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Summary
Summary
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'Elegant, filthy - and quite possibly the queerest thing you will read all year.' - Guardian
'Intriguing and inventive.' - Electric Literature, "Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of the Year"
'A dizzyingly enticing and kaleidoscopic take on the spectrum of sexual experiences.' - Publishers Weekly, starred review
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A daring, category-confounding, and ruthlessly funny novel from National Book Award honored author Edmund White that explores polyamory and bisexuality, aging and love.
Sicilian aristocrat and musician, Ruggero, and his younger American wife, Constance, agree to break their marital silence and write their Confessions. Until now they had a ban on speaking about the past, since transparency had wrecked their previous marriages. As the two alternate reading the memoirs they've written about their lives, Constance reveals her multiple marriages to older men, and Ruggero details the affairs he's had with men and women across his lifetime--most importantly his passionate affair with the author Edmund White.
Sweeping outward from the isolated Swiss ski chalet where the couple reads to travel through Europe and the United States, White's new novel pushes for a broader understanding of sexual orientation and pairs humor and truth to create his most fascinating and complex characters to date. As in all of White's earlier novels, this is a searing, scintillating take on physical beauty and its inevitable decline. But in this experimental new mode--one where the author has laid himself bare as a secondary character--White explores the themes of love and age through numerous eyes, hearts and minds.
Delightful, irreverent, and experimental, A Previous Life proves once more why White is considered a master of American literature.
Author Notes
Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy's Own Story , The Beautiful Room Is Empty , The Farewell Symphony , and Our Young Man . His nonfiction includes City Boy , Inside a Pearl , The Unpunished Vice , and other memoirs; The Flâneur , about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He was named the 2018 winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and received the 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
White (A Saint from Texas) offers an erotically charged and ingenious metafictional story of a married couple. In 2050, 70-something Sicilian musician Ruggero Castelnuovo agrees, with his 30-year-old American wife, Constance, to break the silence about their pasts. Three decades earlier, Ruggero had an affair with Edmund White, who was in his 80s at the time. Ruggero and Constance read their memoirs aloud in alternate passages, and each welcomes their newfound revelations. Ruggero fears that despite his international reputation in the music world he'll only be remembered as "the man who ruined Edmund White's life" (what he means by that will come out later). Constance tells of a gay suitemate at Princeton, two failed marriages to older men (robbed by her first husband; humiliated by her second). As their confessions unroll, they reckon with the shadow of age and redefine their relationship, culminating in life-changing decisions. Through it all, the author hands his characters indelible lines to express their self-knowledge, which often yield insights on gender fluidity and sexuality ("it was the part you played that determined your identity, not the gender of your partner," Ruggero tells Constance, explaining an episode of role play). It adds up to a dizzyingly enticing and kaleidoscopic take on the spectrum of sexual experiences. (Jan.)
Guardian Review
Edmund White's latest book - his 30th, by my count - bears the subtitle "Another posthumous novel". This alludes not only to the fact that White has continued to write prolifically after suffering multiple strokes, but also to those critics who have dismissed his most recent novels as an old-school irrelevance to the brave new world of contemporary queer fiction. The acerbic preface to this new one suggests that we're about to read an autobiographical account of an affair, written by a ravaged old queen who must surely be White himself. However, the opening pages of the book itself plunge us straight - no pun intended - into a turbulent, picaresque and obviously fictional narrative. The year is 2050; a married couple are holed up in a remote Swiss chalet while the husband recovers from a skiing accident. To while away this enforced convalescence, they decide to write a pair of complementary memoirs that will describe their previous sexual careers with absolute honesty. In order to make the game more exquisite, they will take it in turns to read these confessions out loud - meaning, of course, that we will be allowed to eavesdrop. We quickly discover that this is no ordinary marriage. The wife, Constance, is in her early 30s, while her husband, Ruggero, is at least four decades older; she is an African American orphan, while he is a legendarily well-connected (not to mention well-hung) Sicilian aristocrat who also happens to be a world-famous baroque harpsichordist. Oh, and the sometime lover of a deceased and forgotten gay novelist called Edmund White. In the course of their readings, the couple work their way through pretty much every available combination of gender and lifestyle. Ruggero tends to focus on the visible and physical (he is obsessed with his prowess) while Constance - true to her name - is more concerned with the workings of fidelity. As the confessions unspool, the cracks in their marriage begin to show. Things get particularly sticky when we're made privy to an email-by-email account of Ruggero's obsessive two-year affair with the then octogenarian White. At this point, the Chinese boxes of White's metafiction become ever more fantastically interlocked. Constance consults White's (real) archive in Princeton to determine the (fictional) truth of Ruggero's account of their affair; meanwhile, we are given a voyeur's-eye view of Ruggero's sado-masochistic romps with his besotted geriatric plaything. Of course, we can't help but remember that it is White penning these pitiless descriptions of impotence and age, and it is perhaps in these truly hard to read passages that we glimpse the driving impulse behind the book. No matter how elaborately cultured or crudely pornographic the prose gets, it still crackles with a heartfelt insistence that the old and hungry have as much to tell us about the dynamics of sex as the young and sated. A fugue-like ending leads the central couple down ever stranger perspectives of self-discovery, into relationships that no one (least of all themselves) could have seen coming. If we really want to continue to put fiction at the service of liberation, White seems to be suggesting, then we might need to risk imagining ourselves in each and every sexual and emotional position in the book - no matter how abject or alien those positions might be. Back in the now-distant 1970s and 80s, White's dazzling first quartet of novels forever enlarged what gay writing might do with its then newly found freedoms. With this latest report from the frontiers of desire, he has triumphantly dared to continue that project. A Previous Life is elegant, filthy - and quite possibly the queerest thing you will read all year.
Kirkus Review
A septuagenarian musician and his 30-year-old wife break their silence about the past and share a series of episodic confessions. White's latest begins in the year 2050, when Sicilian musician Ruggero Castelnuovo and his American wife, Constance, decide to break a vow they had made to keep their pasts in the dark. Ruggero has already had a slew of marriages and love affairs with men and women alike, while Constance has had two brief marriages. When the couple determines that silence is no longer serving them, they begin to write a series of "confessions" in the form of episodic memoirs, which they take turns reading aloud. Ruggero shares memories of his aristocratic upbringing, his early sexual experiences, and the beginnings of his music career. Along with these reminiscences spill Ruggero's anxieties about his reputation, which has been compromised by a dramatic and well-publicized affair with the writer Edmund White. Constance, on the other hand, details her parents' tragic deaths and her subsequent upbringing by her nanny's family. When she is continuously molested by an uncle figure, she becomes determined to pursue an education at an elite university and never return. For Ruggero, this foundational trauma explains her attraction to significantly older men, including one who robbed her of everything she had and another who humiliated her deeply. Traveling to various locations in Europe and the United States, the couple make life-altering decisions about their relationship as their memoirs address large questions about aging, death, and desire. In crisp but erotically charged prose, White provides a compelling character study that presses on the boundaries of sexuality and romance, polyamory and marriage. The memoirs give the book a unique and immersive structure as the secrets Ruggero and Constance reveal cast light on enigmatic parts of their internal lives and as they negotiate the terms of their marriage. A delightful metafictional novel that examines conventions of marriage and love. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
White, a prolific writer of both nonfiction and fiction, follows his historical novel, A Saint from Texas (2020), with a sometimes humorous and nearly always irreverent tale about love and aging that is experimental in execution if not quite in theme. It begins in 2050 and looks back and is tinged from start to finish with regret and a sense of longing, signaled by White's use of the sentimental Scots ballad about separation, "Loch Lomond," as one of two epigraphs. The story revolves around a Sicilian aristocrat, Ruggero, who is also a professional musician (he plays the harpsichord), and his younger American wife, Constance. Each write their respective memoirs in alternating chapters. Many of their memories feature numerous marriages and even more numerous affairs, including trysts for each with both men and women. Given that this is an Edmund White novel--his work can often be unpredictable and striking----fiction and real life sometimes overlap, especially when one of Ruggero's affairs is with White himself. The result is an erotically charged literary romp facing the loss of physical beauty and the inevitable passage of time.
Library Journal Review
Rich aristocratic Sicilian Ruggero and his much younger wife Constance agree to write their memoirs for each other, to be read aloud and then destroyed. In a secluded Swiss chalet, they reveal their pasts and the formative events of their lives to each other one chapter at a time. His stories highlight his privileged upbringing, his genius, and sexual encounters, while hers begin with sexual abuse by a family member at age 12 and continue through several failed marriages to older men. In the process of exchanging information, husband and wife reveal their own insecurities and identify what they most like and dislike about each other. In the midst of the storytelling, Ruggero discovers that Constance has been having an affair. Despite their open marriage, Ruggero forces her to choose between her husband and her lover. VERDICT Fans of White's (A Saint from Texas) will particularly enjoy this very explicit novel that explores sexuality, aging, and the complexities of love.--Joanna Burkhardt