath time and interest in their naked bodies was not maternal and certainly not normal. It is perhaps not surprising that both boys end up with deeply ambivalent feelings towards their mother though the eldest son takes it to extremes when he supplies his mother with views of his naked body not simply at the bizarre bathing ritual but by coming home from school going straight to his room stripping naked and masturbating while his mother watched from his open bedroom door.
When the two older boys eventually exact a terrible revenge on their mother and brother it is hard to see them as monsters and not as very abused and broken individuals.
Overall my problem with the novel is that the the mother's sexual obsession with her sons and incestuous relations with one is all tied up with the first Spanish Republic and its attempts to overthrow the repressive hold of conservative attitudes, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca, psychosomatic blindness, loss of memory, the theories of how to perform baroque music, etc. There is great passion here particularly with regards to the Civil War and what happened in Spain, it was subject very close to the author and he wrote excellently about it and also about the end of Franco's rule in other novels. But overall it is simply too much for this relatively brief novel.
That I still recommend it is a tribute to the author's skills in handling complex and challenging subjects. In this case he could have done better but even so he is still a million miles ahead of almost any other author I can think of his generation and despite the passage of time he can teach an awful lot to more recent authors.
Displaying 1 of 1 review