We had almost stopped believing in it, but now Justin Torres is finally offering us a second novel. Thirteen years later Animal lifea punchy story translated into 15 languages, adapted for film by Jeremiah Zagar in 2018 and recently included on the list of the 100 best books of the 21st centurye century by the New York Timesthe 44-year-old American author of Puerto Rican origin, professor at UCLA, is back with Blackoutsa captivating work of great formal audacity, a unique interweaving of reality and invention, of words and images, of history and literature which earned it last year the National Book Award in the category fiction.
While constituting a courageous autofiction, which notably deals with family violence, mental health, poverty and prostitution, the book pays vibrant tribute to a queer pioneer: Jan Gay (1902–1960), an American researcher, anthropologist , lesbian and activist, who collected several testimonies from gays and lesbians in Europe and the United States in the 1930s. His colossal work was plundered and misused by George W. Henry, a psychiatrist whose book Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patternspublished in 1941, helped establish homosexuality as a mental illness, which it remained in the United States until the mid-1970s.
“I took the road to the Palace with my last money, alone after having lost everything in the big city. I had no job, no diploma and no kingdom, no heart for work, no pimp. » Haunted by a phrase whose source he does not know, “Every path leads to love”, the narrator, a 27-year-old man of Puerto Rican origin, heads towards a queer commune located in the middle of the desert. At the Palace, a place above which hover the ghosts of Juan Rulfo, Jean Genet, Manuel Puig and Arthur Rimbaud, he finds Juan, a Puerto Rican now dying whom he met ten years earlier in a asylum where they were both residents. First Juan questions the narrator, pushes him to revisit his story, then, feeling the end coming, entrusts him with an important mission.
“The big project, to be completed after Juan’s death, involved a cardboard folder filled with scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, photographs and scribbled notes, as well as two enormous books with text almost completely crossed out. » You will have understood that the said project, a synthesis of the various materials, is nothing other than the book which is now in our hands. It is indeed an initiatory novel that we are dealing with, a work of transmission between a master and his student, an enterprise of repair, an eminently queer literary and visual approach. For the narrator to realize his crucial role, Juan quotes this verse from the Puerto Rican poet Jesús Colón: “With its enthusiasm, youth ensures that the fire and the songs never die. »
An alloy of memories and photographs, comical dialogues and poignant confessions, testimonies and analyses, terrible facts and delirious hallucinations, the object is grandiose, of admirable scale, of impressive intertextuality, of a stimulating singularity. Certainly, the book is mysterious, complex, some would say confusing. It will not please everyone, or even the majority, but Blackouts has everything it takes to become a cult book.