Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples

by Edmund White

The two early novels of Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story. This is the first time that Forgetting Elena has been published in Britain.

Genres: Fiction

222 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1984

About the author

Edmund Valentine White III was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. He was the recipient of Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
White was known as a groundbreaking writer of gay literature and a major influence on gay American literature and has been called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers."

Reviews

[Andreas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't recall how I arrived at Edmund White, I must have read a short story by him somewhere. Whatever I read made me buy this book instantly, and it has been lying around for a couple of years, lingering in my to-read pile. Anytime I looked at it, I remembered that it would be full of wonderful sentences, but other books kept getting higher priority.

I finally got around to it, and it did not disappoint. Both Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes are exotic tales - exotic because there is an eerie, unrecognisable aspect to the world the nameless characters move in. But it is a beautiful world, described in gorgeous sentences. Both stories are shrouded in mystery, in unknown rituals, in an aesthetic that is hinted at but that you can never fully grasp. It made me think of Huysmans' A Rebours, another masterpiece of style.

The stories probably won't have a lasting influence on its readers, and neither will the characters. But the atmosphere White creates, creeps up on you and stays with you. Its world of privilege is out of reach, and you probably wouldn't want to belong to it anyway - it's superficial to an extreme - but you'll want to include touches of its aesthetics in your surroundings for a long time afterwards, and at least pretend.

[The Kenosha Kid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forgetting Elena is a baroque checker board fantasy of manners in which the protagonist suffers amnesia and narrates his paranoid observations of Island society as he tries to remember who and where he is.

Wasnt as into Nocturnes of the King of Naples.

[Becc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really slow, painfully slow -- the language is dense, plus you're stuck forever in a parade of futureless, pastless, contextless present moments thanks to its protagonist's unconfessed amnesia; I couldn't read more than 10 pages at a go, so it took me nearly a full week to get through its 120-odd pages; but completely original, ergo also refreshing. NB: I've read and enjoyed much of White's semi/autobiographical stuff over the years; this is nothing like that, is much more highly stylised and conscious of its literary-ness -- though thematic concerns like self-differentiation and power/powerlessness I think run through this as they do at least his earlier more autobiographical work. Interesting to see the way it's treated in his more "serious" fiction.