In the mid-to-late 18th century, the reading public grew so sharply in Britain, France and Germany that historians speak of a reading revolution. Reading was often a shared activity. Rousseau recounts how he and his father read aloud to each other, often continuing all night until they heard the dawn chorus. But it was also, and increasingly, a solitary practice, especially popular among middle-class women who had leisure, access to artificial light, and enough money to buy books. People not only read more: they read differently, becoming more involved in fictional worlds. The first-person singular becomes increasingly popular as a narrative device, which brings the protagonist close to the reader. Such stories often recount the protagonist’s progress through sin and error to an understanding of his faults and the reception of divine grace.
Part memoir, part history, part pornographic novel, Gay Bar is a gripping read. By turns raunchy and melancholic, it charts Lin’s coming out, his relationships, and his early adulthood as a gay man. But Lin also applies a critical eye to these memories, thinking about ways in which gay bars, even while serving as sites of community, can also exclude and isolate. Deploying queer history and critique in this intimate way, Lin does not offer readers any answers—that is not his goal. Rather, he paints a portrait of a culture in transition, of a new queer world emerging and an old one fading away.
I learned the news of my mother’s death on Facebook. I had left her the day before, tiny swimmer in an Olympic-sized hospice bed. Her parched mouth was open, but her breathing was wet. When I kissed her forehead, she smelled salty, sweet—a sticky, human smell.
I read the news of her death sitting in Pearson airport, stress eating a hamburger. I was heading back to stupid London, where I had a stupid job interview I was not prepared for. When I had kissed my mother in her hospice bed, she was still alive and full of desire. She wanted to swim. I, too, needed her to be alive. I’d asked everyone not to disclose anything mother related until my interview was done, worried I wouldn’t board the plane. And then, instantly, she was gone because my uncle posted it on Facebook.
The world is a bit bleak at the moment, so we decided to get a little nerdy this week and dive into an entirely new frontier. So grab a bowl of your favorite Klingon cuisine and a barrel of blood wine, because we’re exploring something a bit different: the Klingon language and its interesting impact on modern pop culture.
Few writers who’ve ever lived have been able to create moods of transience, loss and existential self-doubt as Ishiguro has — not art about the feelings, but the feelings themselves.
If the Coen brothers ever ventured beyond the United States for their films, they would find ample material in this novel, which offers a familiar mix of dark humor and casual brutality — and an ultimately hopeful search for small comforts and a modicum of justice in an absurd and immoral world.