The Farewell Symphony

Following A Boy's Own Story (now a classic of American fiction) and his richly acclaimed The Beautiful Room Is Empty, here is the eagerly awaited final volume of Edmund White's groundbreaking autobiographical trilogy.

Named for the work by Haydn in which the instrumentalists leave the stage one after another until only a single violin remains playing, this is the story of a man who has outlived most of his friends. Having reached the six-month anniversary of his lover's death, he embarks on a journey of remembrance that will recount his struggle to become a writer and his discovery of what it means to be a gay man. His witty, conversational narrative transports us from the 1960s to the near present, from starkly erotic scenes in the back rooms of New York clubs to episodes of rarefied hilarity in the salons of Paris to moments of family truth in the American Midwest. Along the way, a breathtaking variety of personal connections--and near misses--slowly builds an awareness of the transformative power of genuine friendship, of love and loss, culminating in an indelible experience with a dying man. And as the flow of memory carries us across time, space and society, one man's magnificently realized story grows to encompass an entire generation.

Sublimely funny yet elegiac, full of unsparingly trenchant social observation yet infused with wisdom and a deeply felt compassion, The Farewell Symphony is a triumph of reflection and expressive elegance. It is also a stunning and wholly original panorama of gay life over the past thirty years--the crowning achievement of one of our finest writers.

"One of our most gifted and penetrating writers, Edmund White has once again delivered in this moving and unsettling final installment of his 'autobiographical novel.' The Farewell Symphony is a candid and at times exhibitionist work that combines—à la Baudelaire—the loveliest of transcendental prose with some of the most sordid of human experiences, leaving the reader to both weep and wince at the artistry of the page. At its core, White's is a story about the many manifestations of love's anguish: the hollowness and whirl of gay relationships after Stonewall; the ambivalent homesickness that comes from living abroad; the guilt of loving a mother too little; the loneliness of losing everyone to AIDS. For all his rich and revealing experience, White does end up alone. Indeed,
the novel gets it title from a Haydn symphony in which the musicians leave the stage one by one until just a single soulful violin remains to hear the crowd's applause. In The Farewell Symphony, White is that skillful, soulful musician, and he performs his haunting elegy spectacularly. This beautiful and disquieting opus is not to be missed. Nor, in all its graphic abandon, is it to be taken up lightly." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)

Concluding the trilogy that began with A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty, Edmund White creates a novel of opulent sensuality that is at once the story of a writer's education (sentimental, erotic, and aesthetic) and an elegy for the gay world that flourished between Stonewall and the present.

White's narrator — still mourning a lover who died of AIDS — chronicles that world from the 1960s to the 1990s, from Parisian salons to the dunes of Fire Island, from evenings of brilliant conversation to nights of unfettered sex in the basement clubs of the West Village. Filled with lust and friendship, The Farewell Symphony is a work of Proustian richness, grief, and wisdom, from a contemporary master.

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati in 1940. He has taught literature and creative writing at Yale, Johns Hopkins, New York University and Columbia, was a full professor of English at Brown and served as executive director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. In 1983 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Literature from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1993 he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. For his last book, Genet: A Biography (1993), he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award. His other books include Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, A Boy's Own Story, Caracole and The Beautiful Room Is Empty. He lives in Paris.

From the Hardcover edition.