Summary of The Folding Star
A British man relocates to a small Belgian town around 1990 to teach English and falls in love with one of his students, a seventeen-year-old boy. His romantic obsession with the boy is mirrored in the life of a local painter, Edgar Orst, who was infatuated with a mysterious actress who disappeared while swimming in the sea at Ostend.
Reasons to read The Folding Star
“The Folding Star” is a poetic, sensitive, and melancholic novel that intertwines elements of the Belgian Symbolist art scene around 1900 with a man’s homoerotic obsession with beauty a century later. The novel’s plot and its dreamlike location are influenced by Georges Rodenbach’s novella “Bruges-la-Morte” and also allude to Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”. Edgar Orst is not a real painter but is based on the Belgian artists Fernand Khnopff and James Ensor. Alan Hollinghurst is a renowned English writer, who won the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for this novel. In 2004, he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel “The Line of Beauty”.
Setting: Ostend, Bruges (Belgium)
Book set in Belgium: Ostend, and an unnamed Belgian town likely inspired by Bruges.
Original title: The Folding Star
Year of publication: 1994
Nr of pages: 422
