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The letters of a seducer to the great love of his life, a sensual tour-de-force by "the paterfamilias of queer literature" (New York Times)
"Can't sleep tonight. Was lying in bed reading the biography of a great man whose genius deserted him . . . The genius who deserted me was you." In a series of late-night letters, gorgeous, funny, filled with memory, sensuality, and regret, a seducer calls across the years to the great love of his youth: an older, revered expatriate known, in his adoptive city, as the King of Naples. As the narrator evokes their affair, in scenes of beauty and remorse, his memories range over the men who came after and before, especially the seductive father who still haunts his erotic imagination.
First published in 1978, before the trilogy of frankly autobiographical novels that made him famous, Nocturnes for the King of Naples reveals Edmund White at his most poetic, playful, and evocative, a magician on the level of James Salter, James Merrill, or Vladimir Nabokov.
Author: Edmund White
Paperback Published 4 June 2024 168 pages
"Artful vignettes from a life passed between Bohemian and cafe societies, in Italy and Spain, on a decaying American estate, on the New York piers . . . It is exquisite prose, gooey and fantastic as Italian pastry, mounds of it, piled on prodigally. Elegant plays on words abound . . . Proust, for a possible comparison, piled phrase upon phrase . . . Mr. White [is] a similar virtuoso . . . Nocturnes is a set of delicious . . . prose poems by a writer of great talent and high art."--John Yohalem "New York Times"
"White's disarmingly gorgeous prose everywhere works transformations . . . Banal gestures become lavishly, ravishingly beautiful, making drama of perception . . . Some of the book's mysteries remain unsoundable, at least for me, which is a quality I prize: one can return again and again, to the inexhaustible text . . . This edition provides an opportunity for a new and better reading of White's second novel, one that sees its importance not just as an historic record or an essential document of a crucial career, but as a psychological study of complexity and depth, and a stylistic performance of an immaculacy seldom achieved."--Garth Greenwell, from the Foreword