plutonian reviewed Blackouts by Justin Torres
"...a subversive, variant culture; an inheritance."
4 stars
It's hard to know where to even start reviewing this. This was an emotionally intense book, and occasionally so gorgeously written that sometimes I would have to pause for a few minutes just to savor the sentences I had just read. It's experimental fiction, but it's very approachable. It's essentially a series of conversations between a dying man (Juan) and his younger friend, both queer. Torres uses everything from found photographs to children's books illustrations to film scripts to tell his story. You'll skip between history and fantasy, the past and the present, the personal and the universal.
It's a novel about the stories we are allowed to tell about ourselves; specifically, the stories queer people are allowed to tell about themselves. And it's astonishing to me how much of this history I did. not. know. Let me be clear: I knew almost none of it. I'd never heard of …
It's hard to know where to even start reviewing this. This was an emotionally intense book, and occasionally so gorgeously written that sometimes I would have to pause for a few minutes just to savor the sentences I had just read. It's experimental fiction, but it's very approachable. It's essentially a series of conversations between a dying man (Juan) and his younger friend, both queer. Torres uses everything from found photographs to children's books illustrations to film scripts to tell his story. You'll skip between history and fantasy, the past and the present, the personal and the universal.
It's a novel about the stories we are allowed to tell about ourselves; specifically, the stories queer people are allowed to tell about themselves. And it's astonishing to me how much of this history I did. not. know. Let me be clear: I knew almost none of it. I'd never heard of Jan or Zhenya Gay. I actually assumed that they were an elaborate fiction; same with the Sex Variants book. And I was enraged by that, by how much queer history has been buried, redacted, blacked out from the record. I was learning right along with our protagonist.
Torres takes the bones of this history and fleshes it out, fictionalizing real people's lives, giving them back their stories and their humanity. But at the core of this novel is a very intimate and tender story about two people who love and care for each other deeply; and I, in turn, cared deeply about them. It's rare to read an ambitious book that succeeds so completely on every level.
