Jonah Levine > Recent Status Updates

“There was something a little faggy about someone who made a point to identify as a top, instead of just being a top.”

“How could straight people, for instance, have real friends when their entire lives were an inhabitation of a myth?”

Tsiolkas exposes every character’s terrible inner thoughts, and it’s delicious. It feels scandalous at first, but there’s a realization that everyone thinks those things you could never say out loud, never admit to thinking, even to yourself after the initial emotion goes through your mind. It seems like no one is going to be a good person in this story - obscuring the moral question of the slap. Great so far.

I am enjoying this book more the further I go. Had a rough start - the voice (of both narrators) is pretentious and tough to follow without any context. As I read each time strand vignette and the letter following it, however, I am seeing more characterization, more nuance, and starting to understand this world (these worlds). Hoping for some more explanation of the mechanics, though I think that might not happen.

The book moves between moments. Characters experience vast changes in these quick shifts, and then we spend delicious time in each long moment and see them live out their natures and deal with their complex fates in vignettes. Achilles as gentle and artistic and charismatic but cursed with the envied skill of killing, like a machine. And Patroclus, understanding and dedicated, and finding his own path too.