Tag: LGBTQ

Review 2604: The Safekeep

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In 1961 Utrecht, Isabel lives in the house her uncle bought for her mother during the war. Her mother died, and Isabel is very protective of the house’s contents, although she doesn’t own them. Her uncle intends to leave the house to her oldest brother Louis.

Isabel is in her thirties—particular, with a dislike of things that are different, stiff, unfriendly, and solitary. She has no sexual experience. She doesn’t like people to touch the things in the house, and she frequently thinks the help is stealing.

Isabel, Louis, and her other brother Hendrik have periodic dinners in the house, although both men now live in The Hague. Louis often misses the dinner, though, or if he comes, he brings his latest in a long string of girls he’s been in love with. These relationships only last a short while, however, so Isabel and Hendrik resent the inclusion of the women. Isabel, though, refuses to invite Hendrik’s partner, Sebastian.

Louis comes to dinner with a new girlfriend, Eva, whom Isabel thinks is low-class and treats with hostility. To her dismay, Louis tells her he must travel for business and wants Isabel to have Eva for a guest while he is away. He points out that the house isn’t really Isabel’s but is intended for him.

So, Isabel reluctantly takes Eva in, but she is not nice about it even though Eva tries to be friendly. The atmosphere is charged.

I found a lot of this novel very interesting, especially in its revelation of how The Netherlands treated Jews returning from the concentration camps after the war. Yes, mild spoiler, this novel does have to do with the aftermath of the war. I am not a fan of explicit sex, however, no matter who it involves, and there was a lot of that going on for about 100 pages.

The novel takes an unexpected turn at the end, and I think, besides the character study of Isabel, I found that part the most interesting.

I read this book for my Walter Scott Prize Project.

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Review 2594: Clear

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I have read some excellent novellas lately, a form I don’t usually choose. That makes me glad I participated in Novellas in November last year. I think I read about this book during that event.

John Ferguson is a 19th century Scottish minister on a difficult mission. Because of the breakup of the Scottish church, in which he participated, he has left his church to join the Free Church and is thus unemployed, no new churches having actually been established. He and his wife are entirely without money, and he doesn’t want to borrow from his brother-in-law, so he takes a job of surveying a small island in the far north of Scotland for clearance. The island only has one inhabitant, who will be forced to leave, and part of John’s job is to tell him.

On the island, Ivar has been alone for many years. The rest of his family left years before, because the island couldn’t support them anymore after foolish decisions by the owner. Ivar thought it could support him, and the factor hasn’t even stopped by to collect rent in years. He lives with a goat, an old horse, a blind cow, and some chickens.

When John arrives, he promptly falls off a cliff and is badly injured. Ivar finds him and takes care of him. They don’t speak a word of each other’s language, but they begin to like each other. John, though, can’t bring himself to try to explain why he’s there.

In the meantime, Mary hears about other clearances being done by John’s employer that disturb her. She decides to go get John.

This is a little gem of a book with a surprising ending. In its few pages, it pulls you totally into the story. It’s a keeper.

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Review 2583: The Magician’s Assistant

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Sabine was very much in love with her husband, Parsifal, when he died unexpectedly. A handsome, affectionate, and charismatic man, he was also gay. For Sabine, it was love at first sight, which he hired her as his magician’s assistant.

Sabine lived with Parsifal and his lover Phan before Phan died from AIDS. Parsifal was also diagnosed with AIDS (this was the 90s when it was a death sentence), but he died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm. Sabine is devastated and finds it hard to get out of bed. Phan was wealthy, so she is alone in a large house with Rabbit.

Although Parsifal had told her he was from Connecticut and had no family, Sabine has a shock coming. He does indeed have a family, a mother and two sisters in Nebraska, and his real name is Guy Fetters. She learns from his lawyer that Parsifal has been sending them money and left them some in his will. Sabine hypothesizes reasons why she has never heard of them but decides to call Mrs. Fetters. Eventually, she agrees to take her and her daughter around a visit of L. A. Sabine’s parents think she should have nothing to do with them.

Sabine likes Dot Fetters and her youngest daughter, Bertie. She begins learning new things about Parsifal. When they are leaving to go home, she agrees to visit them and attend Bertie’s upcoming wedding.

This story is an absorbing and touching one. Sabine learns to deal with her grief and finds out more about Parsifal. His family hears stories from her about their exotic-seeming life. The truth about why he left Nebraska is a difficult one, but Dot Fetters has regretted not trying to find him.

I love this novel. I thought I had read it before when I picked it up for A Century of Books, but it was unfamiliar. Patchett knows a lot about human nature.

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Review 2571: #1952 Club! The Price of Salt

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Here we go with my last entry this year for the 1952 Club!

If you’re accustomed to Patricia Highsmith’s suspense novels, like the Ripley novels or Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt may be a big change of pace. The W. W. Norton and Company edition I read tries to slant it more in that direction by using phrases like “sexual obsession” and “stalking” on the cover, but it’s not like that.

Therese Belivet is unhappy in her life. She is a set designer who can’t find a job, so she has taken a temporary Christmas-season job with a large department store. She hates that job. She dates a man who wants to marry her—Richard—but she doesn’t want to marry him, even though she likes him.

Then one day at work she sees a beautiful blonde woman about 10 or 15 years older than herself. She is immediately struck by her. After she sells her a doll, she puts a little thank you note into the package to be delivered, not signing it but using her employee number. To her surprise, the woman, Carol Aird, calls her at the store.

They begin a hesitant friendship, with Carol often picking her up to spend the night at her house. She lives alone because she is divorcing her husband, who is trying to get custody of their daughter. Therese, who is madly in love with Carol, can’t figure out how Carol feels, as she is cold at times.

Professionally, things are looking up a little for Therese. She gets a short-term job doing sets for an off-Broadway play and has the attention of a major director. Things are getting rocky with Richard, though, and she can’t figure out the situation with Carol. Then Carol invites her to accompany her on a cross-country driving trip.

If this book wasn’t written in 1952 or was about a man and woman, it would more or less be a standard romance with the entanglement of a 50s divorce. However, because of when it was published, it was a daring novel, especially for the United States. (I have read other similar books from English writers, published earlier.) Like many of Highsmith’s books, I wasn’t drawn to any of her characters, but I have never thought Highsmith cared about that kind of thing, in fact, may have preferred protagonists that readers don’t like.

I don’t know what I feel about it. I guess I admire Highsmith’s courage in writing it but otherwise felt sort of meh about it.

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Review 2538: The New Life

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The New Life was a slow read for me. It took me almost a week, which is unusual for me with fiction. I read it for my Walter Scott Prize project.

The novel is loosely based on two men, John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis, who in the early 1890s wrote a book together. When I looked them up, it didn’t seem as if it was very loosely based—Crewe gives his characters almost identical names. But then I realized it is set after Symonds’ death in order to bring in the trial of Oscar Wilde.

John Addington is a gay man who is married and has three grown daughters. He is known for writing about a vast array of subjects. Henry Ellis is an idealistic, naïve younger man, a doctor. He marries a good friend, Edith, and their intention is to lead the way to the New Life. I wasn’t exactly sure what that entailed, but at minimum it seems to be that spouses are equal partners. Unfortunately for Henry, they never discussed the sexual side of marriage. He thought there would be consummation; Edith, a lesbian, did not. So, Henry continues a virgin with a fascination for the subject of sex. They live separately, and soon Edith has a new friend, Angelica.

Henry wishes to make a scientific study of sex and publish the results, and since he knows some gay friends, referred to at that time as “inverts,” he decides to start with them, having a theory that rather than an illness or perversion, inversion is natural. He decides to invite John Addington to join him in his project, not because he thinks he is gay, but because of his reputation as a writer about various topics.

John has been getting more tired of keeping his secret as an invert. He has confessed to his wife and occasionally has brought a man home for sex, an action that I thought was breathtakingly cruel. Now he meets Frank, a much younger, lower-class man who wants to be his friend. When John sees Henry’s proposal, he thinks such a project will change people’s ideas about inversion so that he can be free to do what he wants.

The men write the book and begin looking for a publisher. However, just at that time, Oscar Wilde is found guilty of inversion and is sentenced to jail. The backlash is such that the two fear their work is unpublishable.

If you are not a fan of graphic sex scenes, this won’t be the book for you, especially the first few hundred pages. The novel opens, for example, with a very explicit and detailed wet dream. I am not really a fan of explicit sex scenes in novels, so I found the first half of the novel hard going, despite it being well written and having vivid descriptions of life in Victorian London. (It has a wonderful description of a day that is so smoggy no one can see where they’re going.)

The novel picked up for me after the book, entitled Sexual Inversion, is published and the police go after a bookseller for selling indecent material, their book. Then it becomes about the reactions of the various characters once there is a threat to their own lives.

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Review 2481: Memorial

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Benson is a young Black gay man living in Houston with his Japanese boyfriend Mike. When Mike’s mother is due to arrive for a visit for the first time in years, Mike tells Benson that his father is dying and he’s going to Osaka to be with him, leaving his mother with Benson, who has never met her before.

While Benson navigates the situation with Mitsuko, Mike’s mother, he also considers his relationship with Mike, which has been deteriorating lately. For his part, Mike must work through his resentment that his father deserted him and his mother when he was a teen. That, and Eiju’s general prickliness.

This novel explores the difficulties both men have had with their families and their relationships with each other. Each man also tentatively begins getting to know another gay young man.

Although this novel is supposed to be funny, the humor went right over my head. I found it perceptive and sometimes touching, although I am not a fan of explicit sex scenes. I read it for my James Tait Black project.

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Review 2443: After Sappho

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I read After Sappho for my James Tait Black project. It is experimental, written in short vignettes that jump around in time and from person to person. It tells the stories of lesbian women, mostly literary figures, trying to make a place for themselves. It begins in the late 19th century with women fascinated by the poet Sappho. Some of them study Ancient Greek, some dress like ancient Greeks or re-enact ancient plays, some travel to Greece.

The novel is vividly written in first person plural or in third person, at times slyly ironic, sometimes engaged in word play, often invigorating and with lots of sexual metaphors. It is interesting, telling of repressive laws against women, particularly in Italy, and reporting actual aggressively misogynistic “scientific” or political statements by men. It goes on to tell of the accomplishments and tragedies and love affairs of its protagonists, largely ignoring the men in their lives. For example, from this novel, you wouldn’t know there was a Leonard Woolf, just a Vita Sackville-West.

Although I found the novel very interesting at first, there were so many characters that I couldn’t keep track of them or remember which events happened to which ones. I could only track the ones I was already familiar with. For example, the novel begins and ends with Lina Poletti, even though she disappears about halfway through, so she is obviously important to Schwartz, but by the end I couldn’t remember her. I felt like I needed a chart.

And yet, I feel that with more character definition, I might have remembered all of them, but these short vignettes that tell of an activity or something they said didn’t really provide a cohesive picture to me of what the women were like.

So, I applaud this novel’s daring devices, but they didn’t really work for me.

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Review 2441: Real Life

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Almost from the beginning of this novel, I was struck by how morose it seemed. Yet I couldn’t quite figure out why it seemed so much more dour than novels with similar stories, like A Little Life or Shuggie Bain. Both of the main characters in these novels are White, while Wallace, the main character of Real Life, is Black, but is that the difference? It doesn’t seem like it should be.

Wallace is the only Black student in a graduate biochemistry program at an unnamed Midwestern university that is probably the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has been having problems in his program. His supervising professor, Simone, seems to disapprove of him, and he has been blamed for the carelessness of another student, Dana. Simone seems to think Dana is a star. Later in the novel, Dana makes a racist remark to him and then reports him as being a misogynist.

Wallace and his fellow graduate students seem to be working toward their degrees expecting real life to begin once they get them. Wallace, though, is considering how much he wishes to continue despite knowing the degree is his best chance to succeed, as a Black queer man from a poor family.

Wallace has a group of friends he hangs out with, but they are all White and he doesn’t really feel he fits in with them. He is attracted to Miller but doesn’t even know if Miller likes him.

This novel minutely documents a few days in Wallace’s life. The writing is detailed, whether describing Wallace’s experiment, which has been contaminated, perhaps intentionally by Dana, or a character’s eating habits, or a gay sex scene. Wallace faces quite a few slights and insults in just three days, but he doesn’t really defend himself or point them out. He feels he is trying to fit in, but he keeps himself removed from everything, including his friends, by always saying everything is fine, even when it’s clearly not. I felt frustrated several times by his refusal to tell his side of the story or stand up for himself.

I also didn’t understand the violence in his eventual sexual relationship with Miller (who insists he is not gay). In fact, I often didn’t understand characters’ interactions with each other.

Although I believe this novel ended on a slightly more positive note (or did it? it was certainly ironic), it seemed in some ways that Wallace makes things more difficult for himself. Also, although he certainly faces incidents of racism, he also often makes broad judgments about White people, including his friends. I personally also do not enjoy explicit sex scenes, but that’s just me. I read this novel for my Booker Prize project.

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Review 2314: Bolla

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Arsim is an Albanian literature student in Pristina, Kosovo, in 1995 when he meets Miloš, a Serbian medical student. They are immediately attracted to each other and soon begin a torrid affair. Although he is young, Arsim has already been married for four years to Ajshe, and on the day he consummates his relations with Miloš, she tells him she is pregnant.

The affair continues through Miloš’s graduation, but shortly thereafter, it becomes too dangerous for Albanians to stay in Kosovo, and Ajshe and her brother arrange for the family to leave the country. As soon as he learns Arsim is leaving, Miloš joins the Serbian army.

Arsim’s relatively linear narrative is broken by short sections narrated by Miloš that are harder to understand and move back and forth through time. He is the more fragile of the two and becomes damaged by his war experience.

This novel, which I read for my James Tait Black project, is beautifully written and ultimately haunting. However, I so disliked Arsim that it was hard for me to read. He is absolutely vile in his behavior to almost everyone in the book but especially to his wife and children, whom he periodically deserts and beats when he is there. When he thinks later that he did his best by them, he defines this as financial support. Really, he deserts anyone who poses any difficulties.

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Review 2312: Bright Young Women

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Bright Young Women is a novel centering around the true story of a famous serial killer, whose last killings took place in a sorority at Florida State University in Tallahassee in 1978. Apparently, Knoll believes as I do that men commit such acts at least partially for the attention so she calls the killer The Defendant throughout the book instead of his name. So will I.

The novel is narrated by two different people in three different time frames. In 1978, Pamela is the president of a sorority and is about to become an important witness. In 2021, she is still trying to track down evidence that will lead to the body of one of his earlier victims.

That victim is Ruth, the second narrator, who in 1975 had the misfortune to meet The Defendant at the beach in Issaquah, Washington.

This novel doesn’t want to focus on The Defendant so much as on the girls he was after. The novel sticks with Pamela from the day before the crime through the days after she sees a strange man fleeing the sorority house, but it focuses on Pamela’s self-development afterwards. At the beginning, she is living an expected life as head of the sorority with the brightest girls on campus, engaged to Brian and planning to attend law school, only an inferior school even though she was accepted to Columbia because Brian couldn’t get in. Pamela is obviously in shock after the event because she doesn’t realize for hours that two of the girls are dead. But she clearly tells the sheriff that although she at first thought the man she saw was Roger, her best friend Denise’s boyfriend, she realized the man was a stranger. Nevertheless, the sheriff focuses on Roger, and this is only one instance of the incompetence of the law enforcement work on the case. Pamela is disregarded and patronized time and again in this novel.

One of Knoll’s themes is her idea that The Defendant, having performed poorly at college and not having been accepted into law school, was picking out successful, attractive women to kill. Then the media fed into his own view of himself by depicting him as smarter and more handsome than he was, despite his ridiculous performance when he eventually defended himself. Basically, they admired the killer while denigrating his victims.

Ruth’s self-evolution takes her from a lesbian woman dominated by an unloving mother who doesn’t want the neighbors to know her “shame” to a confident, lovely girl who has found a place for herself, largely because of the help of her friend Tina. It is Tina who later comes to Pamela and tells her she thinks The Defendant murdered Ruth as well as the sorority girls. Although Tina is right about everything, law enforcement disregards her and warns Pamela against her.

Knoll’s late 1970s certainly sound more like the 60s to me. In Michigan, I didn’t know any girls who were interested in sororities or still used hair spray or dressed as described in the novel anymore. Then again, it was Florida.

I found this a fascinating novel with a strong feminist message. I am looking forward to what Knoll does next.

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