COUP DE GRÂCE, a concentrated gut-punch dealing with Love's corrosive, destructive power

COUP DE GRÂCE
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR (tr. Grace Frick)
Farrar, Straus & Giroux (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in the Baltic provinces in the aftermath of World War I, Coup de Grâce tells the story of an intimacy that grows between three young people hemmed in by civil war: Erick, a Prussian fighting with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks; Conrad, his best friend from childhood; and Sophie, whose unrequited love for Conrad becomes an unbearable burden.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY COUNTY'S LIBRARY SYSTEM VIA INTERLIBRARY LOAN. USE YOUR LIBRARIES, PLEASE! THEY NEED OUR PATRONAGE.

My Review: Told in the first person past perfect, this tale is of three young people caught in a highly hormonal passage of their lives at the same moment the Russian Revolution overthrows the privileged existences they'd led until that time. It purports to be the memory of Erick von Lhomond as he sits in a train station cafe. Erick is on his way to who knows where after his career as a soldier of fortune has led to a wounding in the 1930s Spanish Civil War then newly ended. He recalls his strange, unequal love for sibling aristos Conrad and Sophie, children of the Count of Reval; they are his cousins. Sophie falls in love with him; he and Conrad are already involved in some sort of...it's not spelled out, but it feels to my gay twenty-first century self like it's a sexual relationship. Triangle collapses, the two siblings die, and cowardly, culpable Erick soldiers on. It's all in the hows, as life so often is when one is young; now, in the fullness of his wasted years, Erick is seeing the whys, and they're keeping him up nights. And not a moment too soon, if you ask me.

Perhaps I am generalizing from a wholly individual case of moral impotency: of all the men I know I am least disposed to seek out ideological incitements in order to love or hate my fellow beings; it is only for causes in which I do not believe that I have been willing to risk my life.

This, then, is a near-perfect example of a récit (French: “narrative” or “account”). These are brief novella-like things, usually with a simple narrative line; studiedly simple but usually steeped-in-irony tales in which the first-person narrator reveals the inherent moral ambiguities of life by means of reminiscences.

It's a very French narrative form, is the récit, the novella's Goth cousin, all chains and weird makeup effects and scary-looking hair. It's a perfect form to use in telling this sort of moralizing by a man with no morals story. There just aren't that many English-language writers willing to do this without oodles of padding and the crutch of multiple characters, apart from Fitzgerald in his finest work, the scathing takedown of anomie and amorality that is The Great Gatsby. Author Yourcenar, whose Memoirs of Hadrian lives as one of my all-time favorite reads, published this particularly difficult take on the pointlessness of war in 1939...barely beating WWII's official starting gun. She was quite clearly aware that war was inevitable and imminent, and wrote it as a protest against the further damage inevitable in a war. She was also, according to facts relayed by her biographer, Josyane Savigneau, in Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life, settling an old score with a man for whom she had developed a similar and similarly unrequited passion:

We are so used to seeing in wisdom a residue of dead passions that it's difficult to recognize in it the hardest and most condensed form of ardour, the gold nugget pulled out of the fire, not the ashes.

The ending of the book, stark and violent and horrfying, sums up the expectations of this Belgian survivor of the War to End All Wars, and it was not in the least bit too dark or pessimistic. Only extremely painful to read, as I suppose it was to live as well. As a side note, Translator Frick was Author Yourcenar's lover as well as business manager. I can only feel sad that her opinion of this acid-bath of a read doesn't seem to have survived, if it was ever shared with anyone else.

I found the casual, unremarked-on anti-Semitism of the book jarring. I know it was a part of the culture Yourcenar lived in, but it hasn't aged well. I wasn't very impressed with Erick, the narrator's, casual, caddish sexuality either...gentle, clueless Conrad could certainly have done better, and tempestuous, grasping Sophie's awakening has such tragic consequences that it makes one doubt the sanity of the child (she's sixteen to Conrad's and Erick's twenty during the brief span covered by this book). This is a ménage à trois that belies the three-legged stool analogy. It could be the people involved are simply too young to make a stable combination; it could be that Erick simply could never bring himself to lose the battle for supremacy that he wages with himself and against the world (but especially Sophie) in favor of someone he is not in love with:

Nothing moves me more than courage: so total a sacrifice deserved complete trust from me. But she never believed that I trusted her, since she did not suspect how much I distrusted others. In spite of appearances to the contrary, I do not regret having yielded to Sophie as much as it lay in my nature to do; at the first glance I had caught sight of something in her incorruptible, with which one could make a compact as sure, and as dangerous, as with an element itself. Fire may be trusted, provided one knows that its law is to burn, or die.

Recommended? Well, on the whole, not unreservedly. It's not a casual book, and it would offer too few cheap thrills for most people in the modern audience for short reads...deeply transgressive when Yourcenar wrote it in 1939, it's fairly tame today. Gay boy loves bisexual boy, who loves him back but also fancies his teen sister? There couldn't really be that much to shock an audience whose culture served them up Blue Velvet and Natural Born Killers and Bonnie and Clyde on movie screens, let alone in the rarefied, private world of a book's pages.

For me, I'm glad I read it, but I won't re-read it ever.

A POSITION IN PARIS, romantic historical novel with gay leads

A POSITION IN PARIS
MEGAN REDDAWAY
Kindle original
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The (Self-)Publisher Says: Paris, 1919. World War One is over, and wounded hero James Clarynton is struggling to face life without one leg, one eye, and the devilish good looks he had before the conflict. Now he must pay for affection, and it leaves him bitter. He’s filling the time by writing a book—but it’s the young man who comes to type it who really intrigues him.

Edmund Vaughan can’t turn down the chance to be secretary to the wealthy James Clarynton. He’s been out of work since the armistice, and his mother and brother depend on him. But he has secrets to hide, and the last thing he wants is an employer who keeps asking questions.

As they work together, their respect for each other grows, along with something deeper. But tragedy threatens, and shadows from the past confront them at every turn. They must open their hearts and trust each other if they are to break down the barriers that separate them.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It distresses me a bit that this is marketed as a gay romance. The genre's stalwart legions of readers are going to come away disappointed because this is an historical novel, not a romance. The men at the center of the tale fall in love and overcome absurdly bad communication exacerbated by pride and fear. That's not enough to be called a "gay romance" in today's marketplace. There's zero on-page sex. None. Zip zero rien nada. So buyer beware.

What you will receive for your dollars is a well-written and historically accurate vision of post-World-War-One Paris. What you will experience, via the journal entries of the two men whose love story this is, is a wonderful and tender story of falling in love and finding your soul mate. In a time when that was both forbidden and fraught with peril, that is a whole lot to find.

The French have always had a more-or-less indifferent response to gay male love. Tuts and frowns and lack of inclusion are a far cry from the English-influenced countries' thundering condemnatory revilement, torture, and murder. These English folk, arrived in an oasis of rational thought, bloom as far as they'll allow themselves to bloom. James, our war hero, is wealthy and has inherited still more of the world's goods with the death of his gay great-uncle. An apartment, a carriage, a lifestyle of enviable luxury; younger and poorer Edmund has less, needs more, and hides a genuinely tragic stain on his family's character from his war-hero employer.

Needless to say, the entire fakakta mess could be solved if the men would ask direct questions and answer them truthfully, but then again that's the entire problem in the human world. Politics is the art of obfuscating the essential simplicity of human troubles so a few can steal money and value from a lot. But I digress.

James's personality, unsurprisingly, is dominant and take-charge. Edmund is more retiring yet more stubborn and prideful than James is accustomed to dealing with as an aristocrat and an officer. Edmund's idiotic pride presents an enormous obstacle to James, smitten and eager to help his beloved. Quite unsurprisingly, James isn't particularly aware of his overbearing and domineering personality's effect on lower-class, shy Edmund. While it is true that Edmund's idiot pride is the major stumbling block to their communication, James's lack of experience with equality in his relationships needs addressing as well.

These problems being universal among human beings, they're deeply relatable to relationship fiction readers. I fear that placing two men at the center of a relationship fiction, the author won't find those readers; I've already mentioned the issue with the romance readers' expectations. So the resolution to the tale, one that involves an astonishing and moving act of bravery on James's part, is perfectly designed to appeal to an audience I fear will not notice the book.

There is so much to love in the story of two proud, scared, stubborn hearts coming to love each other, to care for and about each other, to form a solid and (one expects) enduring partnership, that I wish I could open your eyes to the reality of the tale's market position. Don't go in expecting A Romance. Go in expecting Romantic Relationship Fiction a la Georgette Heyer or Margery Sharp. Your expectations will be met.

THE BLASPHEMER, WWI meets plane crash meets philosophical atheism...only fun!

THE BLASPHEMER
NIGEL FARNDALE
Random House
$6.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: On its way to the Galapagos Islands, a light aircraft ditches into the sea. As the water floods through the cabin, zoologist Daniel Kennedy faces an impossible choice - should he save himself, or Nancy, the woman he loves?

In a parallel narrative, it is 1917 and Daniel's great grandfather Andrew is preparing to go over the top at Passchendaele. He, too, will have his courage tested, and must live with the moral consequences of his actions.

Back in London, the atheistic Daniel is wrestling with something his 'cold philosophy' cannot explain - something unearthly he thought he saw while swimming for help in the Pacific. But before he can make sense of it, the past must collapse into the present, and both he and Andrew must prove themselves capable of altruism, and deserving of forgiveness.

The Blasphemer is a story about conditional love, cowardice and the possibility of redemption - and what happens to a man of science when forced to question his certainties. It is a novel of rare depth, empathy and ambition that sweeps from the trenches of the First World War to the terrorist-besieged streets of London today: a novel that will speak to the head as well as the heart of any reader.

My Review: Of the three books in here, I like the First World War narrative the best, followed by the London story of academic backbiting and relationship angst, and least of the three the underdeveloped metaphysical events connecting those two. One character says in the course of stitching the stories together that Darwin described angels as creations of Man, which "...have been described as the most beautiful conceit in mortal wit, and I would go along with that."

And that, me hearties, is that.

Daniel, our modern main character, sees his great-grandfather Andrew as he swims to safety. The World War One soldier was a deserter, which is a deeply shocking and shaming thing in the context of the day. Daniel's decision to save himself and not his pill of a baby-mama struck me as most tolerant of him, since I'd've taken the chance to shove her deep into the wreckage so as to be shut of the nightmare carping whinging misery-guts once and for all.

What unites these men across the generations is their cowardly self-preservation, a trait that ultimately lets each create a future for himself and for unknown descendants. It's hard to fault the men. It's hard for them to forgive themselves. It's an interesting counterpoint that Farnsdale sets up: Andrew saves himself from mass insanity and all-but-inevitable senseless death, and Daniel saves his own hide from an accident that will imperil few. Are either of the men "correct" or "justified" in their actions/inactions?

I'm still thinking about them a year after reading the book for the second time. That's a damn good sign.

But I can't go over 3.5 stars of five. The messiness of the story lines is just too egregious for me to go up, and the inventiveness and intriguing premise are too involving for me to go down. It felt to me like the subplot of Daniel's dying father needed to be pruned out, and the characters of Hamsi the teacher and the twirling-mustachioed villain Wetherby were so broadly drawn as to be uninteresting. So while not unflawed, the book was a good, solid read with interesting philosophical points jabbing the soft, lazy parts of one's novel-reading brain.