Gestures: A Memoir

Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1987. reprint. Softcover. Very Good Condition/No Dust Jacket. Gestures is the fictional autobiography of gentleman and career diplomat Jeremy Burnham, a man caught in the social, political and sexual flux of the twentieth century. \nHis story begins in 1923, when, as a young and inexperienced foreign service officer, he arrives in the ancient and exotic city of Venice to take up his first post. He falls into a friendship with an attractive older woman, Jane Carlyle, who initiates him into Venetian society by providing introductions to the enigmatic Eva van Woerden, and to the mysterious and cosmopolitan Jewish art connoisseur Anthony Manet. Their lives and destinies become intertwined, as Venice, and all Italy, falls under the shadow of encroaching fascism. When one of them is brutally murdered, a chain of events ensues that reaches its climax more than twenty years later, in the ruins of postwar Amsterdam. Only then are the lessons of courage and moral responsibility implicit in that earlier death at last made plain. And Jeremy's elegant memoirs are revealed for what they are: a testament of complicity in the barbarism of the century.\n\nA beautiful and terrible reflection on memory and accountability, Gestures is a tale of eloquent and tragic force. clean secondhand copy with no damage to describe Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. 288 pages. Please refer to accompanying picture (s). Quantity Available: 1. Shipped Weight: Under 500 grams. Category: Literature & Literary; British & Irish; Contemporary; ISBN: 014009265X. ISBN/EAN: 9780140092653. Inventory No: 0263763. . 9780140092653