Queer

I first read Giovanni’s Room four years ago. I remember gripping it tightly the whole time, bent over and racing through it. Not 200 pages, Baldwin moves through the story so incisively that it really does feel like the drop of a guillotine. I do not remember detesting David, our narrator, so much on my first read. Depressed moody people may be able to relate to either being or wanting to be in an empty home with a big bottle of wine and looking moodily out of windows (certain I can), but David does begin to feel like an alien. In his early experience with Joey, he vanishes out of insecurity and fear. That’s understandable—coming of age, a much different era than we’re in now. Even in our current era, I can remember first realizing I’d fallen for a boy in one of my high school classes, and that was terrifying. ...

Another Guibert. I expected this one to speak a little more to me, as it is the intersection of photography and writing. Little parts of it, especially the brief entry “Contact Sheet” (see note for p75 below) did, and others were worth reading, but maybe had quieter voices. The premise of using words as a method of constituting photographs (the ghost images) in the reader’s mind is interesting; it is what all fiction writing at the least is, of a sort. Stephen King calls writing telepathy. Sometimes the writer strings words together that are outlandish and have nothing to do with anything else, purely because the stringing of them evokes a certain emotion or sensory experience. Other times it is visual description to the nth degree, forcing the image the writer beholds into the reader’s mind (willingly or not). Guibert falls somewhere in the middle. Some of the photographs and paintings referenced speak more to me in Guibert’s words than they do on a computer screen, and some of his words I badly wish I could see printed as a photo. At some point soon I will mindfully go through his photobook The Only Face and I’m curious if I will discover any of these spoken photos in those pages. ...

Rather difficult to “review” journals. What’s the reader to evaluate, the prose? How interesting the trivia? I don’t typically read Goodreads reviews before I write my thoughts, but I felt pretty sure that mine wouldn’t change much. I read a few lamentations, Oh, Hervé needed an editor. I do not want journals to be heavily edited. I think that ruins them. Sure, maybe a few typo corrections or whatever, but to have entries removed by someone else veers into making judgement about what is important and what is not. Two people are empowered to make that decision, the journalist and the reader, especially with a posthumous publication. Especially with a writer so known for being ‘merciless’ and so willing to be pornographic in his work. I would like the thing warts and all. ...

Theodoridou’s recent book is my small press club’s pick for June, and what a strange little book. It is a retelling, kind of, of the Bluebeard story. I think I first encountered the Bluebeard story in Stephen King’s The Shining, but probably before in some form as well. In general, I think the book is quite good. Theodoridou’s framing device for Sour Cherry features an unnamed narrator reciting the events of the tale as though they are a ghost story, presumably to “you” the reader, who also may or may not be a child. ...

I became aware of Guibert via Philippe Besson’s Lie With Me, and so picked up Written in Invisible Ink, a collection of short stories which I had mixed feelings about but generally liked. Crazy for Vincent has been on my saved titles list on ThriftBooks for quite a while and I finally found a copy. It’s a short little diary, told reverse-chronologically, of Hervé’s love for Vincent. It begins in 1989 at the end of November, with Vincent’s death. I often forgot that we are moving back through time, through the period of Hervé’s knowing of and love for (obsession with?) Vincent. In a way it is fitting that we start with Vincent’s death, because we have no sense of the book-Hervé’s continued life afterwards, it is as if he, too, died. ...

Greenwell’s follow up to What Belongs to You feels more distinctly like a collection of short stories. I picked the book off my shelf before heading to work, unwilling to scrape my brain against Dostoevsky on my 50-minute morning metro ride. Small Rain, my first Greenwell and the follow up to this book, knocked me flat on my back, and I enjoyed What Belongs very much. So much that I’ve been saving Cleanness for just an occasion as this, a need for something I knew would capture me. ...

This will be a short note. Ana Simo’s Heartland was my small press book club’s March pick, and wow! Unfortunately, I did not like it. I found it so grating to read that I couldn’t finish it, despite getting about 90 pages into its 200something pagecount. I felt the use of slurs so over the top that it smelled like an amateur novelist trying to scare the reader, to tell them, Hey, this is Serious Stuff. But it did not work for me, and only made me roll my eyes. ...

February’s book club pick. I felt excited to vaguely engineer the polls such that we could finally cover a Semiotexte title, not to mention one that I was certain would be weird and gay. The certainty proved well-founded, because I more or less am not sure what happened in the book, but I enjoyed every page, such that some of these very sad paragraphs can be enjoyed. Gary Indiana’s book is at least faintingly autobiographical, though whose to say just how much. Some parts seem so clearly translated from real people that I refuse to believe their synthetics. I did not read the introduction before reading the book so became educated that at least one character seems to be directly inspired by Susan Sontag, which I found just delicious. ...

“Sex was the reply to any question.” There’s a lot of sex in this book, and a lot of it is quite hot to read. But it is not exactly smut. There is something in it of the loss of sense, the obliteration of the person by way of pleasure into nothingness. All that aside, a lot of it is also simply hot to read. I bought this without knowing anything about it in the NYRB sale. I saw the penis-graced cover (in what I will call an art style I do not like, apologies to the artist Louis Fratino), saw that it was apparently pretty gay, and figured why not. The back jacket has a quote from William S. Burroughs: ...

As soon as I finished Small Rain, or at least once I snapped out of the adoring daze in which it left me, I ordered copies of Greenwell’s other books, this along with Cleanness. The three share a loose continuity, with (apparently) the same unnamed narrator. This book following him through a few years spent in Bulgaria, as he entwines with and parts from Mitko. Greenwell’s prose is as lovely here as in Small Rain, and I sometimes re-read sentences just to soak in them. Elements feel so tangible and real that they risk implanting ‘false’ memories, or drawing out those that share kinship in your own life, reflecting and refracting off these written words. Such was the flash to our protagonist’s history with his father on page 72: ...