Recent reading
Dec. 29th, 2021 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRead Return to Night by Mary Renault, mostly with a strong sense of second-hand embarrassment. Romance between a doctor in her mid-30s and an aspiring actor a decade her junior, set in England in the months before WWII. I quite liked the protagonist, Dr. Hilary Mansell, which made me feel all the more girl, RUN, you do not need these vibes in your life about the whole situation with Julian and his mother.
For most of the novel, my theory on why Julian's mother is Like That was that she's pretty sure he's gay, but (this being the 1930s) thinks it would be horribly gauche to acknowledge this out loud in any way and is instead trying to passive-aggressively stiff-upper-lip it out of him. The actual Watsonian explanation, eventually revealed, is that Julian's biological father was a "cad of an actor" rather than the dearly departed war hero Mr. Fleming— though, to be fair, this doesn't necessarily preclude my own theory. The Doylist explanation is, of course, Renault's Oedipus complex kink.
If I had a nickel for every Mary Renault book I've read that ends with the love interest almost committing suicide, I'd only have ten cents, but it's weird it happened twice.
Read Strange Weather In Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, which oddly enough is also about a woman in her 30s in a friendship-turned-romance with a significant age gap, although in this case, her love interest is thirty years her senior and (it's not as sordid as it sounds, I promise) had been her high school teacher. Reminded me of Tove Jansson's Fair Play, both in its structure of a novel in vignettes and in that it deals with similar themes of solitude and intimacy, albeit in different ways.
Read Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly, a warm and laugh-out-loud-funny contemporary fiction novel about a pair of siblings living in Auckland, New Zealand, navigating life in their mid-to-late 20s (Greta is a graduate student in comparative literature; Valdin spent eight years studying physics, had a breakdown, and became a comedian) and love (both of them end up living out their own gay rom-coms!) and their chaotic Russian-Maori-Catalonian family. Absolute 10/10.
For most of the novel, my theory on why Julian's mother is Like That was that she's pretty sure he's gay, but (this being the 1930s) thinks it would be horribly gauche to acknowledge this out loud in any way and is instead trying to passive-aggressively stiff-upper-lip it out of him. The actual Watsonian explanation, eventually revealed, is that Julian's biological father was a "cad of an actor" rather than the dearly departed war hero Mr. Fleming— though, to be fair, this doesn't necessarily preclude my own theory. The Doylist explanation is, of course, Renault's Oedipus complex kink.
If I had a nickel for every Mary Renault book I've read that ends with the love interest almost committing suicide, I'd only have ten cents, but it's weird it happened twice.
Read Strange Weather In Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, which oddly enough is also about a woman in her 30s in a friendship-turned-romance with a significant age gap, although in this case, her love interest is thirty years her senior and (it's not as sordid as it sounds, I promise) had been her high school teacher. Reminded me of Tove Jansson's Fair Play, both in its structure of a novel in vignettes and in that it deals with similar themes of solitude and intimacy, albeit in different ways.
Read Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly, a warm and laugh-out-loud-funny contemporary fiction novel about a pair of siblings living in Auckland, New Zealand, navigating life in their mid-to-late 20s (Greta is a graduate student in comparative literature; Valdin spent eight years studying physics, had a breakdown, and became a comedian) and love (both of them end up living out their own gay rom-coms!) and their chaotic Russian-Maori-Catalonian family. Absolute 10/10.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-29 01:25 am (UTC)I'm so glad you liked Strange Weather in Tokyo! I read the book more or less blind and went a little OH when I realized it was going to be a romance between a woman and her former teacher (albeit more than a decade after the student graduated!) - but although I expected the book to become sordid or even skeevy it never did. It was a delicate and sensitive exploration of the age gap, I thought.
I remain extremely puzzled by the book's cover, which features a floating girl, and led me confidently to expect magical elements, of which the book contains none at all. It's a very eye-catching cover, so maybe someone in the publishing house just said "Screw truth in advertising, let's go with it!"
no subject
Date: 2021-12-29 01:44 am (UTC)I did know what I was getting into, and was a little surprised that the romance part of things took so long to even be hinted at, let alone developed! I thought it was a very sweet book— although bittersweet, at the end. I like that it gave Tsukiko an alternative love interest, to make her romantic relationship with Sensei an active choice rather than one that arose out of sheer... orbital gravity, I suppose?
No idea what was going on with the book's cover, either. Maybe... it's a metaphor...?