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The Master
A Novel
by Colm Tóibín
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Like Michael Cunningham in The Hours, Colm Toibin captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Brilliant and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America's first intellectual families two decades before the Civil War. James left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers. In stunningly resonant prose, Toibin captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of Toibin's portrait of James is riveting. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart and incapable of reconciling his dreams of passion with his own fragility. [Scribner]
Scribner Book Company, 352 pages
06/02/2004
$25.00
ISBN: 0743250400
Fiction
Historical Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Brad Hooper
Even the reader who knows little about Henry James or his work can enjoy this marvelously intelligent and engaging novel, which presents not on a silver platter but in tender, opened hands a beautifully nuanced psychological portrait. [1 Apr 2004, p.1350]
Christian Science Monitor Ron Charles
Reflects all the brilliance and challenge of Henry James's work, sweeping through the author's life and mind with a scope that's both broad and precise.
Houston Chronicle John Freeman
It is unlikely a better book about James will ever be written.
Kirkus Reviews
A somewhat stately novel that will appeal most to readers who admire James's subtle, stylistically rich, demanding prose. As such, it's a formidably brilliant performance.
Library Journal Mark Andre Singer
Toibin here turns a life-long obsession with Henry James into a scrupulously researched and artfully rendered biographical novel. [1 May 2004, p.142]
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Annabel Lyon
The Master deserves more than a Man-Booker Prize and a sumptuous Merchant-Ivory film: It deserves to be read. Withdraw, reader, like the Master himself, and reject anyone whose claim on you might interrupt your reading. You won't be sorry.
Publishers Weekly
The subtlety and empathy with which Tóibín 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.
New York Observer James Kaplan
It's emblematic of the many generous pleasures of The Master that Mr. Tóibín, a gay man and a writer in whose fiction and nonfiction male homosexuality has figured strongly, has depicted with utter persuasiveness a genius who insistently, and to a certain extent tragically, sublimated his own sexuality
New York Review Of Books John Bayley
Tóibín does not make the mistake in this latest book of using a Jamesian style and manner of writing as if from the Master's mind as well as from his pen. As a novelist he has his own, complete, individuality. He takes James's mind and life as a subject, but for a novel that is all his own.
Entertainment Weekly Mark Harris
If at times The Master feels as uncomfortably stranded between literary genres as its subject, Toibin's accomplishment -- a depiction of James that is, in its nuance, specificity, and tenderness, Jamesian -- is still extraordinary.
Salon Laura Miller
Nothing is puzzled out or proven, only gently and unsurprisingly revealed. Really, The Master makes you feel, as you are reading it, the way James' fiction makes you feel only when you are thinking about it after reading it.
San Francisco Chronicle Heller McAlpin
A superbly researched and nuanced portrait that could have the happy effect of sending some of its readers back to the master himself.
Sydney Morning Herald James Bradley
Slowly, improbably, and ultimately breathtakingly, it draws something luminous and intensely moving from its portrait of a life lived in exile, not just from his country but from himself. [15 May 2004, Spectrum p.12]
The Economist
By insinuating himself under James's skin and writing in the first person, he covers not only the known episodes of James's life, but also the darker corners of the writer's loneliness and uncertainty.
The Guardian Hermione Lee
An audacious, profound, and wonderfully intelligent book.
The Independent Richard Canning
A taut, well-crafted, mesmerising novel.
The Independent Henry Sutton
If The Master has a weakness it is in Tóibín's rather crass way of alluding to how James may have used real life to inspire his fiction.
The Nation Brenda Wineapple
Tóibín's evocative novel The Master, published this past spring, represents James as a man of regret, reminiscence and not a little self-reflection.
The New Republic Deborah Friedell
The James whom he (Tóibín) creates on the page is a man who seems so utterly real, a creature of such vitality and pain, that he threatens to obscure or to overwhelm the actual man. I imagine that James would have been horrified by such a quantity of vitality; but when in the future I think of James, it will be Colm Tóibín's.
The New York Times Janet Maslin
Mr. Toibin's language is sometimes genuinely elegant, sometimes derivative, in a book that is a compelling hybrid of biography, fiction and ventriloquism.
The New York Times Book Review Daniel Mendelsohn
As with James, the result is both aesthetically and psychologically potent -- and weakened only, perhaps, by certain limitations that tell us more about the author than they do about his ostensible subject, which in this case is, in fact, the ''pure coldness'' that for Toibin was James's life.
The New Yorker John Updike
A hypnotic attraction seems to have inspired Tóibín's extensive, misty, and intricate work of reconstruction, a marvel of lightly worn research and modulated tone.
The Spectator Sebastian Smee
There can be few contemporary novelists capable of sustaining this sort of psychological probe over an entire novel, and Tóibín does it with great artistry and conviction.
Washington Post Michael Dirda
Colm Toibin has written a superb novel about a great artist, and done it in just the right way. It is worth reading just for itself.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Paula Marantz Cohen
Ultimately, the book seems a genre unto itself: a personalized way into the fiction through the life and the life through the fiction. It pretends to no special authority except its ability to strike a note that reverberates pleasingly and persuasively for the reader.
London Review Of Books Michael Wood
The question to ask with novels about historical persons, perhaps, is not whether the fiction is faithful to a given reality, since the reality is usually what needs thinking about. The question would be whether the fictional person can plausibly meet up with whatever facts and settled notations we have, and I have no doubt that The Master gives us a genuine intimacy with one of the people who might have been Henry James.
Los Angeles Times Michael Gorra
No biographer can possibly treat James' inner experience with the kind of freedom he brought to his characters. That is precisely what the Irish writer Colm Tóibín has achieved in this deeply engrossing novel.
Daily Telegraph Benjamin Markovits
The Master is a terrific book; and if Tóibín can't quite match James in subtlety (who can?), he powerfully depicts its shortcomings.
Boston Globe Justin Cronin
A seamless and ultimately moving portrait of a fading era.
Daily Telegraph David Robson
With such a regret-filled protagonist, The Master is necessarily a rather lugubrious novel. I wish Tóibín had introduced a bit more light and shade into the story.
 The average user rating for this book is 9.3 (out of 10) based on 6 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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