At Certain Points We Touch

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That being said, I really didn’t like the epilogue as the final image of the book, and the format as a letter meant that there were some narrative threads that I wish had been tied a little tighter. Please note that for the sake of my being unaware of how the main character—JJ—would like to be addressed I will be employing ‘they/them’ pronouns.

Therefore, should you have come upon my little review sent into the void of the inter-webs, please note that my sentiments are purely subjective. Chillingly, there’s a mention of him probably having voted for Brexit, had he had the opportunity even. The narrative delves slightly into her backstory which begins to shed light on her nature but there's not enough to make her sympathetic, or more unlikeable, or anything really. Sally McGrane is a Berlin-based journalist and the author of Moscow at Midnight (2018) , a spy novel, as well as another, Odesa at Dawn , which takes place in Ukraine shortly after the annexation of Crimea. With your right hand, you extend what I first read as a gesture of a gun towards me, then you wrap the two straightened fingers around the twisted strap of my bra and say, ‘What’s all this then?particular scenes, such as a Barbra Streisand act whilst high on Vicodin - were fun and well observed but like I say, the individual passages could not add up to a cohesive whole. But this book is also an excavation of the world we all live in, a depiction of the ways in which love affairs reflect and refract political circumstances and beliefs, and an exploration of how technology has changed and how it has changed us. In every practical sense I am the same person I was before reading this, but in all the important ways I am newer, wiser, more afraid, and more resolute. Rather than about transitioning or bildungsroman or capturing the “scene”, it really is almost 400 pages of showing how her life was affected by Thomas while acting as an architect with some perspective, cobbling together who he actually was.

I acknowledge that some of these earlier encounters were pertinent to the book—I suppose one could say that each scene was pertinent given whom we know JJ to be—yet, once again, I found myself reading something that I would not have selected for myself had I known that sexual encounters were to be described with such specific detail. With an almost haunting sense of the recent past and grief, At Certain Points We Touch is a novel that really paints a portrait, not just of the narrator's lover, but of the narrator themselves, of cities and bad rooms, and of growing up as a millennial and traversing different kinds of culture and community.Luckily, Joseph has chosen a medium sturdier than flea-market film to accomplish the same goal in this excellent debut novel. there in the gallery, i think i finally began to understand that you and Adam really were just what you said you were, just two gay men, just two guys who have sex with guys, that’s all. His relationship to his queerness and his fundamental homophobia and conservative values are unearthed, begging the question of who he might have become. Every single page is heavy with meaning and though the language is admittedly pretentious at times, it is in the best possible way.

Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity and its intoxicating and toxic power plays initiates a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims-and culminate in terrible betrayal. At Certain Points We Touch is as much a love letter to the glamour and glory of countercultural nightlife as a self-aware sendup of its absurdities and deprivations.All that being said, I couldn’t finish this book because the gratuitous use of drugs as though casual encounters of an ice-cream truck in summer, put me off. Through their flowing, mystifying pros I felt every raw emotion of the cast of complicated anti-heroes and genuinely real characters/people. JJ is someone who is incredibly naive while being willfully ignorant, almost seeking to place themselves into situations wherein they are tumbled like dry leaves. This is one of the few—if not the only—case wherein a prologue has enticed me to read on; sweetly drawing me in with a writing style that was heavily prosed without being excessively vapid for the sake of keeping a word count.