This award is given to a living American author whose scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or her in the highest rank of American literature. Thus begins what is essentially a catalogue of sexual behaviour in all its permutations – often graphic, sometimes confronting, but always written with the elegance and style one would expect from an author awarded in 2018 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Literature. But they decided to write their confessions in an edition of one, for each other’s eyes alone and read them to each other six months later. On the basis that transparency had destroyed their earlier marriages, they vowed never to speak to each other of their past lives. Ruggero Castelnuovo – ‘he was in his seventies but still slender and handsome with his strong profile’ – is married to Constance who is about forty years younger and of African-American heritage alongside Ruggero’s Sicilian heritage. Set in 2050 and subtitled ‘Another Posthumous Novel’, the central thread of the story is the relationship between the protagonist and the author told from the perspective of each – and by others as the novel progresses. Using the quote as a starting point, one could easily interpret A Previous Life as an attempt to make sense of the sexuality of old age especially when ‘it’s been very painful’ as it is expressed in this novel. White said in a 2006 interview that riting has always been my recourse when I’ve tried to make sense of my experience or when it’s been very painful. Each describes a period in the author’s life as he traverses the stages of being gay from boyhood to middle-age.

Edmund White is an American novelist and essayist perhaps best known for his three auto-fiction volumes A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony.

Pratchett maskerade