The Secret History Of Modernism
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
A chance meeting has New Zealand writer Laszlo Winter thinking back to his time in London in the late 1950s. The Empire might be in a state of collapse, but for young 'colonials', England remains a mythical place that draws them from the farthest corners of the globe.
There was Australian Samantha Conlan, clever, desirable, hopelessly in love with married Jewish New Zealander Freddy Goldstein, who carried with him a dark history. Rajiv, an earnest young Indian at work on a study of Yeats and the Indian mind. The enigmatic Margot, whose bond with her athletic brother Mark troubled Laszlo in ways he didn't quite understand. Heather, the call girl with whom Laszlo exchanged lessons on Shakespeare for lessons in love.
The great writers of the time, and the details of their lives are recorded by Samantha in her idiosyncratic research project that she named her Secret History of Modernism. There was all of that and more, and then there was Laszlo, knocking blindly about among them, despairing at his academic prospects, and gradually realising that he was, would only ever be, a storyteller. Now, years later, from the other side of the world, the people seem to spring to life again, in this beguiling work by one of New Zealand's foremost writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Zealand writer Stead (Death of the Body,etc.) examines literary life in the middle of the 20th century through the prism of a writer's unrequited love for a friend, building his novel around an entertaining, engaging protagonist, Auckland novelist Laszlo Winter. Most of the book focuses on Winter's graduate student years at London University in the late 1950s and his ill-fated attraction to the vibrant, smart Samantha Conlan, who unfortunately has the hots for Friedrich Goldstein, a married Jewish journalist. Conlan and Goldstein embark on a passionate but problematic affair, forcing Winter to satisfy his urges with a call girl named Heather, who offers sex in exchange for lessons about Shakespeare in a series of unusual scenes. Winter next drifts into a relationship with another woman from his circle named Margot, but throughout their brief affair he remains troubled by the possibility that she may have had an incestuous relationship with her brother, Mark. In between the various couplings, Stead explores Winter's writing efforts, Conlan's brief encounter with T.S. Eliot and the work of an Indian colleague named Rajiv as he researches a biography of Yeats. Winter's dry, droll sense of humor and intelligence make him intriguing, but the insular quality of some of the literary scenes limits his ability to carry an entire novel. The passages with Conlan occasionally catch fire, but in the end this is a book for literary aficionados who understand the intoxicating power of study, gossip and debate about books.
