Books & Brunch to discuss 'History of a Pleasure Seeker,' March 16
Books & Brunch, the Club’s book discussion group, will meet at at the Club at noon on Saturday, March 16, over brunch to discuss its current fiction selection, "History of a Pleasure Seeker" by Richard Mason.
All Club members are welcome. Please RSVP to Chairman Jack Williams at [email protected]
Books & Brunch reads and discusses award-winning books available in paperback each month. The selections alternate between fiction and non-fiction.
About the March selection from Amazon:
From the acclaimed author of "The Drowning People" (which was called “a literary sensation” by The New York Times Book Review) and "Natural Elements" (hailed as "a magnum opus” by The New Yorker), "History of a Pleasure Seeker" is an opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of Europe’s belle époque. It is written in the grand tradition with a lightness of touch that is wholly modern and original.
The novel opens in Amsterdam at the turn of the last century. It moves to New York at the time of the 1907 financial crisis and proceeds aboard a luxury liner headed for Cape Town.
It is about a young man, Piet Barol, who has an instinctive appreciation for pleasure and a gift for finding it. Piet’s father is an austere administrator at Holland’s oldest university. His mother, a voice teacher, has died -- but not before giving him a thorough grounding in the arts of charm.
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 Amsterdam’s grandest canal. As Piet enters this glittering world, he learns its secrets — and soon, quietly, steadily, finds his life transformed as he in turn transforms the lives of those around him.
"History of a Pleasure Seeker" is a brilliantly written portrait of the senses, a novel about pleasure and those who are in search of it; those who embrace it, luxuriate in it, need it; and those who deprive themselves of it as they do those they love. It is a book that will beguile and transport readers to another world, another time and another state of being.