In 1927, 19-year-old Dinu Grigorescu arrives in Paris from Bucharest, sent by his father to spend a summer adventuring in the City of Light and recovering from the unexpected death of his mother. In the late 1960s, an elderly Dinu sits down in London to write the story of that summer in Paris, recalling with tenderness his first visit to a whorehouse known to offer men the services of men; the lover he found at that establishment and kept for a lifetime; and the unexpected ways that a forbidden affair could span the worst times of early 20th-century Europe and last beyond even death.
This is the premise of The Prince's Boy, which Paul Bailey (Chapman's Odyssey) wrote as Dinu's account of his love decades after the fact. The novel's length--a mere 160 pages in hardcover--serves as a credit to Bailey's ability to pack an astounding amount of information and emotion into very few words; The Prince's Boy covers more than 40 years and three countries, and contains a lifetime of Dinu's love. Though large swaths of information are necessarily glossed over, no detail ever feels forgotten, no trembling hand or rapid heartbeat untold.
As an account of Bohemian times in Paris in the 1920s, The Prince's Boy is delightful; as a story of two unlikely lovers in a time of tumult and chaos in Europe, it is a compelling examination of sexuality and love; as the reflection of an aging man as he nears the end of his life, it is an emotional exploration of memory and history. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm