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claudia_kudya's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
figwood's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
sad
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? Yes
5.0
tolkientoyou's review against another edition
4.0
"Tinha o coração a bater como um coração de assassino."
Anos 20/30 na cidade do amor - Paris. E alguém (o próprio Jean Cocteau), homossexual, a tentar mentir à sociedade e a tentar ser verdadeiro com a sua essência, tudo ao mesmo tempo. É um livro curtinho, mas que depressa percebemos as dificuldades ridicularmente inseridas na atmosfera da pressão da normalidade. Ainda assim, não deixámos de vivenciar montanhas russas de emoções do autor, amores intensos, proibidos, mentiras, enganos dos mais variadíssimos géneros, e também a presença de uma "estrela negra" que vai quase azarar muitas das situações representadas no livro.
Anos 20/30 na cidade do amor - Paris. E alguém (o próprio Jean Cocteau), homossexual, a tentar mentir à sociedade e a tentar ser verdadeiro com a sua essência, tudo ao mesmo tempo. É um livro curtinho, mas que depressa percebemos as dificuldades ridicularmente inseridas na atmosfera da pressão da normalidade. Ainda assim, não deixámos de vivenciar montanhas russas de emoções do autor, amores intensos, proibidos, mentiras, enganos dos mais variadíssimos géneros, e também a presença de uma "estrela negra" que vai quase azarar muitas das situações representadas no livro.
dvlavieri's review
5.0
I will say that this is not a perfect book, but a book which I am glad and changed because I have read it. While it is perhaps overly simplistic, melodramatic, and perhaps not comprehensive enough in it's characters, it is a book which speaks from a true and wounding personal honesty which I believe it rare in many novels, even ones which are my favorites. It relates the experience of a man, in agony and confusion over his sexuality, stripped of artistry and moral-overbearing (albeit somewhat rife with stereotyping). In Proust we find homosexuality painted over, we find Proust's male lovers turned into mannish women, we find the grotesque pervert of Charlus, the sadistic lesbianism of Vinteuil's daughter, etc. While I still believe the truest account of the homosexual love experience is Proust's narrator's love for Albertine, it is impossible to consider it without also acknowledging the gender-bending, and artistic dishonesty of that portrayal. While Proust out-achieves in philosophic truth, in artistic mastery, and aesthetic jouissance, it is Cocteau's slim Le Livre Blanc ("The White Book") which bares his own soul and experience with no masks of garrish making-up.
The story is simple: the narrator falls in and out of infatuation with a series of men, all of his homosexual adventures end in disaster and usually death, leaving the narrator feeling lost and alone. He ultimately retreats from a society which hates and misunderstands him. His primary struggle, as an aesthete, is reconciling his homosexual longings with the aesthetic image of heterosexual love: the two are not compatible. His desires are obtusely unfitting with his ideas about love, as he has learned them from a society largely heterosexual, and only containing secret veins of homosexuality. In Kierkegaard's Seducer's Diary, he explains: A perfect kiss requires that the agents be a girl and a man. A man-to-man kiss is in bad taste, or, worse yet, it tastes bad. Love between men is not a normal thing in the narrator's society (nor is it even today, though it is tolerated and largely accepted as a marginal faction), it is "in bad taste - it tastes bad" - there is something unnatural about it, because nature as society has constructed love is between man and woman. Their parts fit. It is natural.
A gay man can read and love and empathize with Jane Eyre, or Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary or any other novel, which is decidedly written by and for the hetero-normative majority. Why is this? "Because love is love" people say. But I think it is hard for straight people to read, love, and empathize with gay literature. Not because it is not love, but because it is love translated into a language which they do not understand. It is reading a novel in translation, there are bits of the personal artistry, some of the colloquial truth, which is lost in the mechanic process of translation. "Love" has attracted to itself and engendered centuries of discourse, vertiginous heights of poetry and art, which have built it into something nearly incomprehensible. It is accepted and absorbed as abstract, as inevitable, as true. But that is not the case for homosexuality, which remains nascent in the collective mind and culture, remains fringe and marginal.
Being a gay man is a unique social Odyssey. It is unlike being a woman, and unlike being of non-white ethnic color, unlike being physically or diagnostically mentally handicap. Like the Biblical Esther, whose Jewness is not seen and must be vocalized by her, gayness is neither seen nor strictly detectable. It is a true Odyssey - a journey of self-discovery and of regaining your own Ithaka which you have been cast away from by society, on the waters of what is "normal." Even growing up in New England, it is a singular experience to know that there are people in the world who would hate you if they knew - and that you have a perverse and subversive power to reveal the truth: to be or not to be? There is a sovereignty of the mind which gives you the power to determine who you are to whom: a choice which many people need not worry about. You cannot "come out" as black, nor as a woman - it is in the open, it is known. While the struggles of those other oppressed peoples are real, and perhaps in many ways externally worse, it is a unique dilemma of homosexual people (and I can only speak to the male experience) to struggle with the internal demons of who you are, of rationalizing and categorizing, despairing and accepting your emotional, physical, and romantic desires.
Cocteau's narrator notes: “I suppose the artists invented the firm breasts they put on women, and that in reality all women had flabby ones.” It is the collective history of art and society which tells us what love is or is not supposed to be. And by the atavistic definitions we mold and imagine our loves to fit those immortal constructs. But what is a gay man to do in the face of such narrow and incompatible definitions? He must redefine love, or he must settle for the image of love rather than the reality. If Tolstoy is right, that there are as many kinds of loves as there are hearts, then how many people are settling for history's and art's image of love, rather than discovering their own reality of love? Le Livre Blanc is not the story of a gay man finding love, but rather the discovery of a man that his love is not the same love that he has been taught, that love is manifold. That love is a universal truth, but one which has engendered infinite manifestations and varieties. This is not a feel-good novel with trite moralizing, but rather the pained and impassioned struggle and persistent (even at the end) confusion of a man beset against what he has absorbed from society as "normal" and as "real" - he does not find true love, he finds failure and struggle, he finds fleeting images, throbs of physical and emotional stirring, but ultimately he is yet to manifest his own definitions.
The story is simple: the narrator falls in and out of infatuation with a series of men, all of his homosexual adventures end in disaster and usually death, leaving the narrator feeling lost and alone. He ultimately retreats from a society which hates and misunderstands him. His primary struggle, as an aesthete, is reconciling his homosexual longings with the aesthetic image of heterosexual love: the two are not compatible. His desires are obtusely unfitting with his ideas about love, as he has learned them from a society largely heterosexual, and only containing secret veins of homosexuality. In Kierkegaard's Seducer's Diary, he explains: A perfect kiss requires that the agents be a girl and a man. A man-to-man kiss is in bad taste, or, worse yet, it tastes bad. Love between men is not a normal thing in the narrator's society (nor is it even today, though it is tolerated and largely accepted as a marginal faction), it is "in bad taste - it tastes bad" - there is something unnatural about it, because nature as society has constructed love is between man and woman. Their parts fit. It is natural.
A gay man can read and love and empathize with Jane Eyre, or Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary or any other novel, which is decidedly written by and for the hetero-normative majority. Why is this? "Because love is love" people say. But I think it is hard for straight people to read, love, and empathize with gay literature. Not because it is not love, but because it is love translated into a language which they do not understand. It is reading a novel in translation, there are bits of the personal artistry, some of the colloquial truth, which is lost in the mechanic process of translation. "Love" has attracted to itself and engendered centuries of discourse, vertiginous heights of poetry and art, which have built it into something nearly incomprehensible. It is accepted and absorbed as abstract, as inevitable, as true. But that is not the case for homosexuality, which remains nascent in the collective mind and culture, remains fringe and marginal.
Being a gay man is a unique social Odyssey. It is unlike being a woman, and unlike being of non-white ethnic color, unlike being physically or diagnostically mentally handicap. Like the Biblical Esther, whose Jewness is not seen and must be vocalized by her, gayness is neither seen nor strictly detectable. It is a true Odyssey - a journey of self-discovery and of regaining your own Ithaka which you have been cast away from by society, on the waters of what is "normal." Even growing up in New England, it is a singular experience to know that there are people in the world who would hate you if they knew - and that you have a perverse and subversive power to reveal the truth: to be or not to be? There is a sovereignty of the mind which gives you the power to determine who you are to whom: a choice which many people need not worry about. You cannot "come out" as black, nor as a woman - it is in the open, it is known. While the struggles of those other oppressed peoples are real, and perhaps in many ways externally worse, it is a unique dilemma of homosexual people (and I can only speak to the male experience) to struggle with the internal demons of who you are, of rationalizing and categorizing, despairing and accepting your emotional, physical, and romantic desires.
Cocteau's narrator notes: “I suppose the artists invented the firm breasts they put on women, and that in reality all women had flabby ones.” It is the collective history of art and society which tells us what love is or is not supposed to be. And by the atavistic definitions we mold and imagine our loves to fit those immortal constructs. But what is a gay man to do in the face of such narrow and incompatible definitions? He must redefine love, or he must settle for the image of love rather than the reality. If Tolstoy is right, that there are as many kinds of loves as there are hearts, then how many people are settling for history's and art's image of love, rather than discovering their own reality of love? Le Livre Blanc is not the story of a gay man finding love, but rather the discovery of a man that his love is not the same love that he has been taught, that love is manifold. That love is a universal truth, but one which has engendered infinite manifestations and varieties. This is not a feel-good novel with trite moralizing, but rather the pained and impassioned struggle and persistent (even at the end) confusion of a man beset against what he has absorbed from society as "normal" and as "real" - he does not find true love, he finds failure and struggle, he finds fleeting images, throbs of physical and emotional stirring, but ultimately he is yet to manifest his own definitions.
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