CARACOLE by White, Edmund - 1985

New York City, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1985. First Edition. First Printing.. Hardcover. Fine/Fine Dust Jacket.. New York City, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1985. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First Edition/First Printing. 342 pages. The author's fourth novel. Now considered a contemporary classic. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Edmund White's "Caracole". His second historical romance. A fantasy, set in an imaginary time and a place that is a brilliant and analogous conflation of Venice, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro, the novel tells the story of Gabriel as he is introduced to the masculine rites of adulthood: Sex, social intrigue, and political power. Inspired by Choderlos de Laclos' classic, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses", it remains Edmund White's most controversial novel. Like "Dangerous Liaisons", "Caracole" is about the subtle, chess-like mind games that people play, the human being (an innocent boy or girl) turned into hunter's delicious prey. The spoiler is, as always, true love. The novel famously ended White's friendship with Susan Sontag, one of his earliest and most passionate supporters, because she appears in the novel as "Mathilda", the greatest intellectual of her time, with her son, the journalist David Rieff thrown in, as "Daniel", a tragic failure who lives in his mother's shadow. Thinly veiled, it is a vindictive, wounding, and savage characterization of Sontag, publicly formidable but privately thin-skinned and emotionally vulnerable after all. Truman Capote waited until Katherine Anne Porter was safely dead before mercilessly skewering her in "Answered Prayers", as the notoriously predatory, nymphomaniacal power player of the American literary establishment everyone knew her to be. The impatient Edmund White evidently could not wait long enough. He once said that there is a very fine line between love and hate because they are the two deepest (and therefore, most irrational) emotions. Also, we can hate only those whom we have truly loved. The rest is cold contempt. The fragile yet genuine bond between many male homosexual writers and their older female patrons is surely a subject for a book in itself. Written in Edmund White's effortless, supple, and immaculate prose: "A seduction through language, a masque without masks. Brings back to startling life a dormant strain in serious American writing: The idea of The Romantic" (Cynthia Ozick) . An absolute "must-have" title for Edmund White collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the half-title page by Edmund White. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary classic. This is one of few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A scarce signed copy thus. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994 for "Genet: A Biography". Anointed by Vladimir Nabokov as his American successor. One of the finest writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER EDMUND WHITE TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0525242813.