Twelve years after his critically acclaimed debut We animalsAmerican author Justin Torres has written a second novel that will once again inspire readers to compare his life with that of its protagonist. Just like the narrator power outages, When Torres was a teenager, his parents committed him to a mental hospital because he was gay.
The emotional scars of these kinds of events, which leave the narrator “feverish with anger, shame and unasked questions,” are part of a larger, strange story that Torres unearths in a novel that combines fiction, autobiography and real people. Documents and photographs.
The intertwined stories of an unnamed twenty-year-old narrator and his older friend Juan Gay, who dies in “The Palace”, a run-down gay refuge in a remote part of the American desert. Both are of Puerto Rican descent, like Torres, but as the narrator says of his similarities to Juan: “I don’t just mean ethnicity or skin color; The similarity is deeper, it also concerns the method…”
As Juan lies on his deathbed, he and the narrator entertain each other by recounting events that are alternately disturbing, erotic, and moving. They also bring together the life of Jan Gay, a real-life lesbian sexologist with ties to American anarchist Emma Goldman and Andy Warhol, who briefly served as young Juan’s guardian in Torres’ story.
Jan’s interviews with gay men in the 1920s and 1930s played a crucial role in this. General optionsa real study of the “homosexual models” of 1941. The doctors manipulated Yang’s texts to express their view that, as Juan says, “being homosexual is clearly insane.”
Juan – narrator power outages a copy of a study in which much of the text was edited and the remaining visible words were combined to create new elliptical meanings, often erotic (“I was not unimaginative… carnal… unimaginable”), author of a technique known as erasure poetry. The novel’s title refers both to these obscure texts and to the narrator’s habit of losing consciousness during traumatic events.
Beyond sexuality, the novel is also a meditation on race and class, and Torres writes astutely about the emotional impact of low economic power in society. For example, the narrator boasts that he makes a living doing casual sex work and then adds, “However, the habit of poverty ran deep, and beneath the surface I felt the same old fear.” a vague but terrifying insistence.
power outages With short vignette-like chapters and poetic precision in the prose, it clocks in at just under 300 pages. However, the variety of concepts can be overwhelming, and I wish Torres had taken things slower.
On the other hand, there is a strong sense that Torres wants to explore what Juan calls “disillusionment as art.” Having failed to satisfy the reader, Juan suggests, they continue to hold on to it. It might even be “a little twisted,” Torres said in a recent interview. But you might also just want to move more slowly, because the novel may seem like it’s just shying away from important themes.
These caveats aside, in exploring the history of Ian Gay’s work and his relationship to homosexuality, Torres has delved deeply into the mysteries of a hidden past to create a work that is at once formally innovative – in a way reminiscent of the work of so many different contemporary writers. as Ben Lerner reminds us. Garth Greenwell and Sheila Heti belong to the broad literary genre of autofiction and have political implications.
Down to the last sentence, Torres blurs the line between himself and his characters, but when there’s so much to admire and think about, it doesn’t matter what’s real and what’s imagined.
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.