I am forty pages into Andre Aciman's acclaimed novel of homosexual awakening (for lack of a better succinct term) and waiting for several things:
- the formation of a timeline, since trying to determine which seemingly insignificant, supposedly revelatory event takes place two days, ten days, or two weeks into the story (So far, there's a lot of zigging and zagging.)
- some pruning of the lush prose and long and winding sentences, which often leave me breathless in an unpleasant way
- suspension of disbelief re. the narrator's age (I'm having trouble remembering this is a 17-year-old boy and not Michael Caine's character from the movie Educating Rita.)
- action and/or more than a few lines of dialogue at a time
- sex (God, popular fiction has made me one shallow and impatient plebe!)
I just read some reviews on Amazon to see if anybody else had begun to squirm, so quickly, under the weight of this novel's dense, obsessive, and repetitious introspection. Hell yeah; I'm not alone. In fact, there are some very literate and incisive 1-star reviews. A reader actually gave up right around the point I just reached.
I'm intrigued enough to keep going, though, and hope this book's saving graces do indeed save it. (Yes, it has many saving graces, but they're swamped by authorial self-indulgence.) I also hope I don't have to slog through one more dissection and microscopic analysis of the breezy farewell, "Later!" I'd never realized how nuanced it could be. But now that my brain is glutted on its nuances, I could use a break.
Stay tuned.
