![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The only quibble is that this book, which is deftly translated, doesn’t exactly feel like a novel it reads like a memoir. The love between the two feels real and memorable, and Besson is a thoughtful writer who can strike home with vivid imagery, particularly as he and Thomas age and grow apart and Thomas’ son, Lucas, develops a friendship of sorts with the narrator. Besson’s initial reluctance to put names to their sex acts (“I am enthralled by his sex," the narrator writes, as if it’s 1822) feels musty, though the author does get more descriptively honest as the story progresses. ![]() Different as he and the narrator are, they nonetheless initiate an affair that takes place in hidden rooms on campus and at the narrator’s home when his parents aren’t around. Thomas is beautiful but not worldly he’s a sensitive, stunted stud who doesn’t see a way out of the town. Written in an almost confessional first-person, Besson’s ( His Brother, 2005, etc.) latest is a French bestseller set in the mid-1980s in a small, "gray" Bordeaux town “doomed to disappear.” The narrator, an ambitious high school student and son of the principal, falls deeply for a fellow student, the “slender and distant” Thomas Andrieu, a character in the novel but also apparently an actual person to whom the novel is dedicated. A bestselling French writer-or at least the novelized version of a bestselling French writer-reckons in older age with a passionate affair he had as a young man. ![]()
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