The award-winning, bestselling French novel by Philippe Besson about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress/writer Molly Ringwald. We drive at high speed along back roads, through woods, vineyards, and oat fields. The bike smells like gasoline and makes a lot of noise, and sometimes I’m frightened when the wheels slip on the gravel on the dirt road, but the only thing that matters is that I’m holding on to him, that I’m holding on to him outside.Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Without ever acknowledging they know each other in the halls, they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair.Dazzlingly rendered in English by Ringwald in her first-ever translation, Besson’s powerfully moving coming-of-age story captures the eroticism and tenderness of first love—and the heartbreaking passage of time.
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Soul crushing. Fastest I’ve ever read a book. Fairly short but just beautifully written & translated, kept on flipping page after page.
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I’m in this state of one-way desire.
I feel this desire swarming in my belly and running up my spine. But I have to constantly contain and compress it so that it doesn't betray me in front of others. Because I've already understood that desire is visible.
Momentum too; I feel it. I sense a movement, a trajectory, something that will bring me to him.
This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy.
At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.
I am acutely aware of the impossibility.
Difficulty, you can cope with; you can deploy ruses, try to seduce. There is beauty in the hope of conquest. But impossibility, by nature, carries with it a sense of defeat.
This boy is obviously not for me.
0"This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become."
What type of Call Me By Your Name ish is this?
Life-changing first romance with a member of the same sex at the age of seventeen? ✔
Romance set in the mid-80s? ✔
Short-lived because one of them leaves for another country? ✔
Story in its entirety takes place over 20+ years? ✔
Don't end up together in the end? ✔
Anyway this book is wonderful and tragic and gorgeously written and yes, if you do like CMBYN then you'll probably like this. It's so much more than that though and is heartbreakingly an autobiographical story, which makes some of the more sadder elements of the book just hit that much harder.
It's a story of a romance that last both a few months and the rest of their lives, and with that, I'll leave you with probably the most essential quote in the book.
"He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay."
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