The Marble Quilt

Rating:
Summary: Remarkable stories
Review: "The Marble Quilt" is a remarkable and varied collection of short fiction by David Leavitt.
Contrary to most collections I've encountered, I found that each of these pieces were possessed of a certain captivating quality. Though I won't claim to have been mesmerized by each story, the majority are worthy of being singled out, though space permits me to mention only three. "The List" is an epistolary story for the computer age. "The Black Box" is an ironically timed piece which concerns a man coming to terms with the loss of his companion in a plane crash. "Crossing St. Gottard," is the first story in the collection and also first in my heart. An outstanding prose piece worthy of Forster. Erotically charged, yet never coarse. One is left contented if not quite sated.
These stories enhance Mr. Leavitt's already considerable reputation as a gifted chronicler of the American experiance.

Rating:
Summary: A testing ground of new tales for an established author
Review: David Leavitt is a gifted writer and storyteller, one of the best in his genre. This book of novellas/short stories/preNovels succeeds on all levels for this reader. Varied in content and style, these nine tales feel like a testing ground for works that may be brewing in Leavitt's fertile mind. Where is the new thread to be found in each of these stories? It seems that we are being introduced to the unspoken dialogue that holds the distance between apparently proximal characters, whether that proximity is a longstanding relationship being evaluated in retrospect, or a small cabin on a train holding related but highly disparate characters. Leavitt seems to be taking an observor's distance, analyzing why things aren't as they appear. Even relating history (Oscar Wilde's life as played out thorugh the adroitly drawn quasi-lover Bosie) or putting under the microscope the lives of a family of two women who were always thought to be sisters........, etc., or playing out the cruelty of gossip as filtered through the third person of email - each of these tales of misperception or variation of viewpoint are drawn with Leavitt's sharply polished skills with the English language. The author proves yet again that his imagination is alive and well and shows only positive signs of continuing to mature as a potent literary force. Well worth your reading time!

Rating:
Summary: Death, Desire, and Other Realities of Life
Review: David Leavitt is the type of literary gem that falls into our laps once in a generation, multifaceted and exquisitely polished. THE MARBLE QUILT is imbued with the genius and talent Leavitt demonstrated in his earlier short story collections, proving that his sense of observed reality has never been keener.

These nine tales aren't Leavitt's usual stories, though, the ones of safe suburban gays with respectable jobs and solid bank accounts. In this collection, Leavitt paints frightening, heretofore uncharted landscapes. Here, Leavitt introduces us to dark personalities and dark realities: an American being interrogated in Italy weighs his own involvement in the mysterious murder of an ex-lover ("The Marble Quilt"); an introverted book dealer, facing the untimely death of his lover in a plane explosion, has his mourning further complicated by the appearance of a troubling video tape ("Black Box"); an elderly caregiver is burdened with the discovery of a well-buried family secret, unearthed by a distant young cousin preparing her thesis ("The Scruff of the Neck").

In the collection's longest piece, "The Infection Scene," Leavitt skillfully presents two paralleled stories separated by the time of a hundred years, juxtaposing the past against our often-perplexing present. The first story revolves around Lord Alfred ("Bosie") Douglas, whose sexual exploration is painfully confined by the morals of nineteenth-century Europe. The second and more sinister story involves a modern-day California youth named Christopher, who hungers to rebel against the confining realities of man-to-man sex in the 1990s.

Christopher suspects that the rules of safe sex are a lie, "perpetuated by Dead White Males in order to suppress the freedom of gay people," and he craves a taste of "real abandon, release without restraint" by purposefully becoming infected with HIV. Such a seroconversion, he reasons, will bring him closer to his HIV-positive lover Anthony. Is it really that simple? Who could ever hope to make sense of such a plan?

Leavitt does, by illustrating that no human longing, despite the conditions, is ever unprecedented. These seemingly disparate narratives coincidedly explore the intimate connotations of infection and betrayal, finally coming together in a confluence of clarity in the last sentence, the penned sentiments of a dead man.

Lest the reader think these tales are about death and disease, make no mistake; these stories are clearly about the living. They're about facing everyday adversity that looms before us "black as death itself," but, more so, these stories represent survival of such adversity, whether it be real or imagined, whether it be the death of a loved one or an unexpected betrayal.

Above all things, these stories represent the dark tunnels we all face--and the promise of the rebirth that follows.

Rating:
Summary: A Literary Force to be Reckoned With!
Review: I have to admit I've been a fan of David Leavitt's writing for some time, and I've read almost everything he has ever published. I had my doubts about his handling nine short stories, but after repeated reminders by my friends who loved this book that I should read it, I finally sat down and read the book right through in one evening. I wasn't disappointed in the least. Here is a book of short stories that are timeless, that I believe will be long remembered and become classics. David is truly experimenting with different forms of writing and styles here, and he is very successful....

Although all of the nine stories are exceptionally good, the three that stand out for me, and I believe the majority of readers, are definitely, "The Infection Scene", "Black Box, and the title story, "The Marble Quilt". "The Infection Scene" parallels the past and present of two different lives. It deals with the life of Lord Alfred Douglas, during and after his affair with Oscar Wilde, and the life of a fictitious young man named Christopher, who has an obsession with getting AIDS by having unprotected ...[realations] with his lover named Anthony, who is HIV- positive. It shows how restraint & doing the safe thing is just too hard for some people to cope with. It has the power, in this case, to make Christopher do a deadly thing, and not care about the end results. "The Black Box" deals with the death of Bob Bookman's lover... And "The Marble Quilt" tells the story of Vincent, who's ex-lover Tom, is found murdered in his apartment in Rome. Each story deals with death in a different way, and it's the intriguing results that affects the remaining partners' lives that make these stories so realistic and enjoyable.

These stories may sound depressing to read, but they're not. They are as much about living as they are about dying. You'll find yourself asking, "What would I do in the same situations". I'm still thinking about it myself. This is one of David Leavitt's best books yet. It's for sure, we can look forward to more brilliant writing like this from this wonderful author. Highly Recommended!

Rating:
Summary: A Literary Force to be Reckoned With!
Review: I have to admit I've been a fan of David Leavitt's writing for some time, and I've read almost everything he has ever published. I had my doubts about his handling nine short stories, but after repeated reminders by my friends who loved this book that I should read it, I finally sat down and read the book right through in one evening. I wasn't disappointed in the least. Here is a book of short stories that are timeless, that I believe will be long remembered and become classics. David is truly experimenting with different forms of writing and styles here, and he is very successful....

Although all of the nine stories are exceptionally good, the three that stand out for me, and I believe the majority of readers, are definitely, "The Infection Scene", "Black Box, and the title story, "The Marble Quilt". "The Infection Scene" parallels the past and present of two different lives. It deals with the life of Lord Alfred Douglas, during and after his affair with Oscar Wilde, and the life of a fictitious young man named Christopher, who has an obsession with getting AIDS by having unprotected ...[realations] with his lover named Anthony, who is HIV- positive. It shows how restraint & doing the safe thing is just too hard for some people to cope with. It has the power, in this case, to make Christopher do a deadly thing, and not care about the end results. "The Black Box" deals with the death of Bob Bookman's lover... And "The Marble Quilt" tells the story of Vincent, who's ex-lover Tom, is found murdered in his apartment in Rome. Each story deals with death in a different way, and it's the intriguing results that affects the remaining partners' lives that make these stories so realistic and enjoyable.

These stories may sound depressing to read, but they're not. They are as much about living as they are about dying. You'll find yourself asking, "What would I do in the same situations". I'm still thinking about it myself. This is one of David Leavitt's best books yet. It's for sure, we can look forward to more brilliant writing like this from this wonderful author. Highly Recommended!

Rating:
Summary: BRILLIANT STORIES
Review: I rush to read David Leavitt's fiction and non-fiction books as each is published, much the way a Stephen King or John Grisham fan might run to get their newest books. The nine stories contained in THE MARBLE QUILT contain some of the best, most exciting writing Leavitt has ever done. They are on a par with his best novels like THE LOST LANGUAGE OF CRANES and the stories in his masterly FAMILY DANCING.

The title story is one of Leavitt's strangest and most satisfying: in several brief episodes, an American is questioned by Italian police in the matter of his ex-lover's murder. The reader never gets a neat solution to who the murderer is nor why or when or how Tom was killed, but parts of his life, including his new hobby of stealing pieces of marble, reveal an anger and hostility toward the narrator/lover who obviously is more in control of his emotions, more rational, more able to live the life of an outsider.

In THE INFECTION SCENE Lord Alfred Douglas, before, during and after his affair with Oscar Wilde is contrasted, in alternating scenes, with a present day, young San Franciscan, who naively, dangerously believes that his love for a man infected with HIV, can only be tested and proven by becoming infected himself. I found Leavitt's footnotes charming and funny and (possibly) justifiably spiteful given the brouhaha surrounding, arguably, his best novel WHILE ENGLAND SLEEPS.

In, perhaps, the saddest of the stories, BLACK BOX, the grieving widower of a famous designer killed in an unexplained plane crash becomes involved emotionally, physically and intellectually with a stranger who, at every turn, presents surprise after horrible surprise, including a videotape of the dead designer waiting for his plane in the airport.

In these stories, Leavitt experiments with form and content; he brings humor to even the most gloomy of subjects and gives the reader great, great pleasure. These are brilliant stories which must be savored and re-read. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Rating:
Summary: Another great collection from David Leavitt
Review: I've enjoyed all of David Leavitt's books and never fails to disappoint, except that I wanted some of the stories to go on and on and on. His stories are brilliantly written and his subject matter superb.

Rating:
Summary: The Marble Quilt
Review: In these stories, David Leavitt surveys, with characteristic grace & intelligence, the complicated terrain of human relationships, both in the present & the past. In "The Infection Scene," a young man's determined effort to contract HIV is juxtaposed with an account of the early life of Lord Alfred Douglas. In the title story, an expatriate tries to make sense of his former partner's senseless murder. In "Crossing St. Gotthard," the members of an American family traveling in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century find themselves confronting their own mortality as they plunge into a train tunnel in Switzerland. And in "Black Box," the partner of a man killed in a plane crash is drawn into an unholy alliance with a fellow "crash widow." Moving from Rome to San Francisco to Florida, from fin-de-sicle London to Hollywood in the early 1960s, these stories showcase the agility & sensitivity that have earned David Leavitt his reputation as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary short fiction.

Rating:
Summary: What a waste
Review: Leavitt was once one of the most insightful and talented gay writers around. It's hard to imagine he really wrote this junk.

In this book of short stories, Leavitt's strong narrative voice has been replaced by messy and mean-spirited preaching. Central to his message is his take on the practice of "barebacking." There is no topic more controversial in the gay community these days, and Leavitt trades logic and understanding for stereotyping and hateful rhetoric.

It's a missed opportunity, and an indication that Leavitt has evolved into a bitter man. What a loss.

...

Rating:
Summary: Still dancing around those family issues
Review: There is little here of the pinched discomfort of educated middle-class white folk painfully disengaged from their own lives that distinguished Leavitt's first and most insightful short story collection, FAMILY DANCING. But there is still evidence that Leavitt is a keen observer of human behavior and modern life. (Although he sometimes sets his stories in another time period, I find it easiest to surrender to the ones that are firmly set in the present--even if that "present" spans a couple of decades, as in the title story of this collection.) He continues to reference the detritus of modern life (Filofax datebooks, email, automatic pool cleaners), but he does this selectively and, unlike Bret Easton Ellis and others of their generation, he does not overwhelm his readers with brand names and expect us to understand the relative prestige of every product named. His focus is on the workings of the human heart and will, though the social context of his characters is never out of sight. For me, his approach to story telling falls somewhere between that of de Maupassant and Checkhov.

Leavitt experiments in post-modern story telling in "Route 80," a two-part self-reflexive story about a pair of lovers who have broken up; "Speonk," a story with three possible endings about a recently retired soap opera star's efforts to reach the small town of Speonk on eastern Long Island one night and the way his daytime drama personality does (or does not) draw reactions from the people he encounters on the way; and "The List," a modern epistolary story told entirely through the emails exchanged by gay academics, some of whom have never met.

By far the most post-modern story in this collection is "The Infection Scene," the story of two young gay men who make a pact to have unprotected sex so that the uninfected partner can share in his lover's impending doom from AIDS, interwoven with a fictionalized historical account of Alfred Lord Douglas's equally destructive relationship with Oscar Wilde. The contemporary story has the ghoulishness of an urban legend while the historical story seems too confident of its own grasp of the facts to be believable. The ultimate effect (which I suspect is intentional) is to leave the reader questioning the validity and plausibility of any story. As cynical as it may seem, stories, Leavitt seems to be saying, can ultimately do little more than amuse. They cannot teach anything, reveal anything, or guide us through life. You, gentle reader, are what you choose to believe.

This theme also dominates the best story in the collection, "Black Box." Here, using very traditional story-telling techniques, Leavitt chooses one metaphor (the search for fallen commercial jet's black box) to hover in the background of his story. Although certainly written before 9/11/01, it addresses the Grand Guignol aspects of human behavior that have come to the fore since the terrorist attacks of that tragic day. One senses that the lives of people caught up in the numbing banality of modern life are so devoid of meaning that there is an almost romantic surrendering to tragedy and horror. As one character observes, "It's curious how hungry, almost lustful, people get for details. Especially if there's some horrible irony, like the person had just missed another plane" (p. 101). The question seems to be, where do people turn to find meaning and from what do we manufacture it?

Overall, a decent and thoughtful collection of stories, though not as unified and stunning as FAMILY DANCING.