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A review by likecymbeline
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
4.0
I read [b:The Swimming-Pool Library|30106|The Swimming-Pool Library|Alan Hollinghurst|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388450054s/30106.jpg|2776591] last September (while I was training around Europe) and loved it and still think of it often (the prose more than the plot). I'm still looking to read [b:The Line of Beauty|139087|The Line of Beauty|Alan Hollinghurst|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1172099924s/139087.jpg|918312] and am sure I will soon, but for the time being I started on this one, not quite certain of what to expect. It affected me oddly--I was so frustrated by the way that social mores interfere with the biographer's ability to get the whole picture (I won't use the word 'truth'). It reminded me in so many ways of my own plight when conducting research on figures from the past who were forced to conceal their identity. The men I worked on were even faithful keepers-of-records a la Harry Hewitt in this novel, and yet still concealed a great deal in their letters to each other out of necessity. I know very well the difficulty of forming an accurate picture, and in this case it's especially frustrating for the reader because we know the things that actually happened, we read about them in the earlier parts.
The breaks between each part were wonderfully executed, as you attempted to figure out where the thread picked up from the previous section. There were such strong elements of Waugh and Forster running through it, and I found in some ways, especially in the middle parts, that it seemed like Hollinghurst was kind of re-writing a Forster novel, pursuing things past the end and on into the spanning decades (those decades Forster ceased publishing in). I really enjoyed it, but the ending didn't go quite where I expected (though the ultimate disappointment was as masochistically satisfying as The Swimming-Pool Library).
The breaks between each part were wonderfully executed, as you attempted to figure out where the thread picked up from the previous section. There were such strong elements of Waugh and Forster running through it, and I found in some ways, especially in the middle parts, that it seemed like Hollinghurst was kind of re-writing a Forster novel, pursuing things past the end and on into the spanning decades (those decades Forster ceased publishing in). I really enjoyed it, but the ending didn't go quite where I expected (though the ultimate disappointment was as masochistically satisfying as The Swimming-Pool Library).