Synopsis:

My Take: Strangely enough for a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, I only heard about Junot Diaz’s “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” whilst perusing a few ‘Best books of the Noughties’ lists earlier this year. I’m not sure how I missed it when it was released in 2007 because it’s just the kind of thing that I’m naturally drawn to – a quirky, cross-cultural narrative with a prose that fizzes and pops with life. Better late than never though I guess, because “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is one of the best books I’ve read in recent times.

TBWLOW is a difficult book to categorise. It somehow manages to combine elements of an urban modernist tale, a multi-generational family epic, a cultural history of the Dominican Republic and a magical realist fable into a genuinely unique literary form. Similarly, it’s not often you read prose that combines Hispanic street slang, obscure science fiction references, high literary allusions and magic realist metaphors in a single novel. It’s bizarre – but it works.

These disparate literary forms are bound together by the eponymous Oscar de Leon (mockingly known as “Oscar Wao” in reference to the Spanish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde, whom Oscar’s peers disparagingly claimed he resembled when in costume as Dr Who). Oscar is a strange and sad protagonist. Growing up as a poor Hispanic immigrant in Patterson, New Jersey, Oscar is saddled with the dual burdens of a morbidly obese frame and a personality shaped by his devotion to Science Fiction/Fantasy (or as Oscar describes the “the more speculative genres”).

As Yunior, the third-person narrator of Oscar’s story sums it up “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about – he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock”. These afflictions are particularly tragic because beneath his overweight and nerdy exterior beats the heart of a hopeless romantic. Oscar is no wall flower – against all odds he continues to put himself out there in pursuit of his frequent crushes however his appearance and his “Dune” allegories, “The Matrix” quotes and “Lord of the Rings” references are unable to win him even a single kiss (strangely enough proclaiming that a girl is “orchidaceous” is not a winning strategy). Even worse, Oscar knows he needs to lose the weight, as well as the comic books and role-playing games if he is going to get the girl, but for some reason is powerless to become the master of his own destiny.

This is where TBWLOW takes a very strange turn. Through the eyes of Oscar’s mother, Beli, and his sister, Lola, TBWLOW takes on an epic aspect and Diaz portrays the sweep of Dominican history and the story of the D.R.’s U.S. Diaspora on a grand scale. We learn that a run in with the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic two generations ago has left Oscar’s family as the victim of a ‘Fuku’, a curse that pervades all aspects of the family’s life.  As this new aspect of the story unfolds, a strong magic realist thread emerges opening up a completely unexpected dimension to the novel.

It’s all very strange, but somehow it works perfectly. The novel never seems to jar despite the jumble of literary methods it employs and the core narrative of the story feels like it is unfolding completely naturally. It’s only when you look back on the story and think “how did I get here?” that you realise the strange mix of approaches that are brewing in this novel.

I can’t recommend the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao enough.

Highlight:

Sophomore year Oscar’s weight stabilized at about two-ten (two-twenty when he was depressed, which was often), and it had become clear to everybody, especially his family, that he’d become the neighborhood pariguayo. He wore his semikink hair in a Puerto Rican Afro, had enormous Section-8 glasses (his anti-pussy devices, his boys Al and Miggs called them), sported an unappealing trace of mustache, and possessed a pair of close-set eyes that made him look somewhat retarded. The Eyes of Mingus (a comparison he made himself one day, going through his mother’s record collection; she was the only old-school Dominicana he knew who loved jazz; she’d arrived in the States in the early sixties and shacked up with morenos for years until she met Oscar’s father, who put an end to that particular chapter of the All-African World Party). Throughout high school he did the usual ghettonerd things: he collected comic books, he played role-playing games, he worked at a hardware store to save money for an outdated Apple IIe. He was an introvert who trembled with fear every time gym class rolled around. He watched nerd shows like “Doctor Who” and “Blake’s 7,” could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi battle pod, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like “indefatigable” and “ubiquitous” when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school.

He read Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman novels (his favorite character was, of course, Raistlin) and became an early devotee of the End of the World. He devoured every book he could find that dealt with the End Times, from John Christopher’s “Empty World” to Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth.” He didn’t date no one. Didn’t even come close. Inside, he was a passionate person who fell in love easily and deeply. His affection—that gravitational mass of love, fear, longing, desire, and lust that he directed at any and every girl in the vicinity—roamed across all Paterson, affixed itself everywhere without regard to looks, age, or availability. Despite the fact that he considered his affection this tremendous, sputtering force, it was actually more like a ghost because no girl ever seemed to notice it.

Anywhere else, his triple-zero batting average with the girls might have passed unremarked, but this is a Dominican kid, in a Dominican family. Everybody noticed his lack of game and everybody offered him advice. His tío Rodolfo (only recently released from Rahway State) was especially generous in his tutelage. We wouldn’t want you to turn into one of those Greenwich Village maricones, Tío Rodolfo muttered ominously. You have to grab a muchacha, broder, y méteselo. That will take care of everything. Start with a fea. Coge that fea y méteselo! Rodolfo had four kids with three different women, so the nigger was without doubt the family’s resident metiéndolo expert.

Oscar’s sister Lola (who I’d start dating in college) was a lot more practical. She was one of those tough Jersey Latinas, a girl soccer star who drove her own car, had her own checkbook, called men bitches, and would eat a fat cat in front of you without a speck of vergüenza. When she was in sixth grade, she was raped by an older acquaintance, and surviving that urikán of pain, judgment, and bochinche had stripped her of cowardice. She’d say anything to anybody and she cut her hair short (anathema to late-eighties Jersey Dominicans) partially, I think, because when she’d been little her family had let it grow down past her ass—a source of pride, something I’m sure her rapist noticed and admired.

Oscar, Lola warned repeatedly, you’re going to die a virgin.

Don’t you think I know that? Another five years of this and I’ll bet you somebody tries to name a church after me.

Cut the hair, lose the glasses, exercise. And get rid of those porn magazines. They’re disgusting, they bother Mami, and they’ll never get you a date.

Sound counsel, which he did not adopt. He was one of those niggers who didn’t have any kind of hope. It wouldn’t have been half bad if Paterson and its surrounding precincts had been, like Don Bosco, all male. Paterson, however, was girls the way N.Y.C. was girls. And if that wasn’t guapas enough for you, well, then, head south, and there’d be Newark, Elizabeth, Jersey City, the Oranges, Union City, West New York, Weehawken—an urban swath known to niggers everywhere as Negrapolis One. He wasn’t even safe in his own house; his sister’s girlfriends were always hanging out, and when they were around he didn’t need no Penthouses. Her girls were the sort of hot-as-balls Latinas who dated only weight-lifting morenos or Latino cats with guns in their cribs. (His sister was the anomaly—she dated the same dude all four years of high school, a failed Golden Gloves welterweight who was excruciatingly courteous and fucked her like he was playing connect the dots, a pretty boy she’d eventually dump after he dirty-dicked her with some Pompton Lakes Irish bitch.) His sister’s friends were the Bergen County All-Stars, New Jersey’s very own Ciguapas: primera was Gladys, who complained constantly about her chest being too big; Marisol, who’d end up in M.I.T. and could out-salsa even the Goya dancers; Leticia, just off the boat, half Haitian, half Dominican, that special blend the Dominican government swears no existe, who spoke with the deepest accent, a girl so good she refused to sleep with three consecutive boyfriends! It wouldn’t have been so bad if these girls hadn’t treated Oscar like some deaf-mute harem guard; they blithely went on about the particulars of their sex lives while he sat in the kitchen clutching the latest issue of Dragon. Hey, he would yell, in case you’re wondering, there’s a male unit in here. Where? Marisol would say blandly. I don’t see one.

My Take: “Spring Snow” is generally regarded to be Yukio Mishima’s greatest masterpiece. The first instalment in his epic Sea of Fertility tetraology, an allegorical examination of the Westernisation of Japanese society between 1912 and 1975, “Spring Snow” was a best seller on its release despite Mishima’s political unpalatability.

At the most basic level, “Spring Snow” tells the story of star crossed lovers, Kiyoaki Matsugae and Satoko Ayakura, as narrated by Kiyoaki’s stoic best friend Shigekuni Honda. While the financial prosperity of Kiyoaki’s family and the aristocratic standing Satoko’s family made the couple a mutually beneficial pairing, Kiyoaki’s initial equivocation about their relationship allowed Satoko to be betrothed to a member of the Imperial household. However, once Satoko’s matrimonial commitment makes her unattainable, Kiyoaki’s feelings for her crystallise and the pair are set on a course for self-destruction.

While “Spring Snow” starts slowly, dwelling on the characteristics of the alien and hermetically sealed Japanese aristocratic society, as Kiyoaki and Satoko’s relationship builds momentum towards its inevitable conclusion the story develops a gut wrenching intensity. It really does have an emotional weight that leaves you physically weak upon completion.

However, this novel is more than just a Japanese “Romeo and Juliet”. Like all of Mishima’s works, the real emotional impetus for “Spring Snow” flows from the deep internal conflicts within the author and the broader Japanese society. I’ve written before about the contradictions inherent in Mishima’s life as a homosexual fascist bodybuilder/writer but the force of these conflicting desires is writ large in “Spring Snow”.

While societal pressure plays a role in heightening the tension of “Spring Snow”, the fundamental conflict in the novel is internal to Kiyoaki. The protagonist’s alternating ambivalence, hostility and obsessive love for Satoko is the main source of tension in the book and mirrors Mishima’s love/hate relationship for the changing Japan. Kiyoaki doesn’t know whether to welcome the opening up of Japanese society or resist its Westernisation and as such is conflicted about how to deal with this contradiction within Satoko who, by virtue of her position as the daughter of an aristocratic family, is at the forefront of these changes. “Spring Snow” is much more than a simple story of obsessive or forbidden love.

“Spring Snow” isn’t an easily accessible novel and Mishima doesn’t make any concessions to the reader in terms of exposition. It’s literary fiction in its purest form and as with all Mishima novels, it’s prose is jaw-droppingly beautiful. It’s not airport reading, if you’re willing to put the effort in, it’s a rich and rewarding work.

Highlights:

“Just now I had a dream. I’ll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.”

Synopsis: A collection of 15 of Haruki Murakami’s most surreal short stories.

My Take: The Elephant Vanishes is classic Murakami – strange, whimsical, reflective and more than a little confusing. You don’t find stories based on of the disappearance of a man’s favourite elephant or a woman being haunted by a gardening, green monster in every collection of short stories. However, despite being deeply strange, Murakami’s work never feels like fantasy or science fiction. Instead, it retains a dreamlike, contemplative quality that gives his writing a feeling of sophistication that goes beyond its unreal subject matter.

In this regard, I prefer Murakami’s surrealist work in small, day-dream size stories (like the similarly excellent Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman). While it’s still interesting, I find that when Murakami’s strange ruminations are expanded to novel length (like the overrated Kafka on the Shore) his oddness can start to get a bit tiring. Much better to get a brief taste of one of Murakami’s quirky ideas, enjoy the strange flavour for a dozen pages and then move on quickly to the next before the strangeness becomes overwhelming.

Highlight: It’s slightly twee, but for me, the highlight of The Elephant Vanishes” was the shortest story in the book: “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning”. In fact, it’s so short that I’ve reproduced it below:

One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighbourhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either – must be near thirty, not even close to a “girl,” properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there’s a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.

Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl – one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you’re drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I’ll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.

But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can’t recall the shape of hers – or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It’s weird.

“Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl,” I tell someone.

“Yeah?” he says. “Good-looking?”

“Not really.”

“Your favorite type, then?”

“I don’t know. I can’t seem to remember anything about her – the shape of her eyes or the size of her breasts.”

“Strange.”

“Yeah. Strange.”

“So anyhow,” he says, already bored, “what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?”

“Nah. Just passed her on the street.”

She’s walking east to west, and I west to east. It’s a really nice April morning.

Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and – what I’d really like to do – explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock build when peace filled the world.

After talking, we’d have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.

Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.

Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.

How can I approach her? What should I say?

“Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?”

Ridiculous. I’d sound like an insurance salesman.

“Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?”

No, this is just as ridiculous. I’m not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who’s going to buy a line like that?

Maybe the simple truth would do. “Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me.”

No, she wouldn’t believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you’re not the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I’d probably go to pieces. I’d never recover from the shock. I’m thirty-two, and that’s what growing older is all about.

We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can’t bring myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she holds a crisp white envelope lacking only a stamp. So: She’s written somebody a letter, maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The envelope could contain every secret she’s ever had.

I take a few more strides and turn: She’s lost in the crowd.

Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical.

Oh, well. It would have started “Once upon a time” and ended “A sad story, don’t you think?”

Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.

One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.

“This is amazing,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you’re the 100% perfect girl for me.”

“And you,” she said to him, “are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I’d pictured you in every detail. It’s like a dream.”

They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It’s a miracle, a cosmic miracle.

As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily?

And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, “Let’s test ourselves – just once. If we really are each other’s 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we’ll marry then and there. What do you think?”

“Yes,” she said, “that is exactly what we should do.”

And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west.

The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other’s 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.

One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season’s terrible inluenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D. H. Lawrence’s piggy bank.

They were two bright, determined young people, however, and through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love.

Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty.

One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, but along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in their chest. And they knew:

She is the 100% perfect girl for me.

He is the 100% perfect boy for me.

But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fouteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever.

A sad story, don’t you think?

Yes, that’s it, that is what I should have said to her.

My Take: The cover blurb of Norwegian Wood describes the novel thus:

“When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.”

This could easily be off putting to my mind. Stores of teenaged first love and ‘impetuous young women’ set against cultural upheavals can easily cross over into the twee if not handled well by the author. However, this is anything but trash teen lit. Murakami’s prose throughout Norwegian Wood has an affecting, melancholic sensuality and the story arc is anything but formulaic. In fact, The Guardian’s review of this book describes Murakami’s writing as ‘gossamer’ which I think perfectly sums it up. As such, the ultimate impression left by the book is not one of teen-hormones ran amok, but of an otherworldly, dreamlike reminiscence. In fact, it has something of a Gatsbyesq quality to it in the way that it meditates on the nature of the past and how much of what has past is a part of you and how much you can escape from.  This is really one of my favourite books and one that I have come back to on a number of occasions.

This was also the book that first got me into Murakami as a writer, which is ironic, because it’s really not illustrative of his work. Norwegian Wood is a straight narrative and forgoes the more fantastical quirks of his other works (there are no talking cats anywhere to be seen in this book). It’s easily the most accessible of Murakami’s novels and made him a super-star of Japanese fiction when it one of the highest selling books in the nation’s history. Apparently Murakami strongly resented the attention at the time of the book’s release, and you can understand a degree of frustration at being fated for a book that doesn’t really reflect the core of your writing. That being said, probably as a result of the prominence that Norwegian Wood has afforded him, Murakami has been able to carve out a very successful career for himself writing pretty well whatever he wants (however bizarre). So there are some upsides to success I guess.

Highlight:

“Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.”

A further highlight of Norwegian Wood are the exquisite different covers that the book has been released with. You can browse through them at a dedicated page on the publisher’s website.

On a final note, thanks to the loving thoughtfulness of JJ, I have a beautiful first edition of this novel that comes in two small red and green miniature books designed for ease of reading on public transport. A treasured possession.

Synopsis:

My Take: In a word, dark.

Brett Easton Ellis dark.

Reminded me a lot of the Catcher in the Rye for its narcissistic narrator and ultimately nihilistic world view. Its outlook is too bleak for me these days – I think I would have enjoyed this more as a teenager – but Mishima is such a talented writer that the beauty of his prose alone was enough to keep me interested.

Highlight:

“Do you remember that day on the pier when I said there was only one way to make him a hero again… Well, the time has come.”

My Take: As you may have guessed by now, I have a real peccadillo for Japanese fiction. I love the nuance and non-linearity of the story telling and the subtlety of the characterisation. I appreciate the lack of exposition and the fact that in general, readers are left to scrutinise the thoughts, feelings and motivations of the characters with less direction than in much ‘Western’ literature (sweeping generalisations I know). While  Ishiguro has lived in the UK since the age of 5 and claims not to have been influenced by Japanese literature, I do think these ‘Japanese’ characteristics are deeply infused in his work.

In particular, I think the Japanese concept of ‘mono no aware’ strongly underpins Ishiguro’s body of work. It’s a bit of a difficult concept to explain, so I’ll quote from Wikipedia at this point:

Mono no aware ( mono no aware^?, lit. “the pathos of things”), also translated as “an empathy toward things,” or “a sensitivity of ephemera,” is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of mujo or the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness at their passing. The term was coined in the eighteenth century by the Edo-period Japanese cultural scholar Motoori Norinaga, and was originally a concept used in his literary criticism of The Tale of Genji, and later applied to other seminal Japanese works including the Man’yōshū, becoming central to his philosophy of literature, and eventually to Japanese cultural tradition.

This melancholy ‘awareness of the transience of things’ is a feature of all of Ishiguro’s books to varying degrees. Ishiguro employs a first person retrospective approach in each of his books that allows him to subtly, but deeply, explore the attitudes, emotions and motivations of of his protagonist. In this way, the revelation and resolution of the protagonist’s self-deceptions and mental obstacles to ‘awareness’ become the driver of the story arcs of each of his novels. As Ishiguro has said:

“As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”

In this sense, little actually ‘happens’ in Ishiguro’s books outside the mind of the protagonist. In fact, often his protagonists don’t even reach full awareness by the end of his novels – leaving many carefully developed plot threads ultimately unresolved. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I love it.

All of these characteristics of Ishiguro’s writing are clearly present in ‘An Artist of the Floating World’ Ishiguro’s second novel. In my mind this is Ishiguro’s strongest work and it’s not hard to see why it won a Whitbread Prize and was shortlisted for a Booker Prize. Given that the real joy of Ishiguro’s writing is the process of revelation, I won’t write too much about the contents of the novel, but suffice it to say, the societal upheaval of post-war Japan is fertile ground for Ishiguro’s style of contemplative reminiscence.

Highlight: Everything – just read it.

My Take: Mishima is one of those authors (like Solzenitzen or Hemmingway) whose work is made even richer by their his extraordinary personal life. A militant Japanese ultra-conservative (fascist really) martial arts aficionado, Mishima isn’t your usual suspect for a writer of subtle and ambiguous literature. What makes him even more extraordinary however is the fact that he was an openly HOMOSEXUAL, militant Japanese fascist martial arts loving author. Given the contradictions inherent in that package it’s perhaps no great surprise that Mishima ultimately killed himself by committing public Hari-kiri in protest at the modernisation of Japanese society (and arts in particular).

Mishima - a Japanese fascist homosexual(!)

I had devoured Mishima’s most famous work, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy a few years ago and found it to be one of the most powerful works of literature I’d read. I mean this guy makes Gaberiel Garcia Marquez’s protagonists look like dilettantes. “Spring Snow” (the first book in the tetralogy), a story of fatalistic love in post-feudal Japan harnesses emotion in a positively visceral way and one of my all time favourite books (stay tuned for a long post on that one).

So, I had high hopes for “Confessions of a Mask”; hopes that were in the large part borne out. The book is one of Mishima’s earliest works (he wrote it at just 24 years of age which is mildly depressing from a personal perspective) and doesn’t have the literary polish of the Sea of Fertility.

However, the book makes up for this lack of sheen through compelling subject matter.  While it lacks the literary flourish of Spring Snow, it’s extremely successful in communicating the sense of differentness and isolation a gay boy must feel. A vignette about secretly falling in love with a prince (as opposed to the princess) in a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale was especially touching in my view. Similarly, the continuing internal conflict in the protagonist between self-preservation (wearing the mask and conforming in society) and what he terms “self-destruction” (exploring his attractions) is also particularly rending.

All in all I quite enjoyed Confessions of a Mask. It’s not brilliantly written, but the back story is more than enough to keep you interested.

Highlight:

My “act” has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. It’s no longer an act. My knowledge that I am masquerading as a normal person has even corroded whatever of normality I originally possessed, ending by making me tell myself over and over again that it too was nothing but a pretense of normality. To say it another way, I’m becoming the sort of person who can’t believe in anything except the counterfeit.