The Master
Dustjacket synopsis:"In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost.
"In The Master Colm Tуibнn captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlors and palazzos old Europe, who was astonishingly vibrant and alive in his art, and yet whose attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. It is a powerful account of the hazzards of putting the life of the mind before the affairs of the heart."
Quotes:
"A marvel of lightly worn research and modulated tone" - John Updike, The New Yorker
"A tour de force of a novel...The Master is a lovely portrait of the artist, rich in fictional truth" - Times Literary Supplement
"An audacious, profound, and wonderfully intelligent book" - Guardian
"It's a delicate,mysterious process, this act of creation, fraught with psychological tension, but Tуibнn captures it beautifully" - Bulletin
"The Master is a portrait of Henry James that has the depth and finish of great sculpture...Long before its end [Tуibнn] has achieved a triumph on his own terms" - Observer
"The Master is not short of a masterpiece" - Independent on Sunday
"A must-read. Colm Tуibнn has not only written a spectacular novel he has found a way to pay tribute to Henry James. We should all be so gifted and so lucky" - Alice Sebold
"The subtlety and empathy with which Tуibнn inhabits James's psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world are beyond praise, and even the echoes of the master's style ring true. Far more than a stunt, this is a riveting, if inevitably somewhat evasive, portrait of the creative life" - Publisher's Weekly
First Paragraph:
Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead -- familiar faces and the others, half-forgotten ones, fleetingly summoned up. Now as he woke, it was, he imagined, an hour or more before the dawn; there would be no sound or movement for several hours. He touched the muscles on his neck which had become stiff; to his fingers they seemed unyielding and solid but not painful. As he moved his head, he could hear the muscles creaking. I am like an old door, he said to himself.
It was imperative, he knew, that he go back to sleep. He could not lie awake during these hours. He wanted to sleep, enter a lovely blackness, a dark, but not too dark, resting place, unhaunted, unpeopled, with no flickering presences.
When he woke again, he was agitated and unsure where he was. He often woke like this, disturbed, only half remembering the dream and desperate for the day to begin. Sometimes when he dozed, he would bask in the hazy, soft light of Bellosguardo in the early spring, the distances all misty, feeling the sheer pleasure of sunlight on his face, sitting in a chair, close to the wall of the old house with the smell of wisteria and early roses and jasmine. He would hope when he woke that the day would be like the dream, that traces of the ease and the colour and the light would linger at the edge of things until night fell again.
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