A Previous Life: Another Posthumous Novel

By Edmund White

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'Elegant, filthy – and quite possibly the queerest thing you will read all year.' - Guardian


'Intriguing and inventive.' - Electric Literature, "Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of the Year"


'A dizzyingly enticing and kaleidoscopic take on the spectrum of sexual experiences.' - Publishers Weekly, starred review
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A daring, category-confounding, and ruthlessly funny novel from National Book Award honored author Edmund White that explores polyamory and bisexuality, ageing and love.

Sicilian aristocrat and musician, Ruggero, and his younger American wife, Constance, agree to break their marital silence and write their Confessions. Until now they had a ban on speaking about the past, since transparency had wrecked their previous marriages. As the two alternate reading the memoirs they've written about their lives, Constance reveals her multiple marriages to older men, and Ruggero details the affairs he's had with men and women across his lifetime-most importantly his passionate affair with the author Edmund White.

Sweeping outward from the isolated Swiss ski chalet where the couple reads to travel through Europe and the United States, White's new novel pushes for a broader understanding of sexual orientation and pairs humor and truth to create his most fascinating and complex characters to date. As in all of White's earlier novels, this is a searing, scintillating take on physical beauty and its inevitable decline. But in this experimental new mode-one where the author has laid himself bare as a secondary character-White explores the themes of love and age through numerous eyes, hearts and minds.

Delightful, irreverent, and experimental, A Previous Life proves once more why White is considered a master of American literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526632173

Edmund White

<p>Edmund White is the author of the novels <em>Fanny: A Fiction</em>, <em>A Boy's Own Story</em>, <em>The Farewell Symphony</em>, and <em>The Married Man</em>; a biography of Jean Genet; a study of Marcel Proust; and, most recently, a memoir, <em>My Lives</em>. Having lived in Paris for many years, he has now settled in New York, and he teaches at Princeton University.</p>

Reviews for A Previous Life

[thorold_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Edmund White's lockdown novel starts from a new take on the Decameron idea: a married couple, stuck in their ski-chalet at Sils Maria because the husband has broken his leg, decide to amuse themselves by writing down and then reading aloud to each other accounts of their previous sexual relationships. Both Constance (American and 30) and Ruggero (Sicilian and 70) have previous marriages and a selection of interesting lovers of both genders behind them, but the clou is that back in 2018, when he was only forty, Ruggero had a passionate affair with a now-forgotten American writer called Edmund White, then in his late seventies. Yes, that's right, we seem to be in the 2050s, although this clearly isn't science-fiction, and the world has changed remarkably little since the 2020s.Because Constance and Ruggero are educated people but not novelists, and because they are meant to be writing only for their mutual amusement, White has the excuse to give us a lot of carefully calculated "bad" writing, much of it shamelessly pornographic. At times, especially in Ruggero's teenage memories, he seems to be parodying his own overwrought writing from the Boy's own story era — "At the same moment we had peeled down our mutande, releasing our hard Sicilian cocks like overeager hunting dogs." (Of course, he's only using the Italian word for underpants because it gives him an excuse to make that terrible middle-class-gay-dinner-party joke about mutatis mutandis...)There is maybe a bit of a serious point behind all the raunchiness, as White reflects on the many ways old age makes both love and sex more difficult without noticeably reducing our need for them. He makes fun of his unappetising old man's body and its weaknesses, but he wants us to understand that he's still as happy to fantasise about hard Sicilian cocks as he was when he was fourteen. And there's also an extended joke about the way it's more often than not the discarded lovers who get to define how you will be remembered after your death...Fun, although I was getting very bored with Ruggero's arrogant voice by the end of the book.