Lie With Me

Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy.

I discover that absence has a consistency, like the dark water of a river, like oil, some kind of sticky dirty liquid that you can struggle and perhaps drown in. It has a thickness like night, an indefinite space with no landmarks, nothing to bang against, where you search for a light, some small glimmer, something to hang on to and guide you. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping silence that weighs you down and puts you in a state where any unforeseeable, identifiable sound can make you jump.

This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.”

Molly Ringwald, please, review your translations before publishing.
The rating is not regarding the translation, though it might as well be. Some sentences got me wondering how much of Besson and how much of Molly they were. The second half was well written but the first half's “playgrounds” and all the other eye catching bad wording choices got me

“My father never reads books, but he's read yours.” A beautiful story about a love that couldn't have endured, “tomorrow there will be emptiness”. There's something so tenderly sad about this, how he meets his son twenty years later. The son knows, understands the relationship between him and his father. It is so beautiful that their love could be seen by others, even when they had tried to hide from it themselves.

“This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.”

What type of Call Me By Your Name ish is this?
Life-changing first romance with a member of the same sex at the age of seventeen? ✔
Romance set in the mid-80s? ✔
Short-lived because one of them leaves for another country? ✔
Story in its entirety takes place over 20+ years? ✔
Don't end up together in the end? ✔

Anyway this book is wonderful and tragic and gorgeously written and yes, if you do like CMBYN then you'll probably like this. It's so much more than that though and is heartbreakingly an autobiographical story, which makes some of the more sadder elements of the book just hit that much harder.

It's a story of a romance that last both a few months and the rest of their lives, and with that, I'll leave you with probably the most essential quote in the book.

“He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.”

Lie with Me lived up to its reputation. Read everything; the author reveals the ending before the story begins. Bittersweet, and full of sorrow, for the things that might have been but could not be. Mild spoilers follow.

Should the deal have been broken? Should the phone call have been made? Would things have turned out differently? Were there 2 or 3 lead characters? What were the intentions of the putative 3rd character's penultimate and last actions? I'm not haunted by the questions, but they DO nag at me a little.

Highly recommended, as long as you don't require a HEA ending.

Heartbreaking, tender, passionate, loving. A beautifully sad story about a love that could never be.

“I'm seventeen years old. I don't know then that one day I won't be seventeen. I don't know that youth doesn't last, that it's only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it's too late. It's finished, vanished, lost.”