Caracole

by Edmund White

Overview

In French caracole means "prancing"; in English, "caper." Both words perfectly describe this high-spirited erotic adventure. In Caracole, White invents an entire world where country gentry languish in decaying mansions and foppish intellectuals exchange lovers and gossip in an occupied city that resembles both Paris under the Nazis and 1980s New York. To that city comes Gabriel, an awkward boy from the provinces whose social naïveté and sexual ardor make him endlessly attractive to a variety of patrons and paramours.

"A seduction through language, a masque without masks, Caracole brings back to startling life a dormant strain in serious American writing: the idea of the romantic."—Cynthia Ozick

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679764168
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/28/1996
Edition description:	1st Vintage International ed
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1940. His fiction includes the autobiographical trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony, as well as Caracole, Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and Skinned Alive, a collection of short stories. He is also the author of a highly acclaimed biography of Jean Genet, a short study of Proust, a travel book about gay America—States of Desire—and Our Paris. He is an officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and teaches at Princeton University. He lives in New York City.

What People are Saying About This

Cynthia Ozick

To look in the narrowest way at Edmund White's accomplishment in Caracole -- to look only at what a single English sentence can in Edmund White's hands, become -- is to stand entranced before sensuous grace: the perfectly placed weight of an unerring football. And at the same time there is no moment in the pulse of this prose that is without its burst of surprise. A seduction through language, a masque without masks, Caracole brings back to startling life a dormant strain in serious American writing: the idea of the romantic.