Fascination
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2.9 • 15 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Fascination is master storyteller William Boyd's third volume of short stories
Described as "the finest storyteller of his generation", and following his acclaimed collections On the Yankee Station and The Destiny of Nathalie X, in Fascination Boyd shows his brilliance of the form as these stories range widely through time and space. In a dazzling array of styles and narratives we move from 1930s Germany to Los Angeles in the Second World War, from contemporary Oxford to 19th century Russia. Whether in London or Amsterdam. Eastbourne or a Normandy village these stories explore and expose the fraught, funny, absurd, poignant and lovelorn lives of their many and varied characters.
Fascination will be loved by fans of Any Human Heart, as well as readers of William Trevor, Sebastian Faulks, Nick Hornby and Hilary Mantel.
'The stories here are perfect . . . suffused with an understanding of love, desire and emotional incompetence' Guardian
'Perfectly formed snapshots of life at its most mystifying' Daily Mail
'Consistently entertaining' Literary Review
'Boyd achieves his best writing, observing tiny moments of love, lust and epiphany with extraordinary sensitivity' Spectator
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boyd (Any Human Heart, etc.) is difficult to pigeonhole. The 14 stories in this book include the supernaturally inflected ("A Haunting," "Visions Fugitives"), the Chekhovian bittersweet ("The Woman on the Beach with a Dog"), the PoMo urban spiel ("Beulah Berlin, an A-Z") and the comedy of dogged lechery. The last is represented by "Adult Video," which, in journal form, records the infidelity of one Edward, a cynical graduate student, and "Fascination," in which the same Edward, married to the girlfriend he cheated on, bungles a brief foray as a freelance journalist by making a pass at a young interviewee. "A Haunting" uses an old horror motif (a man is possessed by the spirit of another man) to illuminate the character of architect Alex Rief. While the story begins well, it concludes rather flatly with a pseudoscientific explanation. Dispossession is the more everyday horror that animates "The Ghost of a Bird," in which a Doctor Moran observes the brief recovery and sudden death of a young brain-damaged soldier, Gerald Gault. Gault, who published a short story shortly before being injured in 1944, has, in his brief recovery, confused his life with that story: "what became real to Gerald Gault was a consoling phantom, a dream, an urgent wish." Boyd's characters are, as a general rule, seeking and mostly failing to attain the intensity of some similar imaginative act.
