Richard Mason. (2012). The History of a Pleasure-Seeker. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Richard Mason. 2012. The History of a Pleasure-Seeker. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Richard Mason, The History of a Pleasure-Seeker. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Richard Mason. The History of a Pleasure-Seeker. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Mason, Richard
   • bioText: Award-winning novelist RICHARD MASON was born in South Africa and raised in England. He wrote his first novel The Drowning People the year before he went to Oxford.
     With the proceeds from the book’s success, he set up the Kay Mason Foundation, which helps disadvantaged children attend the best schools in Cape Town. In 2010 he broadened the KMF’s scope by founding an eco-project in the country’s Eastern Cape.
     The Lighted Rooms and History of a Pleasure Seeker are the first in a constellation of related novels. The next in the series will follow Piet Barol to South Africa’s Wild Coast.
     Mason lives between New York, Cape Town and Glasgow, Scotland.
      
     www.richard-mason.org
   • name: Richard Mason

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2012-02-07T00:00:00-05:00

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title

The History of a Pleasure-Seeker

fullDescription

“Just try to resist.... A Continental Downton Abbey plus sex, with a dash of Dangerous Liaisons tossed in.” —Seattle Times

Piet Barol has an instinctive appreciation for pleasure and a gift for finding it. When his mother dies, 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 one of Amsterdam’s grandest canals. As Piet enters this glittering world, he learns its secrets and finds his life transformed.
 
A brilliantly written portrait of the senses, History of a Pleasure Seeker is an opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of Europe’s Belle Époque, written with a lightness of touch that is wholly modern and original.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The Gay and Lesbian Review
   • content: "The book charms as much as its main character does, and should have readers eagerly awaiting the sequel."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Edmonton Journal
   • content: "An engaging picaresque romp . . . funny, touching, and arousing . . . Mason does a stellar job of creating a particular time and place."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Alex Preston, author of This Bleeding City
   • content: "A masterpiece. Like Henry James on Viagra. Not only gripping, but brilliantly arranges that the imagined world of Maarten and Jacobina's household sits entirely within Amsterdam of the belle epoque. Piet was wonderfully drawn--rogueish and yet wholly sympathetic."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The Evening Standard
   • content: "A ripping literary romp about the adventures of a dashing, athletic and sexually ambiguous young man."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Waterstones.com
   • content: "Hugely accomplished . . . Rich with period detail and characterised by pitch-perfect dialogue and a cast of carefully drawn characters, it explores themes of ambition, fidelity and class, and ratchets up the tension as our young hero walks a knife-edge between social and financial success and total ruin."
6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 28, 2011
     The title of Mason’s latest misleads, not only because his story details an interlude in a young man’s life, not a history, but also because this man is less a seeker than a receiver. The operative word, however, is pleasure, which comes in abundance to both the reader and the seductively handsome Piet Barol. The story opens in Amsterdam, 1907, during the belle époque, which Mason evokes with delightful period detail. Piet, at 24, is hired as a tutor for the deeply troubled son of the wealthy Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts, a devout Calvinist whose belief in predetermination guides him to a degree that he conceals even from his cherished wife, Jacobina. Their obsessive son, Egbert, is tormented by invisible demons; his suffering adds weight to a tale that is otherwise amusingly, at times stubbornly, lighthearted. No one, including Jacobina or Egbert’s two older sisters, fails to notice Piet’s allure. He is bright, talented, and ambitious, but he trusts those qualities less than he trusts his sexuality, which leads him to many enthusiastic encounters with women, including Jacobina, and men, and helps him slide haplessly into passivity. Mason (Natural Elements) writes with sensuality and humor, but the novel fails to deeply satisfy, especially at its forced and hollow end. Agent: Anderson Literary Management.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     January 15, 2012
     An ambitious young raconteur coaxes the passion out of a desiccated family in turn-of-the-century Amsterdam. British novelist Mason's latest (The Drowning People, 2005, etc.) teases out the eroticism in a 19th-century game of cat-and-mouse without succumbing to the cliches that might earn it a Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Of his cunning protagonist, Mason writes, "The adventures of adolescence had taught Piet Barol that he was extremely attractive to most women and to many men." He adds: "He was old enough to be pragmatic about this advantage, young enough to be immodest..." Piet is far more used to poverty and hardship than he is to the life of luxury in Europe's La Belle epoque. But he is above all ambitious and trained to navigate the world of privilege by his late mother. So it is that Piet infiltrates the household of Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts, one of the wealthiest men in Amsterdam. Maarten's sex-starved wife Jacobina hires Piet to tutor their son Egbert, a boy who becomes hysterical outside his own home. Though playing a dangerous game--the image of a man walking a tightrope is threaded through the narrative--Piet loses no time in pursuing all pleasures, be it music, fine food, wealth or the charms of his employer's wife. Throughout the novel Mason displays a sharp eye and a wit to rival Oscar Wilde. A provocative and keenly funny portrait of a rake with an agenda all his own.

     COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 15, 2011
     

     Take one head-turningly handsome young man, put him in a leading bourgeois household in Amsterdam as a tutor during Europe's Belle Epoque, and what do you get? This new novel from the author of the award-winning The Drowning People and 2009's original and ambitious Natural Elements. This story of dashing Piet Barol's affair with the older woman who heads the household in which he works is at once windswept historical romance and focused social commentary. Good for a wide range of readers, and there's a reading group guide.

     Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     December 15, 2011
     In fictionalized early twentieth-century Amsterdam, Piet Barol, son of a middle-class paper-pusher, secures a job with the plush Vermeulen-Sickerts family as private tutor to a brilliant but cripplingly obsessive young boy. Progress with his pupil is slow, but hot baths, fine vestments inherited from the master of the house, and pointed attention from the master's wife soon have the handsome, charming, and absurdly lucky Piet employing the tastes instilled in him by his late, Parisian mother and assuming the high-society role he'd long planned for. Historical references aboundhotel tycoon Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts is deep into building a tony New York property, his first American venture, when the U.S. market collapsesand they are transporting and evocative. This bildungsroman is as smart as it is seductive, and seductionby finery, older women, successful men, and aged brandiesin the novel is rampant. Readers will savor final scenes aboard the gilded ocean-liner Eugenie and welcome the undercurrent that perhaps Piet's good fortune isn't luck at all but a lesson that pleasure exists for those who seek it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from December 1, 2011
      

      What would you do if you were Piet Barol, charismatic, head-turningly handsome, and ambitious for the best things in life yet raised in shabby circumstances and now, after the death of his sophisticated Parisienne mother, stuck with a glum academic father in a shack that has an outhouse? You'd accept Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts's invitation to interview for a job as tutor to young son Egbert, a brilliant pianist so powerfully phobic he cannot leave the house. Since the Vermeulen-Sickertses are among the wealthiest families of early 1900s Amsterdam, Piet is soon savoring the truly elegant life. He handles himself smoothly with the two spoiled Vermeulen-Sickerts daughters and mightily impresses the father, but not the least of his pleasures is his relationship with affection-starved Jacobina. When Piet leaves, only half in triumph, he's managed to heal some family wounds, though it takes him longer to learn which pleasures he should really seek. VERDICT Mason (Natural Elements) writes lushly, and he persuasively gets readers to side with Piet, despite his oily manipulations--for aren't those around him even more obviously self-serving? Highly recommended as an engaging portrait of an individual, a family, and time. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/11.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

      Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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“Just try to resist.... A Continental Downton Abbey plus sex, with a dash of Dangerous Liaisons tossed in.” —Seattle Times

Piet Barol has an instinctive appreciation for pleasure and a gift for finding it. When his mother dies, 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 one of Amsterdam’s grandest canals. As Piet enters this glittering world, he learns its secrets and finds his life transformed.
 
A brilliantly written portrait of the senses, History of a Pleasure Seeker is an opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of Europe’s Belle Époque, written with a lightness of touch that is wholly modern and original.

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