The Blue Star

by Robert Ferro

Two heroes, reflective Peter and Byronic Chase, indulge their youthful appetites in Florence. Over the next 20 years their paths diverge and reconverge. Chase marries into the Italian aristocracy and Peter pursues his passion for Lorenzo, a beautiful young Florentine. The past impinges on the present as the story of Chase"s ancestor, Orvil Starkweather, is revealed -- the secrets of his life sounding a counterpoint to Chase"s. New York City"s Central Park and the imposing figure of designer Frederick Law Olmsted provide a mysterious connection to Chase"s life. The story of the two men unfolds in Florence and New York exposing the unimagined and startling connection with the past, and taking them finally on a fateful cruise up the Nile aboard the luxury yacht, "The Blue Star."

Genres: Fiction, Gay Fiction, Gay, LGBT

244 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Attended Rutgers University and received a Master's Degree from the University of Iowa. Founder of the The Violet Quill literary group with his partner Michael Grumley.

Died of AIDS in 1988 a few months after his partner, Michael Grumley.

Reviews

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

An odd yet intriguing book... Initially, it's a rather romantic look at chic gay life at the end of the disco-and-cocaine era, with that slightly melancholy Fitzgeraldian note... And then, suddenly, you're in the midst of an Umberto Eco story--- a well-researched, well-crafted almost-conspiracy tale about Frederick Law Olmstead, the Freemasons, and the building of Central Park. Surprising, unexpected, and oddly delightful. Worth finding.

[Marinello · Rating 5 out of 5]

My fascination with Robert Ferro continues.

This is the third book of his I managed to find and I’m so glad there are still copies stashed away (cheap first editions, too, for my fellow addicts).
Glad as I am those copies exist, I find it extremely sad that these books are not more popular.
Especially that one, alongside Max Desir,
they should have been timeless bestsellers of an author so prematurely lost.
Maybe it’s our job as more liberated queers of the 21st century to unearth these hidden gems and shine on them the light they deserve.

More on the actual novel, I was happy to dedicate the past couple of days on devouring a story, obviously a gay narrative, free from the HIV/AIDS plague, conveniently set in the ‘60s and then ‘70s, while both the world and the author himself were blissfully unaware of what was in store for them.

It felt very much like Dan Brown when the Mason conspiracy started unfolding; not in a negative light, I mean it as a compliment because his books are fucking page-turning. I was just surprised that the author managed to incorporate that in an otherwise light story. And even if that part was left out of the book, still I’d love to know what happened to Peter and Leonardo, Chase and Olympia, Lino and the rest. Because they were beautiful characters and now I wish I was a Netflix producer and I could turn this fantastic story into a mini series.

[Dennis Holland · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Well, I do,” he replied. “I enjoy The Blue Star. It makes you think the world is a romantic place, when we all know it’s a sewer filled with turds and reptiles.”
p. 222

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another library book I came across by chance, the title appealed to me and then seeing the amazing shirtless Matt Damon lookalike on the cover was enough to make me pick this up without much else to go on. Interestingly images of the GMP version of this book don't seem to exist online (if you Google image search it at the moment my profile picture comes up) which speaks to how forgotten this book seems to be. 

It starts out feeling somewhere between The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Sun Also Rises or a Moveable Feast and then becomes something a little stranger. It's one of those books that is anchored in the genre of 'my more glamorous friend', which for whatever reason is one I like even though the more glamorous friend is invariably someone I'd be allergic to in real life.

The quality of the writing on a sentence to sentence level is great, sophisticated and economical but also warm, and is probably the greatest strength of this book, which is probably more of a vibes book than anything else. I liked the story even if it never quite figured out what it wanted to be and does sort of just run out of steam. There's a few different strands going on within it, some more interesting than others, one seeming quite out of place although still quite interesting. The conspiratorial stuff got me quite excited and I thought it might be shooting for something much more ambitious than I'd initially thought, but it didn't really end up going that way. As a story I don't know that it was really wrestling with anything too deep or trying to say much thematically beyond what's there on the page, but I liked what was on the page, and as a slightly wistful story about love and yearning, platonic companionship, aristocracy, urban planning and weird Masonic conspiracy it held my attention all the way through. This is a book I would have loved to read on holiday.

I will have to check out more Robert Ferro at some point.

[Dieter Moitzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

NOTE: This book was provided by ReQueered Tales for the purpose of a review on Rainbow Book Reviews.

This is a rather difficult book to review. It was an interesting and intriguing read, and I really liked it a lot, not least because large parts of it are set in one of my favorite towns on earth, stunningly beautiful Florence. But the novel consists of many developments and twists, many levels and layers, which makes it so hard to even try to summarize the plot(s) with a modicum of accuracy (there are two main plots that are loosely related and more or less interwoven). Moreover, the most important feature of ‘The Blut Star’ is less a linear plot (or two) than the perfect depiction of places at a certain time, of ambiences, of atmospheres, so it is not an easy task to grasp exactly what I liked about the book. Everything lies within the strong evocative power of the words the author has chosen.

The first storyline starts in the early sixties. The first-person narrator Peter, a twenty-one-year-old all-American boy, decides he wants to become a writer. He chooses to settle down in Florence, Italy, to work on his first novel, moving into the Pensione Bardolini, which is owned and run by a resolute woman called Zá-Zá. Instead of writing, however, he is drawn in by the atmosphere and the timeless beauty of the city as well as by the handsomeness of the Italian men. Florence by night constitutes the key moment that allows Peter to realize he is gay. Then model-handsome Chase Walker arrives in the Pensione. He is gay as well, and openly so. The two young men soon strike an honest friendship and start cruising the streets together in search of new casual sex encounters, carefree and unquestioning—“[w]hen we are young the impossibility of what we want does not occur to us. We place ourselves in the way of a thing happening and assume it will happen. The great talent of youth is this unencumbered expectation”, as the author so aptly writes.

One day they call on a family acquaintance of Chase’s, the flamboyantly gay Count Niccolo Virgiliano, in his sixties already, who lives in a little palace next to the Palazzo Pitti, with a view over the Giardino di Boboli. When they are invited to Virgiliano’s country estate, the count’s mother proposes a complicated and harebrained scheme where Virgiliano would legally adopt Chase before marrying him off to his cousin, a young Italian princess. The only thing they ask of Chase is to produce an heir in order to perpetuate the Virgiliano family name. Chase accepts, not least because he is offered an important amount of money. He goes through with the required proceedings, and when his son is born, he returns to New York to start a botanical career. Peter is finally forced to return to the US too, having run out of money. The night before his departure, he is seduced by Zá-Zá’s sixteen-year-old nephew Lorenzo, as beautiful as a character painted by Caravaggio. They spend a night of passion together that will influence the rest of Peter’s life. He spends fifteen years dreaming of and yearning for his physically perfect Italian lover until, in his thirties, he returns to Florence… and stumbles upon Lorenzo again. The latter is married and father of two children, but turns out very much in love with Peter, too. Some more twists and schemes lead to a trip to Egypt aboard a luxury yacht purchased by Chase’s estranged but obscenely rich wife. The guests include Chase, his teenaged son, Virgiliano, Peter, and Lorenzo.

The second storyline took me back the 1860s and the planning and construction of Central Park. The main characters of this—I cannot even say subplot, it’s rather a second main plot of sorts, a parallel plot even; so, the main characters of this plot are the (historical) landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted on one hand, one of the commissioners, fictional Orvil Starkweather, who turns out to be Chase’s great-great-grandfather and was Grand Master of the New York Lodges of the Freemason at that time, on the other hand. This plot tells the story of Starkweather’s ambitious plan to secretly and illegally add a subterranean Masonic Temple underneath the Stable and Carriage House. I have to admit that at first that second plot came as a bit of a surprise, thrown in as it was in the midst of Peter’s and Chase’s Florentine tribulations. Almost till the end I couldn’t make out any discernible, logical link with the rest of the story; all I found was the rather tenuous connection to Chase by means of that affiliation with Starkweather—far-fetched and awkward, or so it felt. But that didn’t bother me; the author, I thought, had provided me with two stories for the price of one.

And yet. I’ve been thinking about the two plots quite a lot and cannot shake off the feeling, which I’m afraid I would be incapable of aptly putting into words, that there’s a stronger link between the two plots. Maybe it’s the idea of initiation, or of the stubborn pursuit of a dream, a chimera, however silly, however unnecessary, however vague it might seem. Those are two strands that run through the two stories. The longish stay in Florence as an initiation rite for Peter; the secret building of the new Masonic temple as a ritualistic initiation for both Olmsted and Starkweather? The temple as Starkweather’s all-consuming pipe dream just as (imagined and imaginary) Lorenzo would be Peter’s? Whatever it was, it worked for me. Because I can only recommend this novel. Ferro has an appealing way with words (I’ve already mentioned his evocative power as a storyteller) and creates wonderful atmospheric scenes that entranced me. His writing is effortless, erudite without being pedantic, sometimes ornate, sometimes crisp and straightforward, in perfectly paced alternations. The characters, even though I couldn’t always see the reasonings and reasons behind their actions (as if they were real persons in real life, right?), were endearing and intriguing. Peter found and founded his church in unobtainable Lorenzo (what a beautiful, Romeo-and-Juliet-ish love story!); Chase, as his name suggests, chased after something he could never obtain either—an idealized form of love that can never exist in real life.

Robert Ferro has unfortunately only written three other books before his untimely death, but these three books are already on my ever-growing list of books to be read. His is, no mistake, a great name in literature.

[Ryan Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was such an awful book. The writing terrible. The story line boring. Entire paragraphs and chapters that added nothing to the story. I can’t believe I even read the whole thing

[W. Stephen Breedlove · Rating 5 out of 5]

TWO YOUNG GAY AMERICANS IN EUROPE

The beginning of The Blue Star by Robert Ferro is reminiscent of the opening of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. In the Forster novel, Lucy Honeychurch is disappointed that her room in the Pension Bertolini in Florence doesn’t have a view: “I wanted so to see the Arno. The rooms the Signora promised us in her letter would have looked over the Arno. The Signora had no business to do it at all. Oh, it is a shame!” Peter Conrad, the twenty-one-year-old narrator of Ferro’s novel, tells us he didn’t book his room at the Pensione Bardolini until he arrived at the train station in Florence: “The room I was given looked up and down the Arno, at the Ponte Vecchio in the morning mist, at pink, atrocious sunsets in the evening. For symmetry’s sake within the framework of the window—and in an otherwise perfect situation—the Duomo might have been moved a foot or two to the left.” Come on, Peter, I thought, Lucy didn’t have a view at all and you’re complaining about “symmetry”? I wondered if Peter was a perfectionist and obsessive. As I continued reading the novel, I realized that I was correct.

By the end of the second page of The Blue Star, Peter is out at night not admitting to himself what he is actually doing: cruising for sex. He wanders through the nighttime streets of Florence and encounters other men doing the same thing. These cruising scenes are like descriptions of an ancient ritual. I had to remind myself that Peter was in Florence in 1963. He discovers that his eyes “were a sexual tool I might use.” In 2022, do gay men still cruise with their eyes?

At the Bardolini, Peter meets Chase Walker, another young gay American. Peter and Chase develop a deep, lifelong friendship. Once Peter latches on to Chase, The Blue Star becomes a story of two young Americans on the loose in Europe whose fortunes take quite divergent paths. After the Forsterian atmosphere of the first page or two, this first part of the novel, titled “The Bardolini,” becomes Jamesian in its literary style and situations with, of course, more frankness about sex.

Chase describes Lorenzo, the nephew of the signora who owns the Bardolini, as “a young Tadzio, if ever I saw one.” Chase observes, “The young of this species devour their suitors, like spiders.” Peter falls completely in love with Lorenzo and stays caught in Lorenzo’s web for the rest of his life. After much consideration, Chase agrees to an arranged marriage with Olympia. a young, innocent, seventeen-year-old principessa, in order to produce an heir and unite two dying lines of the old Italian aristocracy. He sires a son on Olympia and receives a monetary reward--and his freedom.

With “Temple Park,” the second and middle part of the novel, the Peter and Chase story stops dead in its tracks. We go back a hundred years into a complicated story involving an ancestor of Chase who influences Frederick Law Olmsted to secretly include in the construction plans for Central Park an underground Masonic Temple. The prose here casts off its Jamesian richness and becomes more red-blooded American with its mind-boggling descriptions of massive digging and earth-moving. Why did Ferro include this somewhat tedious and, seemingly, irrelevant sequence, in the novel? In an essay on Ferro in Contemporary Gay American Novelists (1993), Joseph Dewey describes the secret, underground Masonic temple as “Ferro’s rich metaphor for homosexuality itself—a necessarily secretive brotherhood that transports its fortunate membership into a sort of parallel dimension of baroque splendor.” I heartily accept Dewey’s explanation of what Ferro is doing here.

“The Blue Star,” the final part of the novel, takes place twenty years after the events of the first part. When Olympia proposes that the entire cast of characters go on a cruise together on The Blue Star, her magnificent yacht, I immediately saw a red flag. What does she have up her sleeve? Peter needs little convincing. He says, “This romantic, improbable cruise, lasting only a few weeks, would be a stopgap in all our lives, and afterword we could each return to whatever we had been doing.” Unsurprisingly, he encourages the married Lorenzo to go on the cruise, without his wife, of course.

Before they go on the cruise, Peter has an exchange with Chase. Chase: “Things never happen the way they do in novels.” Peter: “That’s nonsense.” Chase: “Well, perhaps.” Each reader with have to decide if things in The Blue Star happen the way they do in novels.

The Blue Star is beautifully written, tremendously engaging, and unpredictable, while also somewhat strange and aggravating. I believe that Ferro meant the book to be so. Olympia is the most arresting character, while Peter and Chase seem passive in comparison.

Kudos to ReQueered Tales for republishing The Blue Star, which had been allowed to go out of print.

[Martyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I confess I keep reading gay novels in the hopes of finding something rather explicit in them, and so far all the Gay Men's Press novels I have read seem to avoid it. Was that a deliberate decision on their part, to try to cultivate and promote gay literature of a higher quality, or did they publish a whole array of fictional types and so far I have just managed to miss the kind that I am most looking for? Anyhow, in that regard The Blue Star proved to be another disappointment. The blurb on the back cover didn't help, raising hopes that proved unfulfilled.

In regards to trying to assess the novel itself, as it was and for its own sake, I'm not entirely sure what to say. My initial feeling was that I didn't enjoy it, that I found it rather boring and forgettable. But even while I have just been thinking about it again, parts of the plot which I had forgotten have begun coming back to me, and there are aspects to it which are more interesting, which have an atmosphere that is sinister and brooding, which remind me of things I cannot quite place or remember, and aspects which are more grandiose. Before I bought this in paperback I toyed with buying the first edition in hardback. Then after I started reading it I felt relieved that I hadn't wasted that extra money on a first edition of a book which I wasn't enjoying. But now I am beginning to think that I might have enjoyed it more if it had been in a different edition. It might have put me in a better frame of mind for appreciating it. For the entire time I was reading it I was pretty much convinced that I would have no interest in ever reading it again - and now I am not so sure. Or rather, I feel perhaps it deserves to be read again, but without my old preconceptions, so as to be more fairly assessed and appreciated. But at the same time there are so many books I want to read and to re-read that this book doesn't rank anywhere on that scale of priorities. Regardless of what merits it may have, it could never be a book that I would love.

[Ian B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

In terms of the quality of its prose, beautifully written; I just wish the plot had been more absorbing. I wasn’t, for example, very interested in the precarious love affair between the narrator and the conveniently beautiful, conveniently smitten Lorenzo. I read somewhere that Ferro’s fiction drew heavily on his personal and family history. Perhaps this explains why elements of the book don’t fully cohere, why characters and their situations are abandoned for long stretches, the odd details that feel like non-sequiturs.

I could have done with more of the fabulously wealthy Italian aristocrats Niccolo and the Princess Olympia; even Chase, the narrator’s greatest friend and co-conspirator, recedes unnecessarily into the background. Too much time is spent on the synthesis of events for which we as readers are not present, and not enough on dramatic scenes unfolding in the here and now.

I wasn’t really convinced that the discovery of a diary – ‘Isn’t there always a diary?’ notes the author breezily, just as earlier he had Chase remarking, prior to an awkward reunion, ‘Things never happen the way they do in novels. That’s what makes them novels’ – is quite sufficient to tie the chapters describing the nineteenth century construction of a secret Masonic temple beneath Central Park to the experiences of the contemporary characters. Still, I was relieved that a gay novel published in 1985 stopped before the onslaught of AIDS.

[Jarek · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, the bad things: the book seems to take forever to take off, and when it finally does, it ends. The chapters set in the past do not fit into the rest of the story well until the big reveal, and the interruptions they cause are annoying rather than intriguing.

Regardless, Ferro is always an excellent read. Language is vivid and sensual, characters compelling, and the story quite fascinating, although I would love some more exploration of Chase's relationships with Olympia and Lino.

[Terry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I suspect I would have enjoyed this more when it was first published back in 1985. While Ferro is a good author, I just found myself bored and not really caring about the characters. Have read just too many books about fabulous rich gay men from NYC jet setting here and there on various escapades. And then there was this Mason stuff that truly did nothing to advance the story. Yawn.

[Jack Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

So fun and posh. Definitely the book to read while on vacation. All the gay opulence of being in Italy made it so much fun to read. The back half was odd, but the author weaves the two storylines well. A much enjoyed vintage gay read.

[JamesK · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simply fabulous book. A structural failure, but so smart, funny, and memorable. Magical realism at its best. It reads like something Luchino Visconti would write. So if you adore Visconti films, you'll adore this.

[Jason Chan · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read this entirely in italy like on the trains and it was perfect bc this was set in the places i was literally in but then the dumb sideplot about nyc ruined the whole thing like why would i care about some random white man in the 1800s

[Jim Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was a time in my life where I was fortunate to have had the chance to read a lot of gay press novels cheaply, and The Blue Star is one of the few that I vividly recall. The story stands out in my mind as incredibly successful use of a binary plot. The Italian scenes are believable and a perfect foil for what is to come. Through inheritance, Ferro's novel draws the obvious line from the gay nightlife of the time into the heart of (an ostensibly conservative) American life and raises a host of memorable questions: about how being gay relates to civic virtue(s), to bro-factor societies like the Freemasons of this story, with nods to 19th-C NY's cultural heritage, its traditions, to patriarchy, etc...manhood. But, just the same, it's a story, and The Blue Star is pure presentation. The story is told and there's no need for on-the-nose dialog to evoke those questions in the mind of the reader, which brings me back to the binary plot idea. The two poles of The Blue Star are closer than you think. For me, this was a thought provoking read that has stuck with me. You'll never look at New York's Central Park, or very likely any well designed park, the same way again.

[Karl Winthrop]

I kept thinking that the two plot threads would connect. In the end it was only a metaphoric connection, which felt a bit let down by. It was very well written and I loved each paragraph, but it didn't seen to have a sufficient structure to create sufficient emotional resonance.

[Kat]

Author bio brought a lump to my throat.

[Richard Jespers · Rating 5 out of 5]

A better novel perhaps than The Family of Max Desir—certainly different in its “fancifulness.” My kind of book: happy ending with a touch of ennui. [Ferro died in 1988.]