Abdul
A Black chef whose presence continues the novel’s examination of racialized looking.
To participate in social and sexual situations on terms Will does not fully understand.
The book
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeAbdul is a Black chef connected with Charles’s club and the social world around Staines.
Will is attracted to him and again turns racial difference into aesthetic attention.
The guide distinguishes Abdul’s presence from Will’s limited perception of him.
How the book draws them
- Self-possessedHe is not merely an object of Will’s observation.
- SkilledHis work as a chef gives him a defined social role.
- EroticizedWill’s attraction repeats a pattern of racialized looking.
- Part of the networkHe links the club to Staines’s wider circle.
If you like The Swimming-Pool Library
If you like Alan Hollinghurst
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Charles Bukowski
American poet and novelist of Los Angeles rooming houses, racetracks and the post office, who quit his job to write when a publisher offered him a hundred dollars a month. He came to Paris once, in September 1978, drank his way through a live television book programme and walked off the set — and French television has been replaying it ever since.
View author
Claude McKay
Jamaican-born poet and novelist, and one of the essential writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He arrived in Paris from Moscow in 1923 and stayed in France until 1928, writing Home to Harlem there — and forming a low opinion of the rich, white expatriate scene that dominates most accounts of the period. His Paris is the same years as Hemingway's and almost nothing like it.
View author
Martha Gellhorn
War correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War, D-Day, and conflicts across five more decades; Hemingway's third wife, 1940–1945.
View author