History of a Pleasure Seeker [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Richard Mason (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2012

From the acclaimed author of The Drowning People (“A literary sensation” —The New York Times Book Review) and Natural Elements (“A magnum opus” —The New Yorker), an opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of Europe’s belle époque, 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 onboard a luxury liner headed for Cape Town.
 
It is about a young man—Piet Barol—with 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 singing 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 the young man 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 you—to another world, another time, another state of being.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Highly recommended as an engaging portrait of an individual, a family, and time.”
 —Library Journal, starred
 
 
“This bildrungsroman is as smart as it is seductive . . . 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.”
 —Booklist 
 

About the Author

RICHARD MASON was born in South Africa in 1978 and lives in New York City. His first novel, The Drowning People, published when he was twenty-one and still a student at Oxford, sold more than a million copies worldwide and won Italy’s Grinzane Cavour Prize for Best First Novel. He is also the author of Natural Elements, which was chosen by The Washington Post as one of the best books of 2009 and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Sunday Times Literary Award. History of a Pleasure Seeker is his fourth novel. In 1999, with Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mason started the Kay Mason Foundation (www.kaymasonfoundation.org), which helps disadvantaged South Africans receive quality education. Mason received the Inyathelo Merit Award for Philanthropy in 2010.
 
www.richard-mason.org

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (February 7, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307599477
• ISBN-13: 978-0307599476
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,388 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Modern day Sentimental Education...with some twists, January 3, 2012

By 

switterbug (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: History of a Pleasure Seeker (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Young and charismatic Piet Barol is a hedonist with a purpose. He's turned pleasure into an art, like a jaunty Epicurean. In 1907, he leaves behind his austere beginnings in South Holland for the splendor of the rich and modern, via employment in a powerful family in Amsterdam. Although raised in lower-middle-class surroundings, his Parisienne mother imparted gentility and musical refinement to Piet before her premature death. His sensuous lips, striking physique, keen blue eyes and cultivated, easy charm ignites passion in others, and he is as resourceful as he is alluring.

With confidence and authority, Piet secures a position in the Vermeulen-Sickerts' household as ten-year-old Egbert's private tutor. Egbert's agoraphobia presents a challenge for Piet, who is paid well to teach and to hopefully "cure" him. From the moment he steps foot in their grand house, class distinctions are noted and deftly exploited by the agile and ambitious new tutor.

This promise of the title delivers, and the sex is candid. If you are turned off by explicit sexuality, you may want to reconsider this book. However, Mason writes with a poised pen and a light, poetic touch in this romp of rumps. It's ripe, but not vulgar, and he has a knack for regulating the sexual exuberance. In lesser hands, it would be meretricious and puerile, but he harnesses the narrative's carnal energy with a droll and nutty bite. The bi-curious Piet jettisons the limited definition of heterosexuality. He is a card-carrying lover of women, but he has a sensuous appreciation for the subtle bonds of carefree, liberated men.

This savvy novel of class and manners displays Piet's acumen for blurring divides and situating himself as a "guest" of the house. Barol quickly intuits the vulnerabilities of the domicile, including the servants, and makes an enterprise and métier out of his talent for soothing egos, from the bottom to the top. However, he is not without a nemesis. Daughter Louisa, a strong and independent woman who assesses him as a canny and insouciant opportunist, mistrusts his motives, although her sister Constance is mildly afflicted with his charms.

Maarten's anguish over his son blindly binds him to a severe and persecutory God. His religiosity is so extreme that it has become anathema to intimacy with his wife. There is more at stake here then just a pleasure seeker's desires. The sins of the father have infected the child. The author's understanding of Egbert's illness and its roots in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (although the term isn't named in the book) were penetratingly accurate. What is even more profound is Mason's ability to illustrate a theory that I have always held: that fervent religiosity is also linked to OCD. He shows without telling.

Word has it that Mason intends to continue the adventures of Piet Barol in at least two subsequent books. Knowledge of that mitigates the appearance of a pat and abrupt ending here as the ship sails into South Africa. There is much potential for past liaison's to threaten Piet's future, and for his usual composure to careen as he walks a tightrope--which is an extended metaphor and a prime subtext of the narrative. The novel ends with a promise that pedigree, passion, and ambition will continue to quiver and clash in Piet Barol's pursuit and parlay of pleasure.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Breezy picaresque novel, January 1, 2012

By 

Alan A. Elsner "Alan Elsner, author" (Washington DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: History of a Pleasure Seeker (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

The opening line of this novel set mostly in Amsterdam in 1907 tells us that our hero Piet Barol is extremely attractive to most women as well as to many men and that this will be the key to his advancement.

The son of a dull academic and a now-deceased French woman who has taught him opera and which fork to hold in grand dinners, Barol interviews for the job of tutor to the son of a wealthy trader who has made a fortune selling ice to Americans and opened a chain of luxury hotels.

Barol gets the job and finds himself in the embrace of the Vermeulen-Sicker family with its two attractive daughters and their sexually frustrated mother. Piet's pupil is Egbert, a talented and intelligent nine year-old in the grip of a terrible case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition not yet recognized or named.

The book tells us how the confident and charming Piet maneuvers his way through the thicket of complicated relationships both with the family members and with the staff who serve them. His greatest gift is an ability to know when to use and when to refrain from using his sexual magnetism. One of the strengths of this book is the air of sexual longing and desire that accompanies almost all of its episodes. Almost all of its characters, major and minor, are motivated in some degree by their ability or inability to integrate sexuality into their lives in a way that makes sense.

Eventually, leaving the family under something of a cloud, Piet buys a ticket on a liner for South Africa in tourist class but finds a way with a friend to sneak into first class -- which is what this novel is about. He is on the point of being discovered and thrown off the ship when fate intervenes once more.

It's an enjoyable if undemanding read because one does root for Piet to succeed.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fast, sensual and intoxicating read, January 18, 2012

By 

Megan Snider "writemeg" (Maryland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: History of a Pleasure Seeker (Hardcover)

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Richard Mason's HISTORY OF A PLEASURE SEEKER is a lush, sensuous and finely-wrought story of how, through charisma and seduction, one man is able to change an entire family and free them from their stuffy, well-made cages. In return, Piet is able to leave behind his poverty-stricken youth and seek all the pleasures to which he feels entitled as a self-made man.

I was initially attracted to this book because of a line drawn between it and F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY, one of my favorite classics. After finishing HISTORY OF A PLEASURE SEEKER, I can see the parallels between the two. Though our setting here is The Netherlands, Piet functions as a sort of Gatsby-like anti-hero. I took turns loving and despising him, wondering if he possibly felt for the Vermeulen-Sickerts family or merely sought to snap off a piece of their prestige. That feeling morphed many times over, and I'm still not completely sure how I feel about Piet.

But, like the many characters in Mason's novel, it's hard not to be seduced by him. On the surface Piet is a talented pianist, an educated dreamer, a reliable employee. He's described as devastatingly handsome and all too aware of what his attractive physique can afford him from others. Whether everything is just an elaborate scheme to buy himself fortune, I'm not sure -- but I'm leaning toward not. At his heart, I don't think Piet was a cold and calculated gold digger. I think he was just a little tortured and entitled.

HISTORY OF A PLEASURE SEEKER was a fast, intoxicating read -- all due to Mason's command of language and dreamy, atmospheric writing. Though my interest waned slightly as Piet moved on from Amsterdam, I was still very invested in the plot and characters. The novel features several scenes steamy enough to make my cheeks flush, but I wasn't bothered by the erotic and hypnotic nature of the story. If you're easily offended by sexual content, I'd suggest tiptoeing around this one -- but those seeking a raucous, entertaining and sexy story of one social climber pawing his way to the top will find Richard Mason's novel goes down a treat.