Embrace

by Mark Behr

Book Overview

Erotic, passionate coming-of-age novel, set in an exclusive boys' choir school in South Africa'A sensitive and subtle story' THE TIMES' Behr] is adept at varying his style to the mood and age of his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316854174
• ISBN13: 9780316854177
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.78 lbs.

Customer Reviews

In my top 10 of all time

Karl de Man, the young protagonist of this book is a precocious, gifted and amazing child. He is a student at a prestigious South African music academy and seduces his 30- something-year old male choir director. Karl is raised on a South African game preserve, well-traveled and well-read and this book brims with intelligence about the land, the animals and the people of South Africa. Behr's ability to articulate the feelings of this wonderful child is uncanny and his unflinching eye reveals the racism and homophobia of his milieu. The narrative is captivating. If you are looking for a great story, this is it. For me the book at 750 plus pages was too short. I didn't want it to ever end.

A young Afrikaner's dilemmas

Karl de Man, the narrator, describes his childhood; and as he does we watch him grow from a precocious and slightly effeminate child into the makings of a fine young man. He is a gifted singer and with the prompting of his teacher secures a place at the Drakensberg Boys Choir School, despite the struggle his financially strapped parents endure. It covers the period of Karl's early teens, and is set in South Africa at the time of the beginnings of racial unrest, an issue the crops up at times in the form of contentious discussions. He describes in detail his home life and especially his enjoyment of the environment and wild animals, with vivid images of the African landscape. Underlying all his thoughts and actions are his strongly held beliefs and attitudes that come inevitably from his Afrikaans background, which views may at times appear as shocking as some of the relationships he forms at the Choir School. At home Karl has a steady girl friend, and initially seems to be able to reconcile this relationship with the physical relationships he enjoys at school, but which in time trouble him. He becomes even more troubled after he receives a direct warning at school following the discovery of sexual misconduct among the students. Karl makes some strong friendships at the school, including Dominic, the choir's star solo singer. Karl forms a close and intimate relationship with Dominic, frequently sharing his bed, but Dominic's liberal views, inherited from his parents, contrast with Karl's traditional Afrikaner's ideals, and they eventually get Dominic into trouble with the school when he openly expresses his opinions in class. Karl is also attracted to his Music Director Jacques Cilliers, and is invited to his room and eventually his bed, they even enjoy some time together away from the school, including a stay in an hotel. Some of these illicit activates eventually come to the notice of the school authorities, with the inevitable consequences; and finally some surprising revelations for Karl. This is a wonderful, engrossing and beautifully told story, and outstanding is the image Behr creates of Karl de Man, a vivid image of a most likeable young boy, and all the more likeable for his endearing and sometimes shocking faults are not hidden from us as he struggles to come to terms with his sexuality. We see an intelligent and friendly young boy, at times capable of tantrums, stubbornness and mischief, who at the same time respects and loves his family, who is liked by his teachers, and who tries to be loyal to his friends despite the conflicts he faces. A moving and enthralling book that kept me up well into the small hours; only one complaint, at seven hundred plus pages it was far too short!

Simply Stunning

This rather long book draws in detail the short but important years between 10 and 13 in a musically gifted boy. Karl de Man was born to a poor white family who had been refugees from Tanganyika (as it then was) and had returned to South Africa, their spiritual home. They are mainly English-speaking Afrikaners full of the prejudices and beliefs of their Calvinist background, and that is where much of the dramatic tension originates. The narrative jumps from one time period to another in a sometimes confusing way, but all the time the story is moving forward. This must be very largely autobiographical: I know well the school and those parts of South Africa in which his family have lived, and the detail, clarity and accuracy of Behr's descriptions are absolute. In fact he captures the very smell of the place. The only aspect I found a little disappointing was that at the end the family leaves the Dutch Reformed Church - why? - just as Karl himself leaves the Drakensberg Boys Choir School to go to the local Afrikaans-language government school. What happens next? - we are left in limbo. As for the homosexual aspects of the book, I'm not gay so probably can't judge, but I found the "dirty" bits credible in that it was the usual adolescent (and adult, come to think of it) mixture of lust and real affection/love that drove the sexual side of Karl's developing character along. A truly remarkable book about a remarkable boy: I hope the sequel will be forthcoming soon.

A boy's heart

This is a book to disturb, inspire, sadden, provoke. Its massive scale - a daunting prospect for most readers - reflects the huge scope of its subject which reaches far beyond the central theme of young Karl De Man's emotional and sexual world. One might describe the structure as `symphonic', in its interaction of themes and counter-themes, though in a looser more fantastical way than implied by the many references to Beethoven. The South African setting enhances this effect: the landscape, the uncompromising contrasts and colours, the sharp, brutal delineation of character, mood and political extremism. It is however eminently readable once one has a measure of the teasing complexities of the form: both the uneven chronology and the sectional back-and-forward treatment of narrative and descriptive passages require perseverance. The author's attempt to amalgamate the apparent incompatibilities of quasi-poetical impressionism and blatant school-boy adventurism is only partly successful, but the cracks in this method are to some extent papered over by sallies into more introspective fields, particularly the turmoil and conflicts of a sensitive boy being emotionally torn apart by what he feels and what an unfeeling world expects of him. The book is a curious mixture of the real and unreal. The physical and cultural background of South Africa is all-present - Behr powerfully re-creates the realities and the language of his homeland - yet the characters seem curiously remote from the inner life of the novel, as though they are placed there as necessary props to the unfolding of an uncertain and complex drama. The boys - and their intense friendships - are real enough; the teacher-figures on the other hand are more often stereotypical than flesh-and-blood, with the possible exception of Ma'am Sanders, and the Karl's choirmaster-lover, Cilliers. Similarly, Bok and Bokkie appear more like guardians than parents in spite of fine delineation of character, behaviour and attitude, possibly a subtle device to suggest Karl's emotional isolation from his family. The threads of betrayal and self-deception, coupled with anxiety and guilt, including sexual guilt, are woven within a texture of dream-like, sometimes nightmarish expression. The occasional adoption of free-flow (stream-of-consciousness) writing is intended as a window into the workings of the adolescent psyche by a writer for whom the story is clearly personal and to an extent autobiographical. The colours are stark and strong, the nuances of language and experience being from time to time weakened by overstatement, and indeed a kind of emotional extremism. (One must however allow literary licence in respect of an adult narrator recalling his boyhood in such depth and detail.) The willowy figure of Dominic, Karl's `best friend', is a caricature of the aesthetic and intellectual prodigy: the well-educated and liberal Webster family stand apart from the conventions and social norms w

If You Like Ambiguity...

...then you will love this book. To say that this coming-of-age tome is nonlinear, would be a great understatement. There is no recognizable order to the events in the book at all. Each vignette, every chapter, requires the reader to discover, anew, where he is in the overall sequence.There is reason to enjoy a book wherein the time sequence of every paragraph is a mystery: This volume (all 700+ pages of it) is about the nonlinear progression required, to turn a young gay child into a fully-sentient, understanding young adult. It's a process, and it doesn't happen all at once, or in a simple chain of events. In fact, Effect precedes Cause by several hundred pages here. Other ambiguous discoveries realized by the author: The fluidity of sexual expression in young people, the moral relativism of adults, the ease with which lovers turn to betrayal.If you're not an avid fan of ambiguity, it might be best to stay away from this book. Some of the most important sentences in it are written in Afrikaans, and there is no context afterward to help the reader decode their meaning. This is problematic, since Afrikaans is not a world language (your friends will be unable to help you). Speaking fluent German is little help with Afrikaans. Perhaps the only people who will be able to understand these important sentences, other than South Africans, will be people who speak Dutch, which itself is not a world language. The author also uses Afrikaans words gratuitously throughout the book. Happily, where these words appear one-at-a-time in the narrative, there is sufficient context around them for the reader to guess their meaning.I congratulate the author on his unflinching honesty in approximating the thoughts of a young boy, struggling with his parents, hormones, relationships, and the human body (his own--and others'). Sometimes this honesty is reflected in a nongrammatical stream-of-consciousness recorded by the protagonist. It's precisely the way humans think when upset, confused, humiliated, or elated. The relationship between the adult choir teacher and the young protagonist leads to all of these emotions, and more.If homosexuality bothers you, if you require a yarn told from prologue to epilogue without interruption, if you cannot skip over words in an obscure language without becoming angry at their use (and you don't possess an Afrikaans dictionary) then this book is not for you. If you can embrace these idiosyncratic elements, then this book will open another world, beautiful and untidy, inside your mind.