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BOOK REPORT

I have finished the non-fiction reflection essays, essays on writing essays,

To Show and Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Philip Lopate (2012)

Lopate is an essayist and teacher and has put together this tutorial and reflection about "serious" writing. Isn't all writing serious? No.

I got this because I liked the review I read and because I do a lot of writing. Here and there.

I got a lot out of the book but not what I expected.

I am not looking to change my style any time soon and this blog is not actually literary non-fiction. But it was a nice walk in the park with a guy who can squeeze the feeling that fiction gives a reader out of his practice of essays.

This is because he believes in making himself a "character" from whom the reader can learn something s/he never knew before.

He likes the idea of both showing and telling. Why shortchange oneself, and proceeds to bash a few other icons in the process.

He points out that the most interesting non-fiction writing is where the writer sets out to be contrary in some way to conventional wisdom.

I can get down with that.

This was toilet reading so it went on for quite a long time. I was glad to get to the end because I wanted to read his actual real essays in another book. Coming soon but not too soon. I seldom read serially.

The other book I just finished was Call Me by Your Name by Andre Acimin (2007)

I read this before when it came out and since I wanted to get Acimin's latest novel I decided, as I will, to get all of his work and read it up to the latest.

This is a story of longing and it aches with sensuality. Need. Frustration and consummation. Then, regret. But happy regret.

A young man falls in love with a summer boarder. His dad takes in writers working on a book, a dissertation. When Oliver arrives it starts. Elio, the younger man, is smitten. But resists.

Yes they are gay. An incidental fact but one which through its slightly transgressive nature (gay, younger older, and so on) slows the process of mutual seduction down to a snails pace.

It is beautifully written in an idyllic location and nothing bad happens. Nothing. What a relief. We see the story through the memory of the older version of the younger man so it is a memoir.

It is very sexy in its way, these people move much more slowly in their time than we might in this era. So there is a lot of pentup energy behind the connections that are made.

In his essay “Pensione Eolo,” Aciman writes, “Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that loss.” In other words, Elio and Oliver might give each other up, but the book that conjures them doesn’t give up either one. In fact, it brings them back together, reunites them, for a glorious endless summer. In the book, the river can be revisited. The closing words echo the title: a phrase simultaneously of elegy and of invitation.

It is not porn of course, and is probably not erotica either. It is a simple story of a complicated process of desire and attraction and how it might work mutually.

Great writing.

I remembered some of it but had "forgotten" the denouement. So I got to relive the delicious sensations of this kind of mind, body, soul attraction.

I am moving on to the next novel by Kent Haruf which involves the same small Colorado town and some of the people who live there. And some new situations too.

Labels: books