The Beholder: A Novel

by Thomas Farber

In the words of Isabel Allende, “Here is a poet who writes with economy and precise beauty of desire, love, and the irrevocable loneliness of the heart.” In his first novel since the highly acclaimed Curves of Pursuit , Thomas Farber has created his own language of love, in this rapturous evocation of an obsessive and erotic relationship.

He is a writer, middle-aged, thoughtful, long engaged in a project that involves observing and describing the female form. She is young, married, and beautiful, an art historian who wants to write.

The writer recounts an increasingly charged series of trysts in which he and the young woman create a heady other-world where there are no husbands and no limits. No longer merely subjects for conversation, the passions shared by the writer and the young woman—for art, storytelling, and experience—fuel a transgressive vision of love that cannot, in the end, compete with the demands of the ordered world, and someone must lose.

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 5, 2002

Reviews

[powei · Rating 4 out of 5]

my prof (the writer) said i'd be disturbed by it. of course, after he said that, i can't be disturbed. lots of details of a certain type of sexual behavior. it was very personal to him. it was pretty boring to me--it doesn't make it a bad book, the style was decent, it's just the content wasn't engaging enough. but i appreciated his honesty.

[Robert Wechsler]

I enjoyed Thomas Farber’s staccato prose and third-person limited narration, but after a while the style began to grate on me, and the patter increasingly seemed to me coy in a way that put me off rather than entertained me. There’s a lot good about this novel, but when I found myself starting to skim, I moved on. I'm glad, though, that I had a good taste of Farber's writing.