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"We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate."
~Henry Miller
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Operation Rubikon
The Future Won't Be Long
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The Power of One
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And the Band Played On
Interlude
Update Mai 31, 2016
I don't know how you rate your books, and if likable characters together with a satisfying HEA belong to your most important criteria for a great book.
One of the most important criteria for me is an excellent writing and a story, that makes you live through the ocean of emotions while reading, that haunts you even days after you finished it (what doesn't necessarily mean a HEA with nice characters)
Interlude has THE STORY. And this story is brilliantly written.
I am not a re-read type, and I don't re-read my books, even the ones I loved a lot. But I couldn't not to join my GR buddies who read it the first time. And I am so glad I did.
Without giving a lot away:
1)The writing ---> superb
2)The story---->excellent
3)My feelings--->different this time. It is much more complicated....
Maybe I'll write more later...
Original review:
Poor poor book that will be my next read after this amazing novel by Rupert Smith.
In one of his interviews Rupert Smith said, "I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written."
And I think that it is probably one of the best books I've read this year.
I feel myself totally incapable to give a proper review for this book, because all my blabbering can't do it justice.
[b:Interlude|23435458|Interlude|Rupert Smith|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1413992188s/23435458.jpg|42855657] has EVERYTHING that a great book can offer to readers: a rich and fantastic storyline, amazing characters portraying, and the fabulous, beautiful and memorable writing.
As I started this book and read the first sentence, "Everyone remembers the scene at the end of The Interlude(1959), when Laurence Oliveir takes Jayne Mansfield by the arm as the run down the quasyside at Southampton docks, the massive bulk of the Queen Mary looming behind them", you can imagine what I did next: I googled and googled and googled! Desperately trying to find EVERYTHING about this film. I couldn't. Because there is no film and there is no the book on which this film was based, The Interlude, and there is no "once-fashinable" Edward Barton, its author,one of the great living post-war English novelists in our real world.
It is a fiction work. But if you're acquainted with the works of Rupert Smith, you have to know that even if his characters are fictional, the time setting and historical events are well researched and accurately placed, and all his stories feel very real.
Interlude has two(or three?) main story lines. And every single one could make a nice book. A well-written book. But it wouldn't have been Interlude. The idea of the plot and how it's told, the intertwining of the destinies, a complicated tangle of circumstances, family secrets, decisions, past, present and future, emotions, feelings...This book is unique.
This compelling, beautifully written and excellent plotted novel makes you laugh, makes you cry and makes you think.
I can't recommend it highly enough.
I seldom have this kind of reaction - The moment I read the last page I wanted to start it from the very beginning.
That is one of my highlights in this book:
How can I describe my experience of Billy without descending into pornography or cliché? ‘We were locked in a passionate embrace’ is bad enough. I have no wish to describe the mechanics of who did what to whom; I am of the wrong generation, class and nationality for this. I can use four-letter words, have done in this very manuscript to describe our couplings – but not to describe the emotions that I felt in that apartment high above Fifth Avenue, reunited for the first time in seven years with the man whom I loved above all others. I felt lost, and I felt found. I wanted to live like this forever, and I wanted us both to die. I wanted to tear his throat out, to plunge my hand through his stomach and up to the heart, and yet I would have killed anyone who harmed a hair on his head. The little chip of ice that pierced my heart so long ago suddenly melted, and I was swept away, washed clean in a hot salty tide. It sounds so crass, so smutty when I try to write it down. But for those moments when I was with Billy, nothing else mattered. The world had constricted to one room, one bed, two bodies that had no limits of ‘him’ and ‘me’. We knew each other so well, and neither had forgotten a thing – knew exactly how to please the other, and in doing so please ourselves. There was no giving and taking, just sharing, just being.
This book is....magnificent!
***This review has been crossed posted to Gay Book Reviews