I was a little confused by the format at first. I promptly stopped being confused and started being impressed by the beautiful little first-person tragedies that kept unfurling.

This book was tough to figure out at first. It's a collection of vignettes about two gay men and their lives together and apart.

Now I wonder, has this story liberated anything but my tears?

And now I want to read everything by this author

4.5

John, Henry, Beatrice, Susan, Johnson, Harry and the eponymous Martin are the recurrent names of the characters in this book which its blurb describes as a novel.

This is how I began to read it but a few chapters in (around page 60), things start to shift and each chapter becomes more like a shirt story related to the other through the echoes created by the reuse of certain details and circumstances and of those names in different permutations.

The book becomes a sort of amorphous kaleidoscope where the realities described continually shift while still moving along some vaguely chronologically consistent narrative line.

Eventually it transpires that some of the material has to be autobiographical (those recurring circumstances presumably).

I found it difficult to get into the book but things definitely improved as the narrative moved on and as, I think, the elements described converged more closely with the author's experience.

I ended up almost liking this book which feels like an interesting experiment in style, though I'm not certain what this presentation brings to the reader that a more straight forward narration couldn't achieve.