A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity

by Whitney Otto

Book Overview

In a novel about drifting and reckless youth looking for a more permanent form of happiness, Whitney Otto transports us to San Francisco, a magical, fog-shrouded city suffused with possibility and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375505458
• ISBN13: 9780375505454
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 283 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

To Be Young Was Very Heaven

I bought this right after reading The Passion Dream Book by her - which I loved. I liked this one a lot too. This one is a little less coherently linear and a bit harder to fit together but still it's wonderful! The writing is exceptional, the images evoked are ethereal and realistic, the characters are people you come to care about (and get disappointed when they don't return!) Quote from page 172 - "As her mind wanders she censors none of the random thoughts that blend, melt, give way, and transform into other random thoughts. This inconsequential circling around a central pressing thought. It is pleasant to sit this way, allowing her mind to clip along, relaxed, feeling its muscle as it sorts through the ridiculous and the profound." Otto is an excellent writer and I look forward to reading more by her - she's fast becoming a favorite author.

Unusual and Interesting!

Otto's book reads as many short stories about love, finding love, or missing love that are interconnected. The characters all know each other or someone who knows that person. The people are young, living on their own or with roommates, working, and partying. However, they don't see themselves as going anywhere, career-wise, even though they are intelligent. The author includes Japanese art at the beginning of each chapter, which lead you into the story. She even includes photos of art seen by characters at a museum, which is very unusual. These really added to the story. I have never seen that before, but it was engaging. Highly recommend, if you are looking for something smart and different.

A reader from Switzerland

This book was brillant. If you only read one book this year, make it this one! It was enchanting, engrossing and I couldn't put it down. The japanese prints were a nice and fitting touch to intricately woven stories and the characters, while not always accessible (I think that was the point) were interesting and warm. I loved the back drop of San Francisco and the descriptions of the inside of the tea room.Otto is an amazing writer. I have read all of her books (more than once!) and would recommend all of them highly. She is creative, articulate, intelligent and has a way with words. You won't regret it!

Overwhelmingly marvelous.

This is an amazing book. It is beautiful, enchanting, and a little bit cynical. The plot weaves in and out among itself: the book is composed of a series of what at first appear to be independent short stories, but soon begin to link and spread, forming a connecting and disconnecting network. The stories skip in and out of time and place, following a pattern in theme rather than in chronology; the discontinuity can be confusing if you want to remember everything, but it contributes wonderfully to the dissipative, collectivist mood of the book. Each story opens with a copy of a Japanese print and a description that is meant to parallel the events of the story, and the book as a whole is meant to reflect a famous Japanese diary. These connections are occasionally obvious and often obscure; searching for them is part of the excitement of reading such an interwoven work. The prose is always smooth and often beautiful, and the characters and plot are developed with a distinct sense of artistry. The book as a whole is amazingly balanced, readable, and occasionally stunning. It deserves to be read slowly and in a quiet room.

a world to float away to

I found this book very charming. The front page of each chapter contains a lovely pictorial reference to the Japanese floating world of Edo, a reinforcement of the feeling the book evokes, of an ephemeral age and time - a signature of a particluar generation - this one in the 1980's in a city that itself is a delight - San Francisco. Its characters are an ensemble of detached, almost superficial, visually cued men and women (boys and girls?) of late twenties redeemed by their sense of kindness and by open caring and affection. It reminded me very much of a book of equal sweetness set a decade ealier in the 1970's - Vibram Seth's The Golden Gate, a lyrical poem set in the Bay Area that captured the mixed up romances and changes of a different, more hopeful, pre-AIDS generation. Both books have a lightness and loving nature with the City itself more a stage than stadt.The chapters intertwine characters and timelines like a Shakespearean Oberon, Titania and the path-crossing lovers. The only shortfall is that we never get to know any one character very well. All educated, some are users, some self-consciously detached, a few with a described past, none with exact ambitions. What they all share is a "floating" before landing into the not yet arrived-at weight of jobs, marriage, committment, irrevocable choices or downhill slides, as they pass into their 30's. Maybe many of us landed earlier, especially now that marriage is a sooner thing than it was in the 70's and 80's. But even without a connection to either a belated coming of age, being young in the 80's or a feeling for S.F. (I lived in S.F. in the 70-80's), this is still a reading pleasure, at least a light read for the beach, a cut above the predictable romances. It's bound to refresh.