Edmund White - Nocturnes for the King of Naples (pdf)

Edmund White - Nocturnes for the King of Naples (St. Martin's Press, 1978). 148 pages.

New scan. Searchable pdf (clearscan) with contents in bookmarks, accurate pagination and metadata, etc.


description:

A hauntingly beautiful evocation of lost love, Nocturnes for the King of Naples has all the startling, almost embarrassing, intimacy of a stranger's love letters. The intense emotional situation envelops the readers from the first page; like all images in a dream, White's characters are the most real people we know, thought they remain phantoms. Each chapter, each nocturne, is set in a different emotional key, but all are interconnected through such subtle modulations that the final effect is devastating.


Review

"As a writer, White possesses the rare combination of a poetic sense of language and an ironic sense of humor..." --Newsweek

"There are few novels which defy reviewing. They are the ones that provide us with unique reading experiences, which become valuable additions to understanding of the world and ourselves. Edmund White's new novel is one of these...he has embodied his story in some of the finest writing to be found in recent American fiction." --Doris Grumbach, Washington Post Book World

"Nocturnes for the King of Naples is a baroque invention of quite startling brilliance and intensity." --Gore Vidal

"White is unquestionably the foremost American gay novelist." --Newsweek