L'automne propre

Apparemment, l'été est finalement passé : quand je me suis réveillé ce matin, la température dans ma chambre était enfin de nouveau sous 24 degrés Celsius même avant que j'ai ouvert la fenêtre. Et il a plu pour la plupart de la journée, comme avant-hier. La vie paraît encore un peu meilleure.

Patrick Gale: The Aerodynamics of Pork

[....], never treating children as children. He laughed at, not with.

(about Huw Peake)

Obviously, I'm prejudiced about this one. It wasn't the first gay prose I've ever read, but it was the first gay 'full novel' I did, and after having read dozens of novels which in the vast majority pretended homosexuality didn't exist at all, or at best showed it as a minor character's 'quirk', it was beyond refreshing to read a novel in which most of the main characters were gays and lesbians, despite its being set in 'ordinary' surroundings (there are just a few pages happening at something you could call 'gay scene').

And yet the book reflects the fact that even as a young gay you don't spend all your time thinking about gay-related issues, however important these are for you, you have myriads of other things to think about, myriads of other aspects forming your personality and your life. The book is full of observations which could work as well in a 'straight' novel.

An example is the quotation above about one of the main character's father. This is so like my own parents, and one of the reasons why since about mid-adolescence I never again thought of them as of my 'nearest and dearest'. They were like my favourite high school teachers: people you like, but people  who seem unable to treat you without condescension, and with whom you can therefore be on polite, but not on really friendly terms.

Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending

My memory has increasingly become a mechanism which reiterates apparently truthful data with little variation.

(Tony Webster (narrator), p 64)

 

One would think that growing older, and having been through more, you would have more to recollect, and in one sense you do; at the same time it seems that the older I am, the more I'm actually returning, again and again, to a number of the same memories. (Not just memories: the same is true about topics / opinions, songs, to a certain degree even books, and so on ...)