Olya Z > Recent Status Updates

The subject of art forgery is truly fascinating when combined with the history of famous forgers, the technical process of replicating a painter’s style, and the philosophical questions about authenticity and the value of a fake piece if it is technically indistinguishable from the original.

Here, you have a potentially interesting plot architecture with almost no psychological or atmospheric depth to fill it.

“so one beauty melted in another, surviving youth and exquisite decline.”

feels like this sentence contains the entire novel’s aesthetic compressed into eleven words

In the calm after David had gone he thought lucidly of the Goyle that he’d seen and would perhaps never now own. His collector’s obsession seemed mere consolation, a sad shadow of his obsession with David, whom he would never own, but had borrowed for an astonishing few hours.

The novel opens in Oxford in 1940. The blackouts, the sense of young men living with awareness that their world is about to change. Time is limited and uncertain. The wartime Oxford atmosphere is rendered with Hollinghurst’s unique aesthetic taste and precision. Beauty feels especially sharp in a contrast to the darkness gathering around.

you can’t have a relationship with a work of art…

I perched on the edge of the bed and looked minutely at his stomach as it dropped with the long-delayed breaths of deep sleep, the tongue-tempting crevice of his navel…When he opened his eyes I was the first thing he saw. His arms circled my head and brought me down to him.

When I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was a pair of shoes...

I perched on the edge of the bed and looked minutely at his stomach as it dropped with the long-delayed breaths of deep sleep, the tongue-tempting crevice of his navel. His anatomy was grand and somehow luminous itself, and where the blue veins thickened in his neck they seemed transparent, as in a model or a chart. The model of a man…

When he opened his eyes I was the first thing he saw.

‘These two individuals fought and tore at one another like wild beasts, just for the pleasure of making it up afterwards’

“Beneath it all he was still a child, no matter his cool dissociation from emotion, and his contempt for all human relations. But there was the train. Paris represented madness. He would live out his delirium and burn.”

“When there is little or nothing of the outer world to which one wishes to make claim, the inner cosmos expands”

So far, for me, this book has not been about emotional tension or plot twists. It reads very smoothly as you immerse yourself in the social architecture of a 16th-century household and family relationships. I also very much appreciated all the tactile details and images.

exquisite language is what Hollinghurst does better than almost anyone.

Old stone buildings, theatre halls, late-night rehearsals, brilliant and emotionally volatile characters - the book is incredibly atmospheric. The language is rich and decadent. The Shakespearean quotes add a lot to it without making it sound pretentious.