currently reading

Regiment of Women, Thomas Berger (1975)
The Beauty of Men, Andrew Holleran (1996)

added 11 august 2007

this is how i usually choose a book to read. flip open to first page, scan it, and if it interests me in some way, i may then flip open to another section of the book and read more, and if i'm still interested i borrow it. i seldom buy books anymore, though i used to dearly love them. most of them are single-serve friends these days, and i hardly ever go back for seconds.

when i borrowed the Regiment of Women, i thought it was about transvestites. the opening page described a man waking up, except he has breasts and was dressed in women's undergarments. that was enough for me. didn't even flip through the rest of the book.

no, i didn't borrow it out of a sense of the perverse or deviant sexual hmmm, tendencies. i don't find that kind of thing stimulating. in fact, the opening page went on to describe how the man almost had a nervous breakdown after looking at himself in the mirror because he realised he was growing older. thatx what hooked me. that insight into raw human emotions.

but i was wrong. itx not about transvestites. itx about a society in the future where women are in charge and men are subversive; women dressed in shirts and trousers and men wore dresses. it was quite jarring to read, especially about women with moustaches. lol.

strangely enough, the story was interesting enough and i only switched between it and The Beauty of Men once. finished the book in one sitting in one night, even though it made some presumptions in the end that seemed a bit too clinche. personal bias here. finding it hard to swallow assumptions without researched information these days.

but like i said, couldn't put it down.

The Beauty of Men. ahh. quoting from the back cover, itx "a universal tale of loneliness, ageing (sic) and the feverish desires of the human heart"; itx a simple story about a man named Lark and his desire for his neighbour named Becker.

still reading it, but it has some beautiful parts that are i can empathise with. think i would just quote two passages from it. hmmm. shouldn't be violating any copyright laws here i hope.

' ("Are you there?" his mother said once while a friend from Los Angeles was on the phone, heartbroken after a man twelve years younger had said he just wanted to be friends. "Yes, I'm here," he said to her, at which point his friend had sighed into the phone, "I want to say those words to someone.")'

the other one describes how Lark would drive pass Becker's house every night without Becker's knowledge because that is the only contact he has with Becker. he does this late at night because Becker has refused to meet him again after their single encounter and seemed to be keeping a distance from him. Lark feels foolish, and tries to self-rationalise that he drives by Becker's house because it is a shorter route home, but deep down he knows he does this only to be closer to Becker.

"Still, when Lark sees the lighted panels on either side of the door, or the central window with the swatch of blue wall and the thin white curtain blowing in the breeze, when he drives past at night, something floods his heart and he says out loud in wonder, amazement, gratitude, and despair, "I love him! I love him!"- amazed more than anything by the durability, the persistence of the emotion."

hmmm. if itx still not clear, the story is about homosexual men. and yes, i did intentionally pick it.

itx quite sad really. it prints a bleak picture of isolation and death, dealing as it does with AIDS and the impact it has on their lives. brought home a point about how lonely gay men are. if heterosexual people already feel lonely and unloved, imagine how much harder it must be for homosexuals who have to deal with ostracism and hatred, while trying to find love at the same time. imagine the depth of loneliness and despair that drives one such young man to kill himself because he was sure he would never find love or someone he can spend the rest of his life with.

and that is such a sad thing.