This book is great. It is a must read for anyone who has tested positive for HIV,has aids,or knows anyone who are in either of these situations. All others not in any of these categories, will be touch by the way that Dr. Mahlon Johnson's opens up his heart and shares even the most intimate thoughts and details of his life as he goes about "working on a miracle". He explains in a very understandable way exactly how he waged war on the virus that had invaded his body. He shares how the courage of one person who touch his life renewed his strength and inspired him to continue his battle with the enemy. So much to learn from this book.

I read the book and i think is a extraordinary human review of a patient with aids, he showed to us how difficult is live with this desease and the important role of hope in the course of the desease. Creo que es una obra recomendada para todo paciente con VIH/SIDA.

Joseph Olshan has achieved a nearly impossible task: a successful novel about the kaleidoscope of emotional rides that constitute the anticipation, the terror, the neuroses/psychoses, the obsession and the gamut of highs and lows of that strange encounter called 'falling in love'. Not that potent love stories are oddities, but when the characters are all males in varying degrees of acceptance/indulgence of being gay, such rollercoaster rides often become either merely taudry, steamy sex encounters or distanced longings such as the wondrous "Maurice" of EM Forster. Nightswimmer takes us many places we know and more places we haven't been, and does so in such convincing style that we feel like part of the in-crowd of these perfectly drawn characters. For the reader who wants to understand both sides of the approach/avoidance magnet of being hopelessly in love, here it is. With enough use of metaphor to keep the story universal, Olshan has written a durable novel that already is showing the test of time. I'm happy this book is becoming more available. Recommended highly - thanks to a friend's recommendation!

While I had read mostly decent reviews of "Nightswimmer", I went into this book with a bit of skepticism. So often, gay-themed novels barely qualify as true literature. Thankfully, Joseph Olshan is a first-class author who takes this multi-dimentional story and enhances it with a very unique perspective--written almost as an extended, detailed love letter. It is refreshing to find a book about mature men who question and struggle with love, passion, relationships, commitment, and the role personal history plays in each one's future. A definite read for anyone looking for a quality story about love and loss that just happens to feature gay men.

Nightswimmer was actually the very first item I'd ever written a review for here at Amazon. I don't know what ever happened to it, but the book remains my favorite of all the gay fiction books I've ever read. Most gay fiction centers around name brands, a-list stars and a-list cities, lots of gossip and overblown scandals/dramas. While those books are fun to toss in the beach bag on a nice summer day, Olshan created a story that hits much closer to home in the lives of many gay men. He writes about relationships in a palpable way - love, love lost, and love found again. It's really neither gay nor straight, but an exploration of how gay men in particular tend to cling to relationships of the past, leaving pieces of themselves behind until they have the chance to reclaim them in finding new love. He does not glamourize his characters nor does he attempt to apologize for their flaws or shortcomings. They are who they are, and they are well-crafted and quite realistic. The haunting melancholy of the past and the trepidation the main character, Will, has about his future is beautifully written and the story remains a favorite of all the friends I've loaned this fine book to - get it for yourself, you won't be disappointed.

After the death of his baby sister, David's parents struggle to maintain their marriage, and hire on a Jamaican housekeeper named Clara. As his parents separate and divorce, David befriends Clara and sees her as the one person he can count on, but even she isn't spared from his misbehavior. Clara is hiding a secret about the death of her own son back in Jamaica, and David is determined to find out what it is before he loses her from his life. "Clara's Heart" is a big-hearted story that has great moments of comedy that nearly get lost in the maelstrom of melodrama. Clara is the only likeable character, and it's rather bewildering why she stays with this family, even though she says she's staying to help David. "Clara's Heart" isn't a terrible book, but neither is it the greatest. It was made into a movie starring Whoopi Goldberg.

Having seen Whoopi Goldberg as Clara in the movie version of Clara's Heart, I assumed that when I finally got around to reading the book, I would keep thinking of the actors from the movie. This was not the case.

David, Clara, Bill and Leona are all deeper and more vivid characters in the book. Though I loved the movie version, the written words prove to be much more compelling. As usual, the movie edits out the incredible words written by Olshan. Though parts of the movie are taken word for word from the book, much of the story and significant passages are missing in the movie.

Having owned the movie for many years and after repeated viewings, I really wasn't too enthusiastic about reading the book. But once I started reading the novel, I couldn't put it down. It was as if I was reading something totally new, even though I assumed I would find it completely familiar.

It's no surprise the novel is far superior to the movie, though as movies go, the movie version isn't bad. If you can have only one version of Clara's Heart....take the book!

Bringing back characters from his previous novels "Clara's Heart" and "Nightswimmer", Olshan's new novel centers on a group of people struggling to extricate themselves from the past. Will is stunned when the plane his friend Marie was supposed to be on crashes into the ocean, but when her name isn't listed as among the passengers, the fact of her boarding the plane comes into question. He reaches out to Clara, who helped him get through his brother's death years before. Will is eventually contacted by Marie's children, Peter (Will's ex-boyfriend) and Grace (who's dying of cancer), and the four adults soon come together to await news of Marie's whereabouts. Peter and Will still love each other after all these years, and they slowly reconfigure their new relationship. Each character is mired in the past, and there are numerous flashbacks exploring this, which all grow distracting and tedious as the novel progresses. The reader cannot help but care about these rambling people though, and is treated to a good story to find out how it all ends.

What can I say, but another fresh endearing look into the life of Will Kaplan and why he is such a unforgettable character. When I first heard there was another book featuring the same characters from 'Nightswimmer' and 'Clara's Heart. I went out to 3 different bookstore to find it. I was not disappointed by this haunting, and honest novel told from quite a few perspectives of current and remembered events. There are many things I could say this book is about: hope, longing, family, trust, faith, fate. But of all those things, to me, it's mainly about surviving the past. The ways that different people choose to perceive/cope with the past,and the understanding that can come from it, if we really get honest with ourselves. How there is more to just surviving the past, but having to to decide 'what do I do now?'. Although I was a bit confussed about when this story actually takes place. Was this before or after he had met and lost Chad? Also he went from being a map collector in this book, to a writer , but I don't remember Will collecting maps, as well as writing in 'Nightswimmer'. But otherwise there are no complaints, he kept me guessing almost till the end. If you have never read one of Mr.Olshan's books, take the chance to read one of his other well written novels. (Nightswimmer and 'A Warmer Season' are my favorites) He is one of the few authors I have read that, rather than wrapping the ending all up in a pretty bow, he leaves the resolution in your hands, much like life really is.

Simply haunting and darkly erotic. I finished reading Vanitas over a month ago, and the characters still linger in my mind: Sam the writer, a lonely outsider searching for a sense of family, longing for a child of his own and conflicted by his new love interest, Bobby; Jessie the strong single mother and former lover of Sam who carries on a not-so-secret affair with a British bloke; Bobby the haunted artist who had to flee America due to a scandal; Garland the dying art auctioneer who has commissioned Sam to ghostwrite his memoirs for publication, yet tries at all costs to keep from uncovering the secrets of his past.

Joseph Olshan has always been blessed with a keen ear for dialogue--particularly the awkward language of lovers quarreling. He captures perfectly the plaintive nature one lover feels when the other cannot see their side--or worse, is indifferent to it.

Vanitas gives us an insider's view of the book publishing world, we learn about art restoration and acquisition, and the career and very dark nature of the artist Géricault. Olshan deftly weaves each element like a finely woven tapestry against a backdrop of London and New York City for settings.

And if you'll notice in the acknowledgments for Vanitas, Olshan acknowledges the late Robert Woolley who urged him to find in a novel a place for his memory. A quick search in Amazon.com's databases uncovered a book called "Going Once" by Robert Woolley, a Sotheby's auctioneer, wherein Woolley acknowledges Joseph Olshan for helping him enormously with his memoir. Is the Garland character in Vanitas based on Woolley? Did Olshan actually ghostwrite Woolley's memoir like the Sam character in Vanitas? I think so.

Vanitas is such a lyrical novel. I rationed out the last fifty pages because I did not want the book to end. Several sequences were as cozy as a warm blanket. Olshan's language is pristine and his pacing is perfect. He always knows the correct emotional chord to strike in each scene, giving us just the right detail from his unique perspective. You'll enjoy his special brand of story-telling. I know I'm reading Vanitas at least once more.

--Jeff Funk

VANITAS, the new novel by Joseph Olshan, uses the art world of NYC as the backdrop for a story of love, lost love, desire, hatred and death. This story flows easily from NYC to London and back as the jet setting--on a budget--characters follow those they lust after. There are intriguing hidden agendas and subtle mysteries until the very end that keep you reading and searching for answers--much like the characters in the novel.

If you read Olshan's last novel, NIGHTSWIMMER, and loved it, you should love VANITAS also. VANITAS would be one of very few books I would beg my friends to read--others are THE WHISTLING SONG by Stephen Beachy, LONGING by Paul Reed and WHEN THE PARROT BOY SINGS by John Champagne. All of these works of fiction are similar in that the main chararcters are forever searching for love, following their desires, while tied to events of the past.

"For all is vanity and vexation of spirit." Solomon

Solomon, famed for wisdom, and Joseph Olshan, famed for NIGHTSWIMMER and CLARA'S HEART, among others, both share a certain pitiless willingness to look truth in the face, death in the teeth, and hope in the eye. Perhaps that hope is merely the eye of the hurricane. And perhaps that is all that it has to be, since that is where each of us lives. We are beset on every side: if not by plague, then loneliness; if not loneliness, then the betrayal of a lover or lovers or, perhaps, even of biology itself.

Olshan's characters, both in VANITAS and in his earlier NIGHTSWIMMER, inhabit a world in which they are almost unendingly betrayed by lovers and other strangers--and, frequently, by themselves. Yet they stubbornly, sometimes foolishly and forlornly, still look for love. In a curious and unexpected way, in VANITAS, one of them--finally--finds it. The novel begins when the protagonist, forty year-old struggling writer and journalist Sam Solomon, believing that he is about to die on a plummeting airplane, sees a vision of what he terms "the Angel"--a masculine "face of incomparable beauty," which we may plausibly suspect is a symbol of the Angel of Death. Sam survives, but Olshan locks in the image as a motif which inextricably interweaves beauty and death--a motif which sustains the novel.

Indeed the motif is encapsulated within the title of the novel itself: "Vanitas" is an artistic style of inserting a symbol of death within an otherwise life-affirming painting. Throughout the novel Sam chases such a drawing--of a beautiful naked man reclining next to a skull--for reasons which he can't quite enunciate to himself, but which the reader understands: in this regard, Sam is a proxy for the hordes of gay men who continue to chase a life of uncomplicated hedonism--even in the face of dire consequences.

The idea that living a life steeped in the adoration of beauty carries with it a heavy price is not one which most of the gay world will welcome, and is one which takes a hefty integrity of spirit to air in this politically correct climate. Indeed the horror of "losing you to this terrible disease," as one character puts it, hovers over the book, the movement, the life--like the scythe of the Reaper. Those consequences are spelled out in macabre detail in the character of Elliot Garland: a successful New York art dealer felled by AIDS, who has hired Sam to pen his memoirs and whose slow death is observed in excruciating detail by Sam and by the reader.

One of the reasons that Olshan's NIGHTSWIMMER resonated with many readers--gay and straight--was that it showed the extreme difficulty among people, particularly gay men, of finding a long-term and ultimately satisfying love. In both NIGHTSWIMMER and VANITAS, Olshan demonstrates the tests and betrayals which human nature compels us to inflict upon those whom we love. Love, in both books, is an obsession. It is also a challenge which the characters expect to fail but secretly yearn to overcome. VANITAS takes a hard-eyed look at all manner of betrayal, from the trivial to the fatal.

The twisting and unpredictable path of love, with its inevitable conditions and betrayals, is shown in the relationship of Elliot and Bobby--Elliot's younger protege who eventually became his lover and who, during the course of the novel, becomes Sam's. Bobby's inability fully to return Elliot's love drives Elliot to a kind of subdued madness which, ultimately, becomes his ruin.

Another topic which VANITAS explores with great success is Sam's bisexuality--a notion dismissed by Elliot early on as "being halfway out of the closet." Elliot, of course, echoes the sentiment of most gay men, whose hackles are raised at the thought of any of their own cavorting with the enemy--the enemy, here, not being women themselves, but women as representatives of the heterosexual life which gay people rightly believe is being endlessly foisted on them as the "normal" alternative to their own marginalized lives. Olshan is sure to get scant thanks for raising the spectre of bisexuality, but, while dual desire is a multi-faceted issue, Olshan does not shy away from its dimensions or from its consequences. Nor does he--like his character Elliot and much of the gay press--simply dismiss it out of convenience.

Like most of Olshan's characters, Sam does not reside in any box, up to and including Pandora's. While most of his relationships are with men, his "most important" was with a woman, Jessie. Jessie occupies a significant space of the novel, as Sam visits her and her daughter near London. Staying with them and acting like a father to her daughter arouses deeply-buried--or perhaps only nascent--desires in Sam to be a father himself. These feelings bring resolution not only to the novel and to Sam's life, but also to the lives of men from time immemorial.

While the search for love seems to be Sam's pastime, his real obsession is a search for stability--whether in his hopeful affair with Bobby, his complex relationship with Jessie or his ever-growing need, at the midway point of his life, for roots and children. In the end, that desire informs his obsessive search for that elusive "Vanitas" drawing, which he glimpsed in Elliot's apartment early on, for the painting--with its grim reminder that youth and beauty will end--represents a negation of youth's belief in its own indestructibility.

By framing his beautifully-conceived and superbly-written novel about the highest form of human endeavor--loving interaction--to include the spirit of death (in the form of AIDS), Olshan has created a kind of "Vanitas" out of his novel in much the same way that AIDS itself has made a "Vanitas" out of the gay movement.

Joseph Olshan uses the almost interesting gimmick of switching the point of view thrice in the novel, once for each of the main characters. The first of the three sections is written in the point of view of the mother, Susan. Although it is the section that is the most thoughtfully written, he has absolutely no clue about women so Susan's thoughts and words often seem ridiculous. Susan describes other women as having "Lean, shapely legs" and moans about how, after ten years of marriage, she has had to wait TEN WHOLE DAYS for sex. He shows absolutely no understanding of women.
The second section is a thoughtless race to get to the chapter that revives the story, the one told from the Billy's point of view. Really, the only thing that kept me reading was that I wanted to find out whether Billy did in fact drown Mark.
The most interesting character is not one of the main ones, but Susan's sister Tina. Perhaps readers would have been better served with her story.
The mystery unfolds on page one, but there is really no development of it, only backstory for the characters, until the last page. This book's saving grace for me was that it only took about an hour and a half to read.

Joseph Olshan writes beautifully. I first read Joseph Olshan's book "The Nightswimmer" and was truly intrigued by the tale of Will Kaplan. And how his love of swimming and of the ocean play in his life. Then I found this book, "The Waterline", which featured Billy Kaplan, who loved to swim. In both novels, things that are precious and special to Billy/Will are taken away by the water. In "The Waterline", the story is told by three important voices-by his parents, Susan and Michael and by young Billy. Each tale their sides of the story of the one fateful summer day when a drowing took the life of a young boy and what Billy knew. Billy was only seven when this happen and for long 15 years, he and parents sort out what has happened and how to "make things right" again. The only person who truly understands what Billy is going through is his mothers sister, Rita. Rita was traumatized in her young life and can completely relate to what has happened to Billy, that she helps him long distance to find his resolve. I highly recomend this book and that anyone should read "The Nightswimmer" after. Billy /Will lead and interesting life and to find closure. No matter how long it takes