276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Love is Blind

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

I got no real sense of obsession and I also found it completely un-erotic, despite some fairly graphic descriptions. Boyd's prose is no more than workmanlike in this book which manages to be both bogged down in detail (why do we need to know precisely which brand of cigarettes each character smokes? But there’s no philosophical armature to Love Is Blind, only the most convoluted of bildungsromans . And then he did feel a moment's sadness: thinking of his brothers and sisters and their circumscribed conditions. Exactly what Brodie is doing there is a mystery that will remain unresolved for almost the entire book .

But then it began to fizzle out as more and more characters disappeared and less and less began to happen. This ultimately sets the tone for the last third of the book which becomes a paranoia- laden thriller. Twenty years ago, at a New York party hosted by David Bowie, William Boyd launched his monograph Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-60 about the abstract expressionist who destroyed 99 per cent of his work before committing suicide by jumping off the Staten Island ferry. None other than William Boyd, writing a piece in The Guardian on the centenary of Chekhov’s death in 2004.His fin de siècle hero — a sensualist, as is Boyd’s wont in his young male stars — is Brodie Moncur, a quick-witted Scot with a gift for tuning pianos. In the late 1890s, Brodie Moncur is an expert piano tuner, working for a Edinburgh based piano manufacturer, and when the chance arises for him to move to Paris to try to reinvigorate their showroom there he grasps it with both hands.

For the first third or so of the book I was carried along by Boyd’s easy prose and the interest which, slightly surprisingly, I found in the details of Brodie technical work on pianos.William Boyd’s layered and intricate novel begins close to its end point, with a brief prologue in the form of a 1906 letter from a British penal colony in the Bay of Bengal. This is a beautifully written and structured story of the life of the young Scottish Brodie Moncur, afflicted with health issues, employed at the Channon Piano Company in Edinburgh, when he is offered the opportunity to work in their Paris outlet which he fervently grasps with both hands. Reading a William Boyd novel ensures a view of history, some travel and a somewhat naive main character trying to make sense of the world.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment