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francisicus_rex 's review for:
Blackouts
by Justin Torres
I understand why this received the accolades it did, and there are definitely some interesting concepts. The exploration of gay love and the story of the early research into it being appropriated, changed to fit a negative narrative (instead of the original intent for positive displays/stories of homosexual love) and the original researcher being pushed out by conservative heterosexual male doctors...all this was done in a way that brought this to the attention of readers. I found the message and the deeper meaning of the stories in here to be top notch.
My main issues were more about the kind of topographical / multimedia aspects of the novel. I felt like it was just on the cusp of being useful and new and worth it, but not quite making it over that line. The erasure poems were a great way to turn the homophobic research findings back into a voice of celebration of homosexual love...but it's not exactly a novel idea, using erasure poems in this way. The images sometimes felt useful, other times not...sometimes added in a way that didn't serve the story as much as they could have. And then his use of italics for when one of the men was speaking outside of the frame of a story one of them was speaking...both voices would be in the same italics, making it hard to tell at times who was speaking what when. I almost wish there would have been a bit more play of fonts (one font for one of the two characters, another one for the other character) or another way where these could have been divided so that it was more readily understandable who was speaking. This tied over into the long bits of dialogue, where we would have to rely on seeing a "nene" to know it was the older man who says that, and then I would have to kind of backtrack to find which person said what. For someone already playing with font and visuals to get his message across, it seems an oversight not to take it one step further and make these things clearer. I'm not talking Mark Z. Danielewski levels of play, but somewhere a little closer to that on the spectrum between where Torres was with this and where Danielewski is.
These are nitpicks, and I'm judging it harder because it won a prestigious prize in literature, so perhaps mental I came in expecting a bit more out of this. I'm also realizing that novels I like novels with a bit more action to the plot--here we had interesting characters and heartfelt moments and a true story that sheds light on a disgraceful moment of research into queer lives, but there's not really much more than two people talking in a room for the whole thing. I just wanted a little bit more somehow. Still, I will recommend it if anyone asks about it, and the positives definitely outweigh the nitpicking negatives here.
My main issues were more about the kind of topographical / multimedia aspects of the novel. I felt like it was just on the cusp of being useful and new and worth it, but not quite making it over that line. The erasure poems were a great way to turn the homophobic research findings back into a voice of celebration of homosexual love...but it's not exactly a novel idea, using erasure poems in this way. The images sometimes felt useful, other times not...sometimes added in a way that didn't serve the story as much as they could have. And then his use of italics for when one of the men was speaking outside of the frame of a story one of them was speaking...both voices would be in the same italics, making it hard to tell at times who was speaking what when. I almost wish there would have been a bit more play of fonts (one font for one of the two characters, another one for the other character) or another way where these could have been divided so that it was more readily understandable who was speaking. This tied over into the long bits of dialogue, where we would have to rely on seeing a "nene" to know it was the older man who says that, and then I would have to kind of backtrack to find which person said what. For someone already playing with font and visuals to get his message across, it seems an oversight not to take it one step further and make these things clearer. I'm not talking Mark Z. Danielewski levels of play, but somewhere a little closer to that on the spectrum between where Torres was with this and where Danielewski is.
These are nitpicks, and I'm judging it harder because it won a prestigious prize in literature, so perhaps mental I came in expecting a bit more out of this. I'm also realizing that novels I like novels with a bit more action to the plot--here we had interesting characters and heartfelt moments and a true story that sheds light on a disgraceful moment of research into queer lives, but there's not really much more than two people talking in a room for the whole thing. I just wanted a little bit more somehow. Still, I will recommend it if anyone asks about it, and the positives definitely outweigh the nitpicking negatives here.