As a child I looked forward to growing up, so this story of two sixteen-year-old boys who meet and fall in love felt like the start of a great journeyAs a child I looked forward to growing up, so this story of two sixteen-year-old boys who meet and fall in love felt like the start of a great journey. In fact, their meeting is the culmination, not the outset, of an almost mythical union. For not every boy wants to, or will, grow up.
The Garden God is a 73-page novella to which the Valancourt edition adds footnotes for the literary allusions and an introduction by Michael Kaylor. A short story by Reid and two poems round this edition out at about 150 pages. Kaylor's discussion of "Uranian" literature gives readers a perspective on both the story and the emergence of a modern same-sex self-awareness.
This modern vista developed parallel with, but more and more opposed to, that of the Uranians, who for their part provide a link connecting gay relationships today with those going back to Greek mythology. Uranian literature constituted a decidedly aristocratic link against the egalitarian democracy of a newly explicit sexuality as well as institutional church morality.
The allure of the Uranian appeal among gay men gave way to the allure of the Catholic Church and the societal repression of the mid-twentieth century. The Brownshirt sucker punch delivered in Brideshead Revisited exemplified the triumph of institutional morals; whatever was left of a Uranian sensibility dissolved into modern gay fiction. It is no more.
But about the story. Graham, one of the boys, grew up as a child with an imaginary friend, a vision from Greek mythology that resembles Harold, the boy he meets as an adolescent. The tale is told in a setting of idyllic perfection, a stage deliberately meant to frame an exalted way of life and love.
As the story progresses it seems ever more possible that Harold and the "garden god" of Graham's youth are one and the same. Readers may wonder, by the end, if Harold really even existed. The story is told with Reid's keen eye for language and description. In its style it reminds me of a similar book, Embers.
Reid's writing is a total repudiation of adult cynicism. It tells us what same-sex love should and might be, not what it is. Its uplifted point of view is vital to modern readers. This is a book I recommend....more
This tale of an eleven-year-old boy growing up in an idyllic Irish setting in the mid 1930's appeals as much to adult readers as younger ones due to RThis tale of an eleven-year-old boy growing up in an idyllic Irish setting in the mid 1930's appeals as much to adult readers as younger ones due to Reid's unusual ability to highlight just the right moments with just the right touch....more
In Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned one finds a book of busy detail, yet still somehow lacking. Its author, Brian Moynahan, has woven this vulgar, salacIn Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned one finds a book of busy detail, yet still somehow lacking. Its author, Brian Moynahan, has woven this vulgar, salacious chronicle into a dense meta-narrative of decadence in Imperial Russia. To do so he exchanges the wider world of Siberia's itinerant faith healer for a more delimited vista based on impressions of questionable veracity by variously interested observers.
The book is largely effective in pulling together the many tales and reports about Rasputin. Yet the writer compresses too much into sentences, often leaving words with unclear antecedents. Many oddly chosen words distract, too, sounding as if the author originally wrote in some other tongue.
The text neglects two glaring facts that jump out in every discussion of Rasputin: the steep social stratification of the tsarist empire and the incredible corruption attending it. Its hands-off approach to sources lets disparate accounts speak for themselves. Moynahan does little, for instance, to reconcile the clashing versions of Rasputin's murder.
The writer saves his own verdict for the end, in a discussion of whether Rasputin can be considered evil. But anyone using his approach could conclude almost anything about the mystic healer. Without situating Rasputin's life in a wider framework than random reports, judgments about the enigmatic and charismatic cult leader tell us little.
That's not to say the author doesn't try to guide readers. He does. "Homosexuals" and their "catamites" put a racy spin on Rasputin's deeds. Vague hints abound that parliamentary democracy would have saved Russia, that the Revolution was a worse solution than any existing crisis. But beyond such shading the writer attempts no political or social analysis of any kind. He thus gives a misleading characterization of the circumstances in which his subject lived and acted.
What's left is a story propelled along by the sheer facts of the bizarre career of a mysterious, seductive holy man. But without much more to go on than personal accounts and innuendo, this lazy concatenation counts more as tabloid entertainment than a serious biography....more
I read the Freedonia Press English translation (the one with the orange-brown cover) entitled "A Strange Love".
This book is unique. The story of thisI read the Freedonia Press English translation (the one with the orange-brown cover) entitled "A Strange Love".
This book is unique. The story of this 1899 novel unexpectedly goes on the offensive against homophobia. An excellent translation, prefaced by a delectable gem of an introduction, gives the stylized prose the right effect. It conveys a sensibility and sense of humor perhaps not every reader can appreciate.
Eekhoud relates this scandalized tale using a "pagans vs Christians" framework which even invokes an apparently gay saint, martyred for resisting the salacious predations of the local hussies some 800 years before the story begins.
How could I not like it? It's a story well set up and well told by a daring author who infuses it with a Wildean spirit that brings out the best in fiction....more
This exposure of what amounts to a process of historical falsification taking place in British, American and German universities is most effective wheThis exposure of what amounts to a process of historical falsification taking place in British, American and German universities is most effective where it helps us see how the suppression of the history of revolutionary socialism relates to the world in which we now live.
The author, associated with the International Committee of the Fourth International, provides a thought-provoking analysis of the legacy of Leon Trotsky in a series of essays, speeches and polemics that trace the necessity of an independent socialist perspective in modern politics.
This collection is a rare find: a forceful commentary on current affairs by an expert in the world socialist movement....more
Excellent prose, strong characterization, intelligent framing and a cleverly conceived plot device make this book a classic which in some ways resemblExcellent prose, strong characterization, intelligent framing and a cleverly conceived plot device make this book a classic which in some ways resembles Other Voices, Other Rooms....more
This is another British novel set at Oxford or somewhere else in the confines of the upper class. The story is dependably well written and the subjectThis is another British novel set at Oxford or somewhere else in the confines of the upper class. The story is dependably well written and the subject is interesting, but the ending is rushed an a little unconvincing. Overall, the good aspects of this novel stand out, and I recommend it to readers of gay fiction....more
After the Soviet state arose and before Stalin's iron heel came down this fleeting snapshot captured a true Marxist revolution. Lukacs's polemic is atAfter the Soviet state arose and before Stalin's iron heel came down this fleeting snapshot captured a true Marxist revolution. Lukacs's polemic is at once too good to dismiss and too hostile to its own ideas to redeem. Such contradictory moments within the same work make up a dialectic whose relevance to socialism just may be more important than the book itself. But how so can a book negate its own content?
The reading gives a trenchant, brilliant explanation of the ideas that, exactly 100 years ago, guided the Russian Revolution. The theme exalts Lenin's genius, with Lukacs telling the story of how one man breathed life and fire into a socialist uprising. But this theme comes back to haunt his exposition. The portrait he hangs in the pantheon of Marxist thinkers offers viewers a subjective guarantee of objective theoretical advances. In the postscript, written decades later, the true flaw of the earlier presentation battens upon the unwary like vampires at sunset.
Lukacs identifies ideas too closely with persons. A more precise title might say, "Lenin: A Study on the Synthesis of his Thought." The admiring writer lauds Lenin for certain ideas better associated with Trotsky. The "unity" in the title is actually Lenin's program. But in these pages a reader could be forgiven for imagining the revolution to be the work of a single superhero. Without Lenin the uprising could not have succeeded. On the other hand, he didn't cook it up out of thin air.
All's the worse then, when after decades in Stalinist parties and concentration camps, this writer pens a postscript in which he repudiates both Marx and Lenin over eleven sloppy pages. The earlier logic of argumentation gives way to gauzy impressionism. Here Lukacs turns Lenin into a grandfatherly caricature, the somewhat doting and batty darling of the post-Stalinist kindergarten.
At the heart of the postscript lies the notion that there was no alternative to Stalin. Here the author's quest for superheroes backfires. His point hinges on the relevance of counterfactuals, the "what-if" here pertaining to the Left Opposition. Because they so completely vanish as the negative pole in his appraisal of Stalin, Lukacs's assertion of the inapplicablility of counterfactuals to the study of history takes on the aura of a factual determination. The author's earlier none-other-than-Lenin now implies none-other-than-Stalin.
Such studied amnesia turns those final pages into a sleight of hand. But the blindness runs deeper. The author treats the whole interwar period as a blank space yielding no historical facts. Lukacs informs us that Lenin's theory of imperialism has been disproven. After World War I, he writes, no other worldwide imperialist wars predicted by Lenin occurred -- again with the amnesia. The non-historical, post-Marx world of Hungary in 1967 becomes the repository of a spotless future free of the past.
The author writes off Lenin as a dead horse. It reminds me of a masking of Lenin's original work by Penguin Classics in The State and Revolution. Heigh-ho! Today's pundits get so bent out of shape about socialism. But if the horse is dead, my how they do keep beating on it.
For the rest of us, readers can judge from the juxtaposition of the author's contrasting worldviews the potency of the respective ideas. There lies the value to the study of Marxism of this unique and engaging discourse. ....more
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