The Beholder; A Novel

by Thomas Farber

• ISBN13: 9780312421823
• ISBN10: 0312421826
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2003-08-01
• Publisher: Picador

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Thomas Farber is the author of the highly acclaimed novel Curves of Pursuit (1984), four works of nonfiction, and four collections of short stories. A former commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered, he lives in Berkeley and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

“Irrepressible carnality...Farber limns the perils of Eros with terse, minimalist prose.” —Booklist