1.62k reviews for:

Blackouts

Justin Torres

3.91 AVERAGE

connor_litz's profile picture

connor_litz's review

3.5
emotional funny hopeful sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

One of the gayest books I have ever read, horny, sad, poetic, unique, dreamlike, and lot of knowledge of gay history.
dark emotional reflective slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character

shraya42's review

3.5
emotional reflective sad medium-paced

emilykbecker's review

2.0

It’s very inventive but I just couldn’t connect with it. The vignettes, the surreality, the mixed media. It didn’t land for me the way Biography of X (with which it shares quite a lot) did.
emotional informative reflective medium-paced
grimoires's profile picture

grimoires's review

4.0

Unsure at first--the constant tagless dialogue grates me, even when I see it lends to the scattered and often dreamy, snippet-based quality of it all--but overall it really is a stellar experimental book on story telling.

mloschi's review

4.0
emotional reflective medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

This book is beautifully written and poetic. I especially like that the whole story is the conversation between the two main characters that’s a really lovely and intimate device. It also felt like an educational, historical, like on long anecdotal case study. A lovely read but there wasn’t anything pulling me back in so I would go for long stints without picking the book back up particularly between section breaks, hence the 4 stars rather than 5. 
rodroinrainbows's profile picture

rodroinrainbows's review

4.0
hopeful informative reflective sad slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: N/A
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Definitivamente Blackouts ha sido: una experiencia.

Blackouts es una novela inspirada por clásicos de la literatura latinoamericana e indaga en los orígenes de la patologización de la homosexualidad y el borrado queer través de un relato histórico / autobiográfico que presenta una copia del infame Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns transformado en arte mediante páginas de dicho manuscrito tachadas y reimaginadas, creando poemas y relatos de dolor, culpa y deseo. 

Además de tener cierta pretensión creativa, Blackouts indaga en el pasado de figuras históricas y polémicas en la historia como Jan Gay, Ben Reitman y Emma Goldman, aportando mucho valor para aquellos que deseen aprender a la par que disfrutan de una novela altamente experimental, contada a varios tiempos y donde la prosa y la lírica se difuminan. 

Tengo sentimientos encontrados con este libro, porque a veces me ha hecho sentir como un escrito académico atrapado en una novela experimental, otras veces me he perdido en el collage de historias, textos alterados e infografías que proporciona y otras veces simplemente me ha hecho disfrutar de su arte. Como novela apenas tiene recorrido, pero su valor no está en el viaje emocional (o la falta de este) que sufre el narrador sin nombre, sino en el cómo remueve la historia y se intenta crear arte del sufrimiento, resiliencia después del dolor. 

Es una lectura extraña. Quizás demasiado pretenciosa para su bien, pero definitivamente recomendable para quien quiera aprender sobre la historia del colectivo. 

kristine_roggentien's review

2.0

An important topic and interesting presentation, but I couldn’t get into it. It felt very disjointed, random musings.