Ratings11
Average rating3.8
Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book―Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns―and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?
A book about storytelling―its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change―and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres’s Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made―a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.
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This experimental book provided me such a unique reading experience! Centered around the friendship and ongoing conversation of these two men, this fictional book interweaves literature, queer history, the dark past of psychology in regards to queer identities, and Puerto Rican lore. This is all done through a variety of storytelling techniques where both men encourage each other to lie and embellish the stories to make them interesting and compelling; I especially enjoyed the scenes they described and composed as if they were directing a movie. The storytelling wasn't linear or perfect, but felt messy, organic, and genuine. Although the main characters in this story are fictional, many of the topics and historical figures they talk about are not. I enjoyed the book a lot, but mostly their stories guided me towards different rabbit holes I could get lost in as I learnt about the historical context this story wanted to capture. The use of photos and black out poetry based on the text of the Sex Variants truly enhanced the experience and provided insights into the stories being told. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but since this book walks the line between fiction and nonfiction, I didn't find it as easy to read it for long periods of time.