History of a Pleasure Seeker
Richard Mason, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307599476
Summary
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 epoque, 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1977 or 1978 (?)
• Where—Johannesburg, South Africa
• Raised—England
• Education—Oxford University
• Currently—lives in New York, New York, USA
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Mason was ten years old when he moved to England with his parents. He was educated at Eton and New College Oxford.
His first novel, The Drowning People (1999), was published during his time at Oxford and has since been translated into 22 languages. His subsequent novels include: Us (2005), The Lighted Rooms (2008), Natural Elements (2010) and History of a Pleasure Seeker (2011). Mason now lives in New York City.
Mason set up the Kay Mason Foundation, in memory of his sister, who died when he was a child. The aim of the foundation is to make the best education available for young people in South Africa. The foundation has the patronage of Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In 2010, Mason was awarded a Merit in Philanthropy Award at the Inyathelo Philanthropy Awards in Cape Town.
In 2008, Mason set up Project Lulutho on 36 hectares of land in the Tunga Valley in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Lulutho offers skills transfer, employment opportunities, and the restoration of a ravaged eco-system, to protect and preserve the Eastern Cape landscape. Lulutho is now an established Trust and Public Benefit Organization. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
If the book scares off prudish readers, it's their loss. Mason writes in a beautifully turned, classical style that yields both pleasing phrases and psychological complexity. Piet's relationships with Jacobina, Egbert and Didier, a footman who yearns for him, are genuinely moving.
John Williams - New York Times Book Review
the best new work of fiction to cross my desk in many moons. Mason…has written an unabashed romance, a classic story of a young man who rises from unprepossessing circumstances to win the favor of the rich and prominent…Mason's hand simply gets surer and surer with each new novel. He has an appealingly playful quality that has never been more evident than it is here; he likes all of his characters and mostly gives them what they deserve; he conjures up early-20th-century Amsterdam and, more briefly, New York, with confidence and exceptional descriptive powers. My only regret about History of a Pleasure Seeker...is that it didn't go on for several hundred pages more.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post
Richard Mason is the rare novelist who can write a very sexy book that never quite turns prurient.... This book about pleasure is a provocative joy.
O Magazine
It’s hard to imagine a better connoisseur of late 19th-century Europe’s gilded delights than Piet Barol, the bisexual hero at the heart of Richard Mason’s witty fourth novel, History of a Pleasure Seeker.... Think Balzac, but lighter and sexier – an exquisitely laced corset of a novel with a sleek, modern zipper down the side.”
Marie Claire
The title of Mason’s latest misleads, not only because his story details an interlude in a young man’s life, not a history, but also because this man is less a seeker than a receiver. The operative word, however, is pleasure, which comes in abundance to both the reader and the seductively handsome Piet Barol. The story opens in Amsterdam, 1907, during the belle époque, which Mason evokes with delightful period detail. Piet, at 24, is hired as a tutor for the deeply troubled son of the wealthy Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts, a devout Calvinist whose belief in predetermination guides him to a degree that he conceals even from his cherished wife, Jacobina. Their obsessive son, Egbert, is tormented by invisible demons; his suffering adds weight to a tale that is otherwise amusingly, at times stubbornly, lighthearted. No one, including Jacobina or Egbert’s two older sisters, fails to notice Piet’s allure. He is bright, talented, and ambitious, but he trusts those qualities less than he trusts his sexuality, which leads him to many enthusiastic encounters with women, including Jacobina, and men, and helps him slide haplessly into passivity. Mason (Natural Elements) writes with sensuality and humor, but the novel fails to deeply satisfy, especially at its forced and hollow end.
Publishers Weekly
What would you do if you were Piet Barol, charismatic, head-turningly handsome, and ambitious for the best things in life yet raised in shabby circumstances and now, after the death of his sophisticated Parisienne mother, stuck with a glum academic father in a shack that has an outhouse? You'd accept Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts's invitation to interview for a job as tutor to young son Egbert, a brilliant pianist so powerfully phobic he cannot leave the house. Since the Vermeulen-Sickertses are among the wealthiest families of early 1900s Amsterdam, Piet is soon savoring the truly elegant life. He handles himself smoothly with the two spoiled Vermeulen-Sickerts daughters and mightily impresses the father, but not the least of his pleasures is his relationship with affection-starved Jacobina. When Piet leaves, only half in triumph, he's managed to heal some family wounds, though it takes him longer to learn which pleasures he should really seek. Verdict: Mason (Natural Elements) writes lushly, and he persuasively gets readers to side with Piet, despite his oily manipulations—for aren't those around him even more obviously self-serving? Highly recommended as an engaging portrait of an individual, a family, and time. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
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
Piet [Barol] infiltrates the household of Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts, one of the wealthiest men in Amsterdam. Maarten's sex-starved wife Jacobina hires Piet to tutor their son Egbert, a boy who becomes hysterical outside his own home. Though playing a dangerous game—the image of a man walking a tightrope is threaded through the narrative—Piet loses no time in pursuing all pleasures, be it music, fine food, wealth or the charms of his employer's wife. Throughout the novel Mason displays a sharp eye and a wit to rival Oscar Wilde. A provocative and keenly funny portrait of a rake with an agenda all his own.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Who is the “pleasure seeker” of the title? Who else might that describe?
2. How does Maarten’s repudiation of pleasure define his character?
3. What is the metaphor of the tightrope?
4. How do the characters’ different religious beliefs shape the events of the story?
5. “Like his father, Egbert was deeply private about his interior afflictions” (page 40). Are there other ways in which father and son are alike? How are they different?
6. Throughout the novel, Mason calls our attention to shared character traits. What do Egbert and Piet share? Piet and Maarten?
7. What role does guilt play in Piet’s actions?
8. The voices Egbert hears are guided by color: “toying with primary colors was an offense that merited prolonged punishment” (page 100). Why do you think color affects Egbert this way? How does Mason use color with other characters?
9. What is the significance of the horseback-riding scene on pages 109–14? Why does it prompt Piet to carry Egbert outside?
10. How does having money—or not having it—affect the characters’ behavior? What about the other members of the household staff? In the terms of this novel, what is the difference between money and class?
11. Why is Piet willing to risk everything to see Jacobina? Is he in love with her?
12. When Louisa seeks her father’s help in opening a shop, he tells her: “You must marry a man with talent and ambition, whose interests you may serve as your mother has served mine. That is the way in which a woman may succeed” (page 153). Is this true for all the women in the novel? How are things changing with the times?
13. What finally gives Egbert the strength to go outside on his own? What role does music play in the decision (pages 154–5)?
14. When Piet turns down Louisa’s proposal, what is the result? How does it influence the novel’s denouement?
15. Why doesn’t the novel end when Piet leaves the Vermeulen-Sickerts household? How might you have imagined Piet’s next steps, if Mason hadn’t supplied them?
16. How does Piet’s interlude with his father change your understanding of his character? How did his late mother shape his behavior?
17. What role does Didier play in the novel’s ending? What impact might a different response from him have had on Piet’s future?
18. What has changed within Piet, that he resolves to tell the truth to Stacey?
(Questions issued by publisher.)