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History of a Pleasure Seeker
Richard Mason
Knopf
February 2012
On Sale: February 7, 2012
288 pages
ISBN: 0307599477
EAN: 9780307599476
Kindle: B004W3IEHW
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
From the acclaimed author of The Drowning People (“A
literary sensation” —The New York Times Book Review) and
Natural Elements (“A magnum opus” —The New Yorker), an
opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of
Europe’s belle époque, written in the grand tradition with a
lightness of touch that is wholly modern and original.
The novel opens in Amsterdam at the turn of the last
century. It moves to New York at the time of the 1907
financial crisis and proceeds onboard a luxury liner headed
for Cape Town.
It is about a young man—Piet Barol—with an instinctive
appreciation for pleasure and a gift for finding it. Piet’s
father is an austere administrator at Holland’s oldest
university. His mother, a singing teacher, has died—but not
before giving him a thorough grounding in the arts of charm.
Piet applies for a job as tutor to the troubled son of
Europe’s leading hotelier: a child who refuses to leave his
family’s mansion on Amsterdam’s grandest canal. As the young
man enters this glittering world, he learns its secrets—and
soon, quietly, steadily, finds his life transformed as he in
turn transforms the lives of those around him.
History of a Pleasure Seeker is a brilliantly written
portrait of the senses, a novel about pleasure and those who
are in search of it; those who embrace it, luxuriate in it,
need it; and those who deprive themselves of it as they do
those they love. It is a book that will beguile and
transport you—to another world, another time, another state
of being.
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