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The Gallery (New York Review Books Classics) Online DFwnN (Free pdf) The Gallery (New York Review Books Classics) Online [DFwnN.ebook] The Gallery (New York Review Books Classics) Pdf Free John Horne Burns *Download PDF | ePub | DOC | audiobook | ebooks Download Now Free Download Here Download eBook #347154 in eBooks 2013-11-20 2013-11-20File Name: B00FO5W7G6 | File size: 22.Mb John Horne Burns : The Gallery (New York Review Books Classics) before purchasing it in order to gage whether or not it would be worth my time, and all praised The Gallery (New York Review Books Classics): 8 of 8 people found the following review helpful. Stunning honesty about the best and worst in peopleBy Charles S. HouserJohn Horne Burns's The Gallery, first published in 1947, was a highly acclaimed first novel about WWIi, a war that launched a thousand novelists' careers. Unlike Mailer, Salinger, Michener, and Wouk, Burns was unable to turn his early success into a sustained literary output. His second novel, Lucifer with a Book (1949), is a roman a clef about Burns's experiences as a prep school teacher, by most accounts a bitter dishing of Burns's coworkers. The overwhelming success of The Gallery (Burns was on the cover of Time) can probably be attributed to several factors: Burns's power of observation and his honest and compassionate depictions of his various uniquely flawed characters; his world-weary, if not outright cynical, take on war which may have appealed to the American public who had likely grown tired of newsreel patriotism; and the book's loose structure (nine "portrait" chapters interwoven with eight "promenade" chapters in which the reminiscences of an anonymous GI are recounted) freed the fledgling novelist from any obligation to create an entirely lucid, tightly integrated whole. Given Burns's penchant for opera and melodrama as attested by his biographer David Margolick (Dreadful, 2013), the book's loose structure may be the novel's saving grace. It is, after all, the story of lives touched by war. If the individual characters' stories had been integrated more forcibly the result would have been a depiction of community (much like what Carson McCullers conjures in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter). Instead, Burns projects a world of profound disorder, non-sense, and alienation.Much has been made, and perhaps rightly so, of Burns's frank depictions of homosexuals in the military. Margolick's research and study of Burns's extensive correspondence proves that Burns was aware of the many discreet and indirect ways gays were able to connect with one another during a time when being homosexual was considered both criminal and pathological. That said, for me four " portraits" in the novel stood out. First, is that of Hal, an attractive second lieutenant whose general anomie and lack of faith in any kind of grounding principle evolves into full-blown paranoid schizophrenia. Then there's the portrait of Momma, the proprietress of a bar in Naples that catered to gay clientele (a bar equipped with mirrors into which Momma's customers could look with "a sort of reconnoitering restlessness"). Captain (later Major) Motes's story is given in the sixth portrait ("The Leaf"). Motes is a lazy, unimaginative but advancement-obsessed army bureaucrat in charge of a massive department responsible for reading and censoring all outgoing military correspondence. The homoerotic politics at play in this chapter are disturbing and seem to uncannily foretell what lay ahead for gay military personnel who transitioned into the State Department diplomatic work after the war. The eighth portrait ("Queen Penicillin") is ironically one of the most intimate and personal of Burns's portraits. It is the touching story of an anonymous GI who must undergo an extended treatment for syphilis. Though heterosexual himself, he is pursued by a sergeant who is attracted to him. In a lengthy scene Burns can be said to be depicting a scenario that conservatives relentlessly warn against--the recruitment of innocent youths by seasoned and guileful homosexuals. But what the reader gets is not Zeus swooping down on Ganymede but one of the novel's few authentic movements toward friendship and a caring connection with another human being. The sergeant tells the GI just before the GI is about to leave the hospital, "You are different...I need a friend, you see. Being a dancer has given me an unreal view on life. I'm fed up with the arty boys. I want to know just one real person." Burns does give us opera and drama (and pathos), but it is neatly managed within the "portrait" chapters. These turbulent waters are constrained and channeled by the conversational and reflective "promenade" chapters. In these the recurring motif is a nostalgic and more distanced "I remember..." The GI narrator and his companions travel through strange new lands (ancient in fact, but "new" to them as Americans) discussing the many odd things they are seeing for the first time. They debate and quibble over many things (demonstrating the community-building potential of Democracy's freedom of speech); they are the imperfect but still-aborning conscience of the novel; they are the chorus to a drama that is neither tragic nor comic, but fully both.4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Before his timeBy ilprofessoreJohn Horne Burns wrote about the Second World War in a way none of his contemporaries, Mailer, Vidal and Jones, did. He was stationed in Naples when it was liberated from the Germans, and depicted the life of the Italian people--the Neapolitans, those who had survived--with a deep compassion and humanity that shines through on every page. He, bravely for his time, also had the courage to depict the prevalent homosexual behavior of average soldiers in time of war, and the Italians, both high and low, who profited from it if only so they could eat. Burns' first novel was hailed by the critics, Edmund Wilson among them, and by Hemingway. Great things were expected of him. Sadly, Burns managed to survive the Second World War but not the literary wars that followed it. An overnight success one year, his second book about a boy's prep school was a failure. That crushed him. Many years later in Tuscany, Gore Vidal came upon the man in the last years of his life. Vidal describes him as arrogant, angry, ugly, overweight, and very drunk--another victim of the instant celebrity that had so damaged so many of his post-war generation,Thomas Haggen, Truman Capote and others. When people wonder why J.D. Salinger escaped into the woods, they need only read about the life of one such author to understand the competitive climate in which such men lived and wrote. Burns, however, left us one remarkable book. One of the most honest ever written about Americans at war. Five stars.0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. A good read for sureBy nyc10026Very interesting novel. Fragments of life in Naples after Allied forces have taken over and are pushing against Germans further north in Italy. Interesting interactions between native Italians and the foreign troops. Very interesting eye witness account of very early American and British homosexual troops at ease in what we would call a "gay bar" in Naples. Also interesting is the account of a veneral disease treatment facility where penicillin had recently been discovered and needed to be administered every few hours round the clock for a month. A good read for sure ! "The first book of real magnitude to come out of the last war." —John Dos Passos John Horne Burns brought The Gallery back from World War II, and on publication in 1947 it became a critically-acclaimed bestseller. However, Burns's early death at the age of 36 led to the subsequent neglect of this searching book, which captures the shock the war dealt to the preconceptions and ideals of the victorious Americans. Set in occupied Naples in 1944, The Gallery takes its name from the Galleria Umberto, a bombed-out arcade where everybody in town comes together in pursuit of food, drink, sex, money, and oblivion. A daring and enduring novel—one of the first to look directly at gay life in the military—The Gallery poignantly conveys the mixed feelings of the men and women who fought the war that made America a superpower. "A book by an ex—soldier that deals with the Americans in Itlay and that displays unmistakable talent…Mr. Burns shows the novelist’s specific gift in a brilliant way." — Edmund Wilson"Burns has a brilliant facility for reproducing the sights, sounds, color, feel, and smell of the places he has seen. He uses this to startling effect to recapture what many Americans beyond the frontiers of their antiseptic homeland for the first time found in exotic and warped war centers as Casablanca, Fedhala, Algiers, and of course the twisted and diseased Napoli itself." — William Hogan, San Francisco Chronicle"An important novel of our time." — William McFee, New York Sun"No one will ever forget this book: a story torn from impassioned experience of modern wars in a shattered city of the ancient world. The Gallery is unique, unsparing, immediate; inextinguishable." — Shirley Hazzard“Burns’s novel…captures the peculiar moral putrefaction military occupation breeds.” —Roy Scranton, Lit HubAbout the AuthorJohn Horne Burns (1916-1953) attended Andover and Harvard and then served in military intelligence during World War II. He wrote two more novels after The Gallery—Lucifer With a Book and A Cry of Children—but both met with a cold critical reception. He drank himself to death in Florence while still in his thirties.Paul Fussell (1924–2012) was the author of many books on war and twentieth-century culture, including The Great War and Modern Memory, which won the National Book Award.
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