Back in 2014, our group read The Queen's Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum's tribute to opera and its devotees (the more obsessive, the better). His latest book--My Lover, the Rabbi--manages to be even wilder than that!
As Neal Bartlett (a noted novelist in his own write, I mean right) says in his review in The Guardian:
"The fierceness begins immediately. All of the book’s 188 chapters are short, but the first one comes in at only four lines. Putting both punctuation and vocabulary to tactically unexpected use, it plunges the reader straight into a world of carnality, confusion and bizarrely specific detail. Like all but a handful of the chapters, it also includes the title of the book itself. And as the book proceeds, this reiteration of the title begins to toll like a bell through the architecture of its prose, becoming almost a mantra. Far from being style-for-style’s sake, this insistent and anxious formality is at the heart of the book’s uncanny life; a quite brilliant matching of style to subject."
I've ordered the novel and, if it lives up to its billing, expect to nominate it for next year's reading list.
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