The scene of this second novel is a monumental and ghostly palace within which a queer community has taken refuge. There the narrator finds Juan, whom he met at the age of seventeen in the psychiatric hospital where both were interned. Much older, Juan is now on the verge of death. A long conversation develops between the two men, who can count on their frank friendship to be as true as they are honest with each other.
Scattered documents
Because he knows his end is near, Juan extracts from the narrator, whose identity is unknown, a promise: that of continuing the research he has started on Jan Gay, whose real name is Helen Reitman (1902-1960), a self-taught anthropologist who was one of the first to take an interest in lesbians and gays in America in the 1930s. The era considered homosexuality as an illness, her pioneering work of documentation, however serious and of great importance magnitude, was discredited before being carefully put aside. Juan, who once knew Jan Gay and Zhenya, his wife, sends to the man he affectionately nicknames nene a file filled with scattered documents, scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, photos, notes, as well as the two volumes of Sex Variants : A Study of Homosexual Patterns, a study begun in New York in 1935 whose pages are happily crossed out.
guillementIsn’t that ultimately the mystery? Your black holes, these erasures? Frustration as art?
It is to this reality, magnetic and mysterious, erased under crude black lines, that Justin Torres intends to restore legitimacy and dignity. Its text interweaves archives and invented memories, but also photos and montages, which gives this novel the appearance of a work of art.
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Without us really knowing whether it is to delay death (we think of Scheherazade) or to tell each other the essentials before it is too late, the two men exchange stories and slices of life in a climate peaceful and complicit. Constructed with great poetic sense, Blackouts pays homage to the suffering, hopes, and desire of a persecuted population. Between what is silenced, hidden, and the facts, a space existed for the novelist. And for the reader following him, to whom Justin Torres (born in 1980) manages to convey a feeling of fullness and rare accomplishment.
⇒ Justin Torres | Blackouts | Novel | translated from English (United States) by Laetitia Devaux | The Olivier | 325 pp., €25.50
