The Folding Star

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The Folding Star is a 1994 novel by Alan Hollinghurst. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The novel is the story of an English homosexual, Edward Manners, who, disaffected with life, moves to a town in Flanders where he teaches two students English. One, Marcel, is good but ugly while the other, Luc, is bad but, to the protagonist, deeply beautiful. The novel also deals with Manners' emerging relationship with Marcel's father who curates a museum of symbolist paintings by Edgard Orst.

Many of the characters (Manners, Orst, Marcel's father, Luc) are marked by obsession with others. The past continually intrudes into the twilight world Hollinghurst evokes, dragging Manners back to England for a time.

The novel shows many of Hollinghurst's features as a writer, controlled prose and a keen eye for social custom. Above all it shows the dichotomy Hollinghurst often outlines between aesthetic sensibilities and lush surroundings and the grasping physical desires and acts that preoccupy his characters.

The New York Review of Books described it thus, "You could read this novel as a miniature Remembrance of Things Past. Or as an expanded Death in Venice...or as a homosexual Lolita...It is an immense pleasure to read, [filled with] funniness and poetry, handled with amazing sensitivity and accuracy."