The Beholder

Farber, author of nine previous books and former commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered," brings us the story of two people --- a writer and a young woman, a beautiful and married student of art history. They meet. They discuss their passions for art and literature. They realize that their passions for those subjects is running over into their physical wants for each other. They have an affair. The writer has an artistic endeavor that he wants to partake in with the woman --- observe and study the female body. They photograph their erotic desires and in their heightened sense they discover sex that had not been discovered before. They obsess over the forms and shapes of sex until conflicts begin to emerge.The book, in parts, is heated and visual, using the sparest of words and the shortest of sentences. At times it's like a poem, sharp and exact, meanings dripping from the words. But the longer that type of writing goes, the less impact it has, and the more exasperating for the reader it can be. Short sentences. Clipped phrases. Quick glimpses. "Merging; impelled by, feeding on, itself. Bewitched. Drifting, dreaming; one flesh. But, oops: hand on, under, around." The book is filled with such phrasing, immediate bursts of words stifled by immediate blockages of periods and semicolons. "Later, when her passion has once again ignited his, he strokes her hair. She draws him to her, wriggling. Baby salmon."Take away the hindrance of Farber's particular writing style in THE BEHOLDER and it's a scintillating examination of love and art, passions and the human form. Even the cover itself examines these thoughts as it glimpses the female body, a naked torso, the right arm laying across it. Inside the covers gives the reader their own glimpses of the human form and human desires. --- Reviewed by Jonathan Shipley