La biblioteca de la piscina

William Beckwith is a twenty-five-year-old homosexual, aristocrat, reasonably wealthy, cheerfully promiscuous, and decidedly hedonistic. One afternoon when he is flirting in a public toilet, he saves the life of Lord Nantwich, an eccentric character, also homosexual but with as many years as the century, who went to the urinals to remember past glories and has suffered a cardiac arrest. Days later they meet again at the Corinthian, a gymnastic club that young Beckwith frequents and uses as "hunting ground." Lord Nantwich, a former Crown official in Africa -and, like William, an dmirer of young people of color- who knew Ronald Firbank and other leading figures in English gay culture, wants young Beckwith to write his biography. He invites you into his home, lets you glimpse the charms and splendors of the gay community in times past, and entrusts him with his diaries. The pool library unfolds as a vast, complex, joyous, and sometimes bitter chronicle of gay life and culture in England, where past-Lord Nantwich- and present -William Beckwith- display their objects of desire, fetishes, codes more. or less secrets, uses and sexual and love customs. And Becwith will eventually discover that behind these powders the mud was hidden, and that his history and that of the old lord are much more inextricably linked than he had ever suspected.