Evanescence. The first word out of my mouth after finishing the book. A fleeting moment of perfection, and then it's gone. Almost a year on, if I bumped into DBJ tomorrow, it would very probably be gone, even though he's the closest to the ideal that I've ever seen in my life.
I fell in love, of course. Totally predictable, given my penchant for melodramatic emotions, and my propensity for falling for beautiful, but possibly flawed fictional characters. Lucette in Ada, the eponymous boy in Loving Sander, and now Tony. How could I not fall in love with the ravishingly gorgeous, preternaturally intelligent and stunningly talented Tony. It's a very strange, double-edged kind of love, though, a jolie-laide kind of love, dripping with melancholy, pervaded with a sense of loss, albeit maybe the loss of something I've never had and never will have.
Having waited so long to read the book, I'm not sure yet where it fits in my literary 'hit parade'. I'll need to read it again, but first impressions are that it won't be at the very top. I did enjoy it, but in a slightly masochistic kind of way. It didn't bring tears to my eyes, although I was within hailing distance of that kind of emotion once or twice. It would be an exaggeration to call it an anticlimax, but it did kind of end with something of a whimper. Worth devoting my day to, though....I think.
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A little edit, with a further few hours of thought about the book.
I think it's the ending that I'm struggling with. I don't quite understand it. Superficially, it seems like a cop-out, although I may be thinking anachronistically in saying that, given that the story was written more than 40 years ago. To contrive a last-minute separation, and then to have Tony become something he wasn't before, something that wasn't even prefigured before, seems strange. Maybe I've got a vested interest in having wanted Tony and David to end up together, even though I knew before I'd read the book that they didn't, but the way it was done, the 'suddenly he's straight' kind of plot device seemed very dissonant.
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Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B
Dang it, a spoiler with no warning! HAHAHA
ReplyDeleteI will need to find this and read it.
Peace <3
Jay
Hello Jay
ReplyDeleteSorry about the spoiler. I hope you don't take as long as me to find a copy - and don't have to spend as much money, either!
Love & best wishes
Sammy B
Hello everyone
ReplyDeleteOn what has not been a very happy day, I've just found something that made me laugh out loud, albeit through decidedly mordant humour - I've just found a suggestion, as part of a customer review at Amazon, that Sandel should be made into a film. A friend of mine, who had read the book, said it wouldn't even get published nowadays, and I have to agree, so the idea of some film industry executive blithely producing a film based around a love affair between a man and a boy is utterly laughable. Any such hypothetical executive would probably be lynched, courtesy of tabloid demagoguery.
Love & best wishes
Sammy B