(no subject)
It's been a quiet few days. All I've wanted to do is sleep, and I haven't done much besides sleep, read, edit, and see Sean. Yeasterday and today, I've gotten caught up on LJ, which is why half your inboxes are flooded.
I've finished Un Coeur découvert by Michel Tremblay since I got out, and I've nearly finished another novel, Skinny Legs and All.
There's so much here, more than I could cover in one review.
Overall, I liked the novel, and thought it had to be written. Love may be cliché, but we need more happy gay romances. And it got better as it went on. To its credit, it avoided some of the more obvious plot clichés -- for instance, they didn't kill off Sébastien's mother or make her boyfriend cruel and abusive, which I was half-expecting.
But partly, the lack of plot clichés was because there was no really plot of any kind. It was more episodic, a series of little crises rather than one big one. The one big one -- the main character's readjustment to this kind of a life -- was never tackled head-on, and dozens of threads were left hanging.
In one sense, it was highly original. Love is the most cliché of topics, but rarely do you ever get a story that tackles on the eight million little problems that appear after a relationship begins -- most stories end where love starts. The only thing I've seen quite like it in format in any media is the anime His and Hers Circumstances.
It's style is very plain, which is good in some respects and boring in others. Probably a cultural difference, but I always wonder whey there seems to be no middle ground in French prose fiction between absolute plainness and pure surreality.
Also, Michel Tremblay clearly skipped the day in fiction class where they explained "show, don't tell." Everything here is exposition. Everything is told.
The main narrator was thoroughly unlikeable -- self-righteous, self-absorbed, egotistical, unpleasant, hypocritical. Sometimes this was acknowledged, usually it went unchallenged. He himself was a major barrier to liking the novel, though he gradually got better.
The narrator clearly loathes the gay community, and is disgusted by the hyper-sexuality of club-kid culture. I always wonder why people like that go to clubs, which of course he does.
This really got on my nerves. My pet peeve these days is gay men who find some excuse or another to rag on all the other gay men in the community. I'm sick about hearing all of us are too sexual/too repressed/too moral/too amoral/too radical/too conservative/too femme/too macho and (my personal favourite when it follows any of the above) too critical of one other. Honestly, don't we get enough constant criticism from the outside? Don't we have enough enemies outside?
Worse, the main character seems more willing to tolerate machismo and homophobia from straight men than he is willing to tolerate the sexual practises of other gay men, which is just plain disturbing.
That's the good and the bad of it. I'm glad I read it, overall, both for its own qualities and its place in the gay canon of Canadian lit.
Interestingly, this novel is often referred to as the first "coming-out novel" in French in Canada, while the first coming-out novel in English Canada is Combat Journal: Place d'Armes.
But Place d'Armes is about an English Canadian who sheds his quiet, middle-class (straight) suburban life for the sexual adventurousness of Montreal's gay community, and Un Coeur découvert is about a man who leaves behind the sexual adventurousness of Montreal's gay community for a quiet, middle-class (gay) suburban life.
Strange how the two novels bookend each other. I wonder if that's more a function of cultural community (rural Ontarian versus urban Québécois) or the time they were written (1967 versus 1989).
I guess the short of it was that it was a good novel overall, though flawed in many respects -- largely by the narrator's personality defects. I guess its lack of a real plot isn't a bad thing, as long as the reader's prepared for something more episodic than most novels.
I've finished Un Coeur découvert by Michel Tremblay since I got out, and I've nearly finished another novel, Skinny Legs and All.
There's so much here, more than I could cover in one review.
Overall, I liked the novel, and thought it had to be written. Love may be cliché, but we need more happy gay romances. And it got better as it went on. To its credit, it avoided some of the more obvious plot clichés -- for instance, they didn't kill off Sébastien's mother or make her boyfriend cruel and abusive, which I was half-expecting.
But partly, the lack of plot clichés was because there was no really plot of any kind. It was more episodic, a series of little crises rather than one big one. The one big one -- the main character's readjustment to this kind of a life -- was never tackled head-on, and dozens of threads were left hanging.
In one sense, it was highly original. Love is the most cliché of topics, but rarely do you ever get a story that tackles on the eight million little problems that appear after a relationship begins -- most stories end where love starts. The only thing I've seen quite like it in format in any media is the anime His and Hers Circumstances.
It's style is very plain, which is good in some respects and boring in others. Probably a cultural difference, but I always wonder whey there seems to be no middle ground in French prose fiction between absolute plainness and pure surreality.
Also, Michel Tremblay clearly skipped the day in fiction class where they explained "show, don't tell." Everything here is exposition. Everything is told.
The main narrator was thoroughly unlikeable -- self-righteous, self-absorbed, egotistical, unpleasant, hypocritical. Sometimes this was acknowledged, usually it went unchallenged. He himself was a major barrier to liking the novel, though he gradually got better.
The narrator clearly loathes the gay community, and is disgusted by the hyper-sexuality of club-kid culture. I always wonder why people like that go to clubs, which of course he does.
This really got on my nerves. My pet peeve these days is gay men who find some excuse or another to rag on all the other gay men in the community. I'm sick about hearing all of us are too sexual/too repressed/too moral/too amoral/too radical/too conservative/too femme/too macho and (my personal favourite when it follows any of the above) too critical of one other. Honestly, don't we get enough constant criticism from the outside? Don't we have enough enemies outside?
Worse, the main character seems more willing to tolerate machismo and homophobia from straight men than he is willing to tolerate the sexual practises of other gay men, which is just plain disturbing.
That's the good and the bad of it. I'm glad I read it, overall, both for its own qualities and its place in the gay canon of Canadian lit.
Interestingly, this novel is often referred to as the first "coming-out novel" in French in Canada, while the first coming-out novel in English Canada is Combat Journal: Place d'Armes.
But Place d'Armes is about an English Canadian who sheds his quiet, middle-class (straight) suburban life for the sexual adventurousness of Montreal's gay community, and Un Coeur découvert is about a man who leaves behind the sexual adventurousness of Montreal's gay community for a quiet, middle-class (gay) suburban life.
Strange how the two novels bookend each other. I wonder if that's more a function of cultural community (rural Ontarian versus urban Québécois) or the time they were written (1967 versus 1989).
I guess the short of it was that it was a good novel overall, though flawed in many respects -- largely by the narrator's personality defects. I guess its lack of a real plot isn't a bad thing, as long as the reader's prepared for something more episodic than most novels.