Less

So, at the end of the global trips of avoiding Freddy Pelu's wedding, Arthur Less found Freddy in front of his home when Less finally returned home. Ridiculously, apparently Freddy left Tom after one day of marriage 😄

While reading the novel, it has not always been clear that I was reading from a narrator or Less himself. At the end, we realized that the narrator has been Freddy ! However, how could Freddy has known all the details when he was not with Less ?! Eg. in the main paragraph on p.79 (starting on the 4th line): "Less awakens to a feeling of peace and triumph … He removes his eye mask and smiles at the Alps below, an optical illusion making them into craters ... He recalls smoking on an airplane once when he was young, checks his armrest, and finds an ashtray in it still". All these are possible only if it's the a first-person narration as only Less himself would know all these details. I don't think that the author is intending or pretending that Freddy is doing the narration in the entire book.

I think this is really the first novel that I've read about love and feeling between gay guys. I have to confess that I either haven't really enjoyed that kind of homosexual love/feeling or I haven't got used to it. The author also likes to use very long sentences with fluctuation of thoughts seemingly running faster than the speed of light at times :-) I've sometimes needed to read it more than one time in order to understand; or sometimes, I've just gone with the flow and tried not to understand every logical bit but just indulge in the sensation at that moment. One constant style of the novel is that it jumps from the "present" to the "past" kind of abruptly, all the time. Though I don't quite enjoy the breakdown of the narrative rhythm so often, it's actually more bearable to go back to the past only briefly and return to the present swiftly. For some reasons, I have been quite a bit more keen on knowing what's going to happen in the "present" in a story rather than reading about the past.

I read this novel mainly because it's the winner of 2018 Pulitzer Prize (in the "fiction" category). I think I don't quite appreciate the artistic prose and somehow (regrettably) the homosexual contents might have made it a bit harder for me to enjoy this novel. Probably unavoidably, this novel has kept reminding me of the movie "Eat Pray Love". It's about the mysterious and ever-surprising love and life. Unfortunately, somehow all in all, my working class kind of mentality (that one has to work hard to earn one's living) has felt that the story is all so frivolous and nearly meaningless. Too bad that I've not been too impressed :-(