Customer Reviews
Love in an age of names you can't remember. - By: Booklover Joseph, 31 Jan 2010 
Edmund White has long written fiction is semi-autobiographical vein & the principal story of this collection (Chaos) is about the issues of growing older, undoubtedly drawn on his own experience as a manin hismid sixties: forgetting people's names, friends who start to die (though that is not a new experience for those who lived through the advent of AIDS, giving sexual pleasure more than directly receiving it, paying for sex, using Viagra. There are love stories within these stories which take the reader from New York to Paris, Greece, Florida & Turkey. Edmund White has an ability to writein a pitilessly candid way that is also tender & moving. His characters play out their sexual fantasies with unembarassed candour. They are aware of their sagging everything as they recall thier past triumphs or their irresistibile bodies, & the accompanying conquests, of forty years before. White's evocation of places, moods & relationships is unrivalled & this is another book to return to like any other work of art that only reveals itself bit by bit.
