Reviews - Onze avonden | The StoryGraph

599 reviews for:

Onze avonden

Alan Hollinghurst

3.95 AVERAGE

kevinkey25's review against another edition

3.0

slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

soph632's review against another edition

1.0

slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

lacytelles's review against another edition

4.0

An older man reflects on his coming of age and life as a mixed race, gay actor born in a small town to a single mom. It is sweet, funny, touching, and full of lovely reminisces.

michaelontheplanet's review against another edition

4.0

A solace or an ambush: Alan Hollinghurst’s nunc dimittis is a familiar landscape lovingly described, until a short, sharp shock interrupts proceedings. It stands as a précis of the last, chaotic and disorientating decade or so of national life, an interdict against the philistines and smug destroyers, and an elegy for a perhaps imaginary perfect place that’s been lost along the way. Hollinghurst does what he does so well, a sort of Penelope Lively trick of capturing people like us, or perhaps people we imagine ourselves to be, though in a different milieu, the Waitrose-shopping, Prius-driving chattering classes of Islington replaced by the middle class visitor - in this case half-Burmese actor Dave Win (names are very important in Hollinghurst) - to the generationally rich uppers with their handed down tweeds, battered Land Rovers and easy entitlement. It’s mostly a fairly unthreatening canter through discreet genteel lesbianism, the mother’s discretion contrasted with her son’s more overt promiscuity, the respectable racism of 50s and 60s Britain (“That’s one too many, isn’t it, Uncle Brian!”), the boorish son of Dave’s paternalistic guardian angels, a sort of horrific laboratory amalgam of Boris Johnson, David Cameron and that Rees-Mogg, a cypher for the selfish lunacy of Brexit. The shocking coda at first seems like a bolt-on but fits with our jarring sense of everything we thought secure unravelling in an instant. Boomer elegies for paradise lost are becoming platitudes, but this has an elegance and breadth of vision that marks it out as a keynote work.