What's Left of the Night

There were some good passages but overall the book felt as if it had been written by an asexual author which, considering the context, was not a good thing.

Fifty years ago I started reading Constantine Cavafy. This novel the explores his brief visit to Paris is beautifully written, delightfully humorous, and psychologically penetrating. The Night will fill you up. No excess.

Not impressed with this book. Did not find anything entertaining or especially readable about this . Wasted my money.

This book was strange at the start, then it turned weird, and finally it became disgusting. Characters appear and fade away without explanation, story lines disappear, it rambles for pages and pages, and in places it's pornographic without being in the least bit erotic. It amazes me that anyone ever published it but it amazes me even more that I finished it. I would have given it no starts if I could have.

Read this book in my book club with 8 other gay men. Despite rave reviews including one from Edmund White, I was at a loss. The book reminded me most of the bizarre film EYES WIDE SHUT and shared some scenes that seemed to be taken from the film. I'm a Cavafy fan from way back, but I thought this attempted much more than it delivered.

Over written and under edited. Also unnecessary. A waste of time and money. I urge you not to read it and regret that I did.

This book dragged through every boring thought of an amateur poet on a vacation consisting of tedious conversations with vapid people. The anticipated climax was deliberately a let down and then the reader is subjected to disgusting scenes as if to punish one for looking forward to the titillation the protagonist sought. More than a waste of time, this book is actually a slog through the mud without redemption. One might argue that it is homophobic since it draws a gay audience to a near death by boredom then to a shocking climax of degradation.

Intriguged by Cavafy's beautiful poetry, I was intrigued by this novelized chapter from his life, but it is badly done and in the last section, grossly distasteful. A vast disappointment - stick to the man's own works, which are sublime.

This novel comes with high praise. As a lover of Cavafy's poetry - his classical as well as his gay poems - and someone with a keen interest in his biography, I came to it with high expectations, prejudiced in his favour. It's a sensitive but unflattering portrait. Nothing wrong with that, as long as it rings true, but for me it didn't. It left me wondering what sources the author used to build her negative character - she doesn't indicate what they were - and why she chose to portrait him as a very flawed, confused young man.She situates Cavafy at the start of his career - when he's trying to find his poetic voice, feeling deeply insecure about his poetic abilities - not in his beloved Alexandria but in Paris. An odd choice. He's at the end of a European tour with his brother John, also a poet. They spend three days there. Nothing dramatic happens: they sit in cafes and talk about Dreyfus, and writing, and society; they visit dances, pissoirs, a risqué private club, the house of an absent, well-known critic, and so on. Paris, in effect, becomes such a rich setting it's almost a subject in itself. The real action goes on inside Cavafy's head. It has a Proustian flavour, with memories of childhood and his doting but interfering mother welling up at any time, particularly in disturbing dreams, of which he has many. Cavafy's interior world is depicted in the most indeterminate terms, prey to every twist and turn of his mind: he could be a character in a Dostoyevsky novel. He's often confused about his whereabouts, his short-term memory, himself; he's vain and furtive, unsociable, sardonic impulsive. Above all, as we know from his poetry, he's full of closeted, sublimated sexual desire for young men.There are two high points in the novel related to this, both extraordinary, both demonstrating what repressed desire can do to a sensitive young man, foreshadowing much of the subject matter of his closeted gay poetry. Cavafy has a brief crush on a young Russian dancer in his hotel. In one scene, the chair on which the dancer is sitting, unaware of Cavafy's attention, becomes a metaphor for the desired penetration, a potent, erotic fetish. In another, Cavafy listens at the dancer's bedroom door while the latter is making love to a woman, loathing himself for doing so but unable to break away. What's puzzling is that later Cavafy comes across the dancer at the Ark, a country club, but makes nothing of it, brushes it aside as if it was no matter - the inconsistency is not explained. Apart from these two set-piece elements there's not much sense of Cavafy as an erotic being - a gay male writer would have brought this out much more, I think.In style and subject matter this is a very literary novel, brilliantly done in parts, rather tedious elsewhere. It left me with a portrait of a man I could not admire. Perhaps I'd put him on a pedestal, and this was a necessary corrective, more true to the man than my imagination. Perhaps it's better to come to the novel without romantic preconceptions about the poet. Perhaps the author, depicting him in an unfavourable light, came nearer to the truth of the man at that stage of his life than I'm willing to accept. Where does the truth lie? I just don't know. But I left the novel with the image of Cavafy somewhat tarnished, and that's what disappointed me.

A very strange book and quite a challenge to read. I still don't know what to make of it but instead of taking it to the charity shop I have put it on the bookshelf after finishing it because I think it merits a re-read. I don't feel I know Cavafy much better. What I did learn, if accurate, was that he was a thoroughly unlikeable, screwed up and tortured man, struggling to come to terms with his sexuality but also highly opinionated about everyone else. The book follows the tortured twists and turns of his artistic mind. Not exactly an enjoyable book but I thought the writer has wonderful talent and I can see why it took her so long to write.

Fascinating book that creates a good atmosphere about an intriguing poet.

My enjoyment of What’s Left of the Night increased dramatically after I stopped reading and did a bit of online research on Cavafy, possibly the most celebrated Mediterranean queer poet since Antiquity. Herein lies my advice to future self (and fellow readers).Before starting this novel by acclaimed Greek writer Ersi Sotiropoulos, I had only read two or three of Cavafy’s poems. He’d popped up here and there in my reading, in books or articles by Daniel Mendelsohn and Andre Aciman, brief but indirect glimpses of a towering figure of turn-of-the-century literature.What’s Left of the Night isn’t a biography, focusing instead on three days Cavafy spends in Paris with his brother in the summer of 1897. When I put the book down, perhaps a third of the way through, I was frustrated by the mundane details of the brothers’ trip. Much was made of where they should eat and who they should try to meet. They hang out with the “tout Paris”, the aristocrats and intellectuals who make-up the literati, and yet no one seems to have anything insightful to say. They vaguely search for the Ark, a secret underground party whispered about for its debauchery. Cavafy agonises about what an influential local writer may or may not think of his poetry, and the homosexual desires that he can no longer deny.Come on! This is one of the world’s greatest queer poets, in the world’s cultural capital, at a moment when the continent is on the cusp of colossal transformation. Is that all you have for me?I shut the book and put it away. Often, when a piece of writing doesn’t make sense, I turn inward rather than against the author. What am I not getting? Irritated, I read a few reader comments and reviews: the frustration wasn’t mine alone. There is both too much exposition and too little. I am not an erudite reader, was I missing context?I found a few of his poems online (the recently published Mendelsohn translations were priced out of my reach). Appreciating poetry does not come easy to me, but Cavafy’s verse felt lucid, clear and pierced with insight. I read some biographical notes. Aha! There was the context. Finally, I settled on an interpretation of this book that allowed me not only to persist but, eventually, to enjoy it thoroughly.Cavafy’s celebrated style came into being as the century turned, shortly after his Parisian trip. By 1897, I’m told, the 34 year-old Cavafy had written very little of lasting significance. This seemingly innocuous interlude is not a revealing glimpse into the mind of a great poet. It’s the last days of a mediocre talent about to rebel against everything that has informed his writing to date. Sotiropoulos doesn’t describe the click of the artist finding his voice exactly, she explores the moments that immediately precede it.The young poet’s Parisian long weekend takes on a new meaning through this lens. The critics’ opinion should matter to the poet as much as ornithology matters to birds. The intellectuals’ pronouncements are irrelevant. The aristocrats’ gossip is just noise. The ornament and lyricism of Cavafy’s own writing are nothing but an affect to be shed. Rhymes, it turns out, are a prison.And the desire and transgression that his contemporaries seek – in the form of an illicit party accessible only to those in the know – pale in comparison to Cavafy’s own true longings.The real epiphany of What’s Left of the Night, felt like deeply buried treasure, at least in the eyes of this superficial reader. In reality, it was right there beneath the surface. Cavafy cannot become a true poet until he follows his own illicit yearning and emancipates himself from the rules and conservative conventions of society.His rising, inexorable desire – expressed in a feverish and hallucinatory scene where he fingers a hole in the upholstery of a chair behind which sits the object of his lust – is the key that unlocks this creativity. The truth he finds in himself, after a couple of sleepless nights and exhausting flaneries through the capital, is the true rupture he needs to free his poetry from the need to please others or follow trends.Meanwhile, I also wondered if a knowledgeable Cavafy enthusiast might glean another layer of meaning from the prosaic meanderings and superficial observations recorded in this travelogue. Will some of the seemingly unimportant observations of the fledgling poet find their way into his future verse, transformed through creative genius? I guess the only way to find out is to read the poet’s work…Don’t you love it when that happens?