Literary Significance and Criticism
Hollinghurst wrote part of the novel in Yaddo.
The book won the 2004 Booker Prize.
Hollinghurst has received praise for his portrayal of life among the privileged governing classes during the early to middle 1980s.
The novel has been compared to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, with special regard to Powell's character Nicholas Jenkins. The protagonist has also been likened to Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
Margaret Thatcher's appearance has been compared to that of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness; Sir Maurice Tipper and his wife have been compared to Evelyn Waugh characters.
Read more about this topic: The Line Of Beauty
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“It is a good lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
“I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)