Matter of Life and Sex

By Oscar Moore

Book Overview

The product of a British middle-class upbringing, Hugo Harvey puts his bland suburban existence behind him to enjoy a life spent in the endless pursuit of homosexual sex in London. 10,000 first... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0452270065
• ISBN13: 9780452270060
• Release Date: June 1993
• Publisher: Plume Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Extraordinary piece of literature

I happened to find this book after reading some of the columns that the late Oscar Moore wrote in a popular English newspaper (and collected in another book, equally good, PWA, Person with Aids). I enjoyed it immensely the first time I read it, because of its honest rawness which made it equally crude and touching in its lack of regret, filters and self-pity. It is of course tragic, because there are very few happy endings in real stories. But this is not all. Since acquiring the book almost 10 years ago, I have read it time and again and every time it is a new experience. The prose of Moore is rich and complex, but not contort. He was a finely educated Cambridge-graduate with a deep sense of style and a profound mastery of the English language. Variations, metaphors and a thick net of hidden meanings and not so hidden references make this autobiographical novel a great piece of modern literature, unique in its own genre. It may be interesting to note that I used one chapter to describe linguistic features during for a graduate course (and because it is graphic but never rude, or gratuitously explicit, nobody bat an eyelid). A must read.

Captivating, Visceral, and Shocking

I received this book as a birthday gift. I thought @ first it would be another overly dramafied story of a gay man's contraction of AIDS and his long painful death. This book doesn't celebrate his life. It's a graphic, dark novel on a young man's adventure through the an underworld that eventually infected him with HIV. It's honestly graphic, powerful, sexually charged and visceral. It takes your attention. I'm nearly finished and I would recomend this book.

A bracing honesty

Theoretically, this is not the sort of "AIDS novel" I would care to read, following as it does a pattern that has become far too predictable: the chronicle of a gay man's sexual adventures followed by his (inevitable?) contraction of HIV. But this book grabbed me anyway: its clean, straightforward, sometimes graphic style -- espeically in a time when too many gay American novelists have succumbed to fussy literary affectation. It's odd and ironic to find a British author who writes more like an American noir novelist, while his American counterparts are too often trying to write (in the 1990s!) like Henry James. This novel was truly a case of bracing candor and honesty overriding the downbeat subject matter. It deserves to be read as a model as well -- for other writers who want to say what they mean, instead of flit around the edges in some mistaken notion that such flitting is what constitues art. I was saddened to read of Moore's death a few months ago, from AIDS complications -- and to realize that the novel was much more autobiographical than I wanted it to be. His voice was brave and pure. These loses cannot properly be measured. But I for one will miss the other books Moore might have written had he lived. James Robert Bake