Sexing the Cherry, by Jeanette Winterson

Excerpt
Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.
Lies 2: Time is a straight line.
Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.
Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.
Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word "finite" (the world, the universe, experience, ourseleves...)
Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.
Lies 7: Reality as truth.

A Brief Summary
In the 17th century, orphan Jordan is taken in by the Dog Woman, a woman whose presence cannot be ignored, her size and her righteous violence spilling over margins. Where the Dog Woman is unreflective but present, Jordan exists in a world of dreams, going on voyages that are both physical and internal, including one with the twelve dancing princesses of old. Time, place, identity, sex, God weave in and out of a patchwork narrative.

The Gay
Sexing the Cherry touches on as many stories of women and sexuality, women existing in a sexual system that is defined by men, as it can, it seems, and its Twelve Dancing Princesses tell stories of infidelity, love, incest, and lesbianism. A lesbian romance it ain't, though.

My Thoughts
I'm something of a 16th-17th century nerd, as a Shakespeare scholar, and I loved the way that themes of identity and exploration that were so central at the time are taken here and reinterpreted in a post-modern, feminist way. I love the imaginative scope of the book. I am caught up on the image of young, modern girl dreaming herself as the Dog Woman, too immense to be invisible. The book is almost too dreamy for me, though, despite the immediacy of some of its more violent imagery, and its brevity makes it feel somewhat slight.

Star Rating
Overall: ★★★
Queer Content: ★★★

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami

Excerpt
Kafka sits in a chair by the shore, Thinking for the pendulum that moves the world, it seems.
When your heart is closed,
The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx,
Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams.

The drowning girl's fingers
Search for the entrance stone, and more.
Lifting the hem of her azure dress,
She gazes --
At Kafka on the shore

A Brief Summary
This book follows the intertwining stories of 15-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura, as he tries to escape his Oedipal destiny, and elderly, mysteriously blank Tanaka, who is "not too bright" but has the uncanny ability to speak with cats. Already somehow connected on a metaphysical level, their destinies draw them both inexorably towards a library in the sea-side town Takamatsu and towards each other.

The Gay (SPOILERY)
One of my main reservations when beginning this book was that, well, I harbor a certain indifference towards the sexual fantasies and developments of fifteen-year-old heterosexual males. I have a younger brother, I saw enough of that at home. The story ended up winning me over quickly enough, but I was also pleasantly surprised by appearance of the transgendered character Oshima early in the book, as one of Kafka's first allies. Oshima is intriguing and androgynous and quite mysterious -- I was actually worried for awhile that he would turn out to be a vampire; this book is that weird -- and I thought the revelation of his secret was an especially lovely moment. He is never given a very large role, nor are we privy to many details of his personal life, but Oshima, with his penchant for reckless driving and philosophical musings, was one of my favorite characters in Kafka, and I was very pleased to see a positively presented, gay, FTM transperson in a book.

My Thoughts
Kafka on the Shore starts with the mysterious Boy Called Crow psyching Kafka up to run away, telling him he needs to be the "toughest 15-year-old in the world." "Oh, gag me with a spoon," thought Emma, "what sort of macho shit is this going to be?" (The answer is: not very macho shit, unless Emma was a lot more hardcore than she thought she was when she hid out in a library reading Sir Richard Francis Burton and purposefully trained her stomach to need less food when she was fifteen.) But I had been planning on reading Murakami for a long time, and I wasn't going to give up that easy.

By the second chapter, which, in government reports, documented the bizarre goings-on in the hills of Japan during WWII that left second protagonist Tanaka a blank slate, I was hooked.

No, not much "actually happens" in this book. No, it never fully ties up any of its many riddles -- though the eagerness with which I raced to the ending suggests it must be doing something to make the reader want to pluck out the heart of its mystery. Yes, frogs rain from the sky and people (maybe) (metaphorically) sleep with their mothers. If you cannot handle these things, this is probably not the book for you. What the book is, though, is a stunningly imaginative and captivating novel, inscrutable but pleasingly intellectual nonetheless. It is a Greek tragedy that skips the tragedy, that believes in fate but lets its characters control their own destinies. I thought this book was remarkable and not only would highly recommend it, but am eager to read more by Murakami.

Star Ratings
Overall: ★★★★
Queer Content: ★★★

Fabulous Announcement

It has occurred to me -- two posts in, of course -- that it would probably, structurally, be best to give a rundown of the gay content before reviewing. Now, if I believed in editing I wouldn't have just written an essay on Cathleen ni Houlihan that insists one of the characters is named Dierdre (hint: she isn't) and blithely handed it in, expecting chocolate and rewards, so the previous two posts will stand as are. However, do expect a switch in future posts.

The Liar, by Stephen Fry

Excerpt
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

A Brief Summary
The Liar follows Adrian Healey, the eponymous liar, from his days in the 1970s as a dandy-ish British public schoolboy with a 'pash' for sporty classmate Hugo Cartwright, through his Cambridge days in the '80s, where he meets eccentric philologist Professor Trefusis and gets drawn into an international web of intrigue.

My Thoughts
It is entirely likely that Stephen Fry could write a tract on the validity of Star Wars as a defense plan or a sequel to Twilight and I would gleefully demand to read it (on second thought, who wouldn't want to read the latter), but this novel is every bit as bitingly funny and enjoyably dirty (have you ever wanted to read Dicken's long-lost turn towards Victorian homoerotica?) as one would expect from him.

Adrian is a marvelous character, never quite as sophisticated as he'd like to be nor really as terrible as he sporadically self-loathingly considers himself -- he felt very young, to me, which might be part of the reason that no matter how hard I tried to tamp my earnest side down I did feel pangs of sympathy and actual emotion for him. [Full disclosure: fourteen-year-old Emma wanted to be Adrian. Also, a vampire. It was a sad time.] Also, living up to his title, Adrian is the epitome of the unreliable narrator, which creates an enjoyably twisty narrative that ties up rather surprisingly.

Overall, I truly enjoyed this book, and it has given me one more Stephen Fry-thing to go around citing obnoxiously. By the way, did you know that Queen Victoria introduced hemophilia into the royal houses of Europe, and that to have done so she must have either been the result of a freak genetic mutation or -- gasp -- been an illegitimate child? QI did.

The Gay
Oh, where to begin. This is the book that confirms everything I have ever secretly, deep-down, and dearly believed about British boys' schools. You will never look at the term "daisy chain" the same again.

Our hero is, of course, mind-bogglingly in love with another boy at the start of the book, and is at fifteen already a fair connoisseur of sodomy, but his Wildean tendencies do not mark the limits of the book's interest in sexuality. There is the matter of Adrian's flirtations with bisexuality, the issue of the aforementioned Dickensian tome and its questionable incestuous content, an incident of alleged cottaging, a detailed history of the life of a 1970s rentboy. It's irreverant and outrageous, but also, in some ways, refreshingly frank.

And, really, if you secretly wished you had a cape and cane and that you spoke in withering bon mots when you were fourteen, there is much to appeal to you.

Star Ratings
Overall: ★★★ 1/2
Queer Content: ★★★★

All About Lulu, by Jonathan Evison

Excerpt
First, I'm going to give you all the Copperfield crap, and I'm not going to apologize for any of it, not one paragraph, so if you're not interested in how I came to see the future, or how I came to understand that the biggest truth in my life was a lie, or, for that matter, how I parlayed my distaste for hot dogs into an '84 RX-7 and a new self-concept, do us both a favor, and just stop now.

A Brief Summary
In the wake of his mother's death, as his bodybuilding brethren pump themselves to Hulkish proportions, weak-eyed vegetarian Will Miller stops growing altogether—until the day his father remarries a relentlessly kind grief counselor, delivering Will a troubled stepsister who soon becomes his confessor, companion, and heart's only desire. But when Lulu returns from cheerleading camp the summer of her fourteenth year, she inexplicably begins to push Will away, forcing him to look elsewhere for meaning. (Wikipedia.org)

My Thoughts
Last summer, I was working as a script-reader for a small independent managing firm, and my job had occasional... lags. To keep myself occupied, I would trawl through the electronic script submission archives and just dip into whatever I found there, whether it was a shitty romcom, a psychological thriller, or a Dickens adaptation. One day, I found this book.

To say "I couldn't put it down" might, strictly speaking, be inaccurate, since it was, after all, an ebook, but the sentiment is the same. Though at the heart of All About Lulu is Will and Lulu's love story, the book is fleshed out by wonderfully realized characters (and I am a Dickens fan, so we know I'm a sucker for side characters), who skirt the line of too quirky and who surprise you by suddenly becoming heart-wrenching. Will's father Big Bill is a good example -- a washed-up Mr. Universe wannabe who worships at the altar of meat, he's an easy comic character, but there's something sad and touching about his frustrated hopes and thwarted relationship with his sons. The whole book is like that, alternating seamlessly between the truly ridiculous and very funny and the sucker-punch-you-in-the-stomach tragic.

The near-Oedipal tragedy of the whole thing is probably what prevents this book from being in my very upper echelon, but that is a personal taste issue (I'm a big sap, really) and in no way detracts from what is a deftly realized, very touching, and very original novel.

The Gay
Okay, so I kicked things off with a pretty damn heterosexual book, so sue me. The big story here is Will's epic Lulu-love, no mistake. That said, there is enough queerness to be found in the side characters to keep me interested (hint: it's not the one you think it is -- unless you're like me, in which case it is exactly the one you think it is) and the book overall is very interested in love and sexuality. And, of course, Will and Lulu's romance is unconventional enough to be a bit queer in its own way. Don't go to this book expecting high fabulosity levels -- I'd place this squarely in the inoffensive, but hardly likely to revolutionize gay representation category -- but if you like unconventional love stories -- and don't we all -- this one is very worth a read.

Star Ratings
Overall: ★★★ 1/2
Queer Content: ★★