Product Description

Named after Haydn's work, in which the players leave the stage one by one, this completes the story of a gay man in his adult years, through Stonewall riots, the hedonism of the 70s and the ravages of AIDS in the 80s and 90s. It follows "A Boy's Own Story" and "The Beautiful Room is Empty".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51385 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Sunday Times
‘A work of singular accomplishment’

Daily Telegraph
‘a forlornly moving elegy to a generation...’

The Times
‘The book gives voice to a life of uncompromising individuation and reaches a depth of compassionate tolerance rare in any writer’

Customer Reviews

the end of a trilogy
The third and final volume of White's autobiographical trilogy, and, in my opinion, the least achieved one. Too many characters, too much adventures, turn some moments of these book a kind of a broken hearts' catalogue, with no density whatsoever.
The good point is: even when he is not so good, White's writing is delicious and amazing.

The Farewell Symphony was sadly beautiful.
As a young man Edumnd White comes to terms with the gay society of New York and to boyfriend leaving him. He travels to Rome and to Paris pursuing his desire to be published. He is in the mist of the gay promiscualility and loves it. He is one of the Clones of the city. As he becomes more successful he realises that he doesn't really know what he wants. He ends up looking after his nephew and his girlfriend with his own boyfriend in the same flat. He moves to europe and meets the love of his life. But in the mist of the Aids plauge he dies. Many of Edumnds friends also die and he is left positive watching them leave him, knowing he has not long left.

Long, Pompous, Pointless
I read the first two books of the trilogy with less and less energy and interest. Nevertheless, the first book was satisfying - its flaws were compensated by its qualities. In this volume however, only the flaws are left.

The writing is sometimes clever, but it doesn't make up for all the times when it's pompous, affected, nothing more, I regret to say, than intellectual wanking. The author goes from place to place (New York, Paris, Italy) and from character to character without making any point. Of course, one does not *have* to make a point, if the characters are entertaining and the scenes thrilling. This is not the case here. We just follow this insipid self-loathing and mysoginist young gay man whose only quality is to have friends that are better than him, and hear about his constant changing moods, his failures and his tedious sex life.

This book seems like a self-published book. As if it hadn't been edited: Pages and pages of uninteresting, irrelevant details and facts and events that could and should have been cut out. The only interesting moment of the book is the death of his friends - it is, indeed, moving. But then again, how hard is it to be moving when one is talking about aids? Nothing to be proud of.

In conclusion, an overrated book from an overrated author, whose success symbolizes the problem of gay litterature: There's so little of it that it doesn't take much to make a "classic"... In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.