At Certain Points We Touch

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In a story about a dead man, everyone becomes a ghost, and the title of the book does reflect its self-conscious ephemerality. There, living rent-free above a laundromat with a couple of semi-employed Berkeley students, the narrator survives on gifted half-burritos and performance art, and finds a “golden-age drag mother” who encourages the trio’s performances and imbues them with the hopes and dreams of the Haight-Ashbury era. In every practical sense I am the same person I was before reading this, but in all the important ways I am newer, wiser, more afraid, and more resolute. Thomas’s character is ghoul-like, haunting over the story from past to present, as the narrator attempts to find closure through their writing.

there in the gallery, i think i finally began to understand that you and Adam really were just what you said you were, just two gay men, just two guys who have sex with guys, that’s all.The narrator describes Leapling’s photography as “an experiment in seeing the world,” carried out with old cameras and even older film, such that the images might either come out beautifully or result in a series of completely black frames, streaked with red. In 2011, Chitra Ramaswamy was dispatched by her editor to interview Glasgow Jews Henry and Ingrid Wuga for a story about refugees.

I didn’t mind the unlikable protagonist, in love for whatever reason with an even more unlikeable character; I didn’t mind the woe-is-me tone it sometimes took, all those poor decisions that led nowhere, story-wise, but I can’t get over the writing. On the anniversary of her lover's death, she descends into a fit of hypergraphia—chronicling—through an open letter directed at the deceased reader—her life predominantly through the lens of the tremulous and exultant relationship with the complex rendered dead. There was no middle ground with you, which makes your own endless moral ambivalence all the more frustrating now I come to review it.Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity and its intoxicating and toxic power play will initiate a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims - and culminate in terrible betrayal. There’s lots of things about this book that I loved… the locations, the references to places in London now long gone that I also used to know and love, the pace of life in both London and NYC that vividly reminded me of my own 20s - living in London, but spending a lot of time across the Atlantic. Every single page is heavy with meaning and though the language is admittedly pretentious at times, it is in the best possible way. But this book is also an excavation of the world we all live in, a depiction of the ways in which love affairs reflect and refract political circumstances and beliefs, and an exploration of how technology has changed and how it has changed us. Everything is momentary, a digital life is wiped out without any more ceremony than a physical life, it is simply so.

Please note that for the sake of my being unaware of how the main character—JJ—would like to be addressed I will be employing ‘they/them’ pronouns. There’s something too painful in remembering how full of potential everything seemed back then when the world was ours”. LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Sally McGrane is a Berlin-based journalist and the author of Moscow at Midnight (2018) , a spy novel, as well as another, Odesa at Dawn , which takes place in Ukraine shortly after the annexation of Crimea. And despite its loose chronology and somewhat distant-feeling characters, the book has amazing sense of place and time.Gargantuan heavy goods vehicles, massive petroleum tankers and enormous Coca-Cola trucks thunde[r] across the dying night, bellowing diesel through the city, causing the pavement to rumble beneath our feet. i am getting truly Comfortable with the idea of leaving books behind this year, but i'm sad this is one of them.

The first-person narrator — unnamed but addressed throughout the book alternately as JJ, Bibby, and Liza Minnelli — has just picked up a handsome American at a house party. They more than compensate for sections when the pacing lags, the faint sense of awkwardness of essentially hanging around in a narrative waiting for a character to die, the times when the writing buckles under its own ambitions and falls apart. At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco and New York – a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age story that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent. Overall, I appreciated what the author was trying to do, and I wish that the indulgence of the writing style didn’t bring me out of the story as much.

All that being said, I couldn’t finish this book because the gratuitous use of drugs as though casual encounters of an ice-cream truck in summer, put me off. com, and others, is the author of a spy novel, Moscow at Midnight (2018), and co-creator of the German-language Ollarikchen podcast. At Certain Points We Touch is an unflinching roman à clef about what it means to love someone and be devastated by their loss, without looking away from the fact that much of that person's character was unseemly.