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by: William Styron  List Price: $15.00 Amazon.com's Price: $11.25 You Save: $3.75 (25%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 813.54 EAN: 9780679736745 ISBN: 0679736743 Label: Vintage Manufacturer: Vintage Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 528 Publication Date: January 04, 1993 Publisher: Vintage Release Date: January 04, 1993 Studio: Vintage Related Items:
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 Rating:  - The Union Forever!I read this book when I was an undergraduate at Columbia College in the mid 1980's. I remember being absolutely captivated by the glamor of it all. Alone in my dorm room, surrounded by rich kids, feeling like a cockroach, I gobbled up the lush Italian setting, the boozing and the brawls, the colorful supporting cast of millionaires and movie stars and barefoot Italian beauties. The central conflict was a classic man to man battle like MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. The dashing charm of the corrupt boyish ... Read More Rating: - Part brilliant, mostly tediousThis novel has tremendous potential at being great until about half way through the story loses it's momentum and things turn into overextended psychological rants by Cass Kinsolving. This one was hard to get through, and the ending is anticlimactic. I started to wonder how much more superflous and prosiac the descriptions could be to convey a simple concept, and how many more times do they have to be repeated? Definitely not a good starting point for a Styron neophyte. It's as if the purpose ... Read More Rating:  - complicated but worth itThis book is long dance, tortured, and brilliant. Descriptions of Italy, specifically Sambuco, make you feel is if you are there They sweep and enfold you into Italy's "warm and fragrant being." It is a complicated tale told between two different time periods. Until the last pages you don't really know what happened or "who did it," or how it happens. Characterization and writing are so clear and precise you know you are in the hands of a genius. Some of my favorite lines; "Cass ... Read More Rating:  - A Trip to Italy (Three Stars)Some readers may be interested to know that the setting of this novel -"Sambuco" - is actually Ravello, on the Amalfi Coast, until recently the home of Gore Vidal. The movie being filmed in the village was Beat the Devil, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart. Cass Kinsovling's household seems to be in the ground floor of the old Caruso Belvedere. The atmosphere of this book is not unlike the film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, another tale of Americans in Italy in the 1950's. ... Read More Rating: - For the Acquired Styron Taste..I love William Styron, I have read all his books, yet I would not recommend picking up "Set This House on Fire" unless you've read some of his other works first. It's lengthy-in certain cases, such as the voluminous number of pages devoted to Cass Kingsolving's abysmal drunkenness, to the point of excess-and at times seems aimless. The story is told from the point of view of a character who is relatively uninvolved in the rape, death, and depression that ensue. Some of the most interesting passages are ... Read More 
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