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.
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Date: 2021-12-29 04:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-29 04:50 am (UTC)Lisa. I'm almost willing to bet that exists on AO3.
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Date: 2021-12-29 08:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-29 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-05 05:06 pm (UTC)But, uh, maybe Rupert could die doing Heroic War Correspondent Stuff and then Hilary & Lisa could raise Lisa's child together in bucolic bliss.
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Date: 2022-01-05 06:31 pm (UTC)That seems to be generally the case, and really, I can't explain why they just didn't click for me! (Part of the problem is that this is one of those books I blanked on completely as soon as I set it down, so literally, I don't remember what put me off.) I suspect Julian's immaturity rankled because, rather than in spite of, the fact he's basically my age...
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Date: 2022-01-05 07:07 pm (UTC)