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Heather Cranmer (2721 KP) created a post

Apr 3, 2022  
Sneak a peek at the literary fiction novel ODD BIRDS by Severo Perez and read a deleted scene from the book on my blog. Enter the giveaway for a chance to win your own autographed copy of the book - 2 winners!

**BOOK SYNOPSIS**
The year is 1961. Seventy-year-old Cosimo Infante Cano, a Cuban-born artist in need of inspiration, follows his lover to Texas in what was to be a temporary sabbatical from their life in France. Unexpectedly, he finds himself stranded in San Antonio, nearly penniless, with little more than the clothes on his back and an extraordinary pocket watch. His long hair and eccentric attire make him an odd sight in what he has been told is a conservative cultural backwater.

Cosimo’s French and Cuban passports put a cloud of suspicion over him as events elsewhere in the world play out. Algeria is in open revolt against France. Freedom Riders are being assaulted in Mississippi, and the Bay of Pigs debacle is front-page news. Cosimo confronts nightmares and waking terrors rooted in the horror he experienced during the Great War of 1914–1918. His friends—students, librarians, shopkeepers, laborers, lawyers, bankers, and even a parrot—coalesce around this elderly French artist as he attempts to return to what remains of his shattered life.

His new friends feel empathy for his impoverished condition, but his unconventional actions and uncompromising ethics confuse them. He creates charming drawings he refuses to sell and paints a house simply for the pleasure of making a difference. In the process he forever alters the lives of those who thought they were helping him.
      
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Eilidh G Clark (177 KP) rated The Portrait of Mr W.H. in Books

May 14, 2017  
The Portrait of Mr W.H.
The Portrait of Mr W.H.
Oscar Wilde | 2014 | Fiction & Poetry
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Quick read. Great insight into the Victorian fin de siecle . Great suspence. (0 more)
Too quick. I wanted more. (0 more)
. As a paradox to the realism and ethics of the period, decadent writers, artists, and poets challenged a society that strove for a standard in public discourse.
First published in 1889, Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr W.H., is a short story about the efforts of three characters trying to discover the identity of Shakespeare’s Mr W.H. ; the dedicatee of his many sonnets. Wilde’s novel is a prime example of decadent literature and aestheticism, which, as a result, challenges the Victorian ideals of moral decency and public rectitude. The author uses paradox in the novel to present a theory that contradicts the conservative critics of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Wilde presents a subjective interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets that portrays homoerotic sexual desire as the force for creative inspiration. Foremost, through the character Cyril Graham, the author demonstrates that art is ‘an attempt to realise one’s own personality on some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and limitations of real life’, (Wilde, p.111).
Taking from a hypothesis in the previous century by Edmund Malone and Thomas Tyrwhitt, the character of Cyril forms a theory in which Mr W.H. is a young actor named Willie Hughes, employed by Shakespeare and who is the muse to which the sonnets are devoted. Cyril investigates each poem and pieces together a theory he believes to be true.

On the surface, Cyril’s theory derives from feeling and beauty rather than logic and instruction.
The withholding of facts in Shakespeare’s sonnets energises Cyril. He scours the poems to find a clue that harmonise with his own feelings. Cyril believes that Shakespeare influences his readers by guiding them to Willie Hughes.

Cyril, spurned by the moralistic interpretations of previous critics, becomes enthralled by Shakespeare’s muse.