phantomtomato

First up is Imre: A Memorandum by Edward Prime-Stevenson. This is short, so I went into it expecting a punchy story, and could not have been more wrong. The opening is many paragraphs of our narrator, Oswald, describing the physical and personal virtues of his new friend and love interest, the titular Imre. Somehow I was still shocked when, starting around 40% through and continuing… far past that… he has a “Who is John Galt?”-level monologue about his entire gay sexual history. It is not a punchy story!

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I also read the one (1) fic in this fandom, Imre: An Addendum by black_bentley, which is delightful and perfectly in-tune with the original. It should really be stapled onto the end, it just makes so much sense.

The largest chunk of my month went towards Some Do Not ... by Ford Madox Ford, volume one of Parade's End. After finishing In Memoriam, I wanted to know how WWI felt when written by someone who'd served in it. There's about a million other options for this and given that the characters are inspired by the war poets, I suppose I should have tried Good-Bye to All That. I bought this copy of Parade's End at a cute used bookstore in Montreal this year, though, so I decided to start with what I owned.

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I read The Summer House, Later by Judith Hermann on a recommendation from myhaus_spaeter. I read it in English, in translation from the original German, and it was a good translation! I mean, not that I speak German, but each of the stories felt like polished, well-considered prose. I really liked it.

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