Lie With Me
Ratings79
Average rating4.3
Stunning. It perfectly embodies the emotional massacre that comes with a queer person's first love.
2.5 Stars
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did. Though the writing is lovely (reading a lot more like a very long journal entry rather than actual scenes, in part due to the lack of dialogue) the actual relationship and plot of said relationship felt very flat and ultimately very cliché to me. I guess I am just kind of over books (and really, all media) that feature an LGBT couple who have a brief affair in their youth, eventually spend decades apart, and then everything ends with the tragic death of one of the pair.
Contains spoilers
Lie with Me lived up to its reputation. Read everything; the author reveals the ending before the story begins. Bittersweet, and full of sorrow, for the things that might have been but could not be. Mild spoilers follow.
Should the deal have been broken? Should the phone call have been made? Would things have turned out differently? Were there 2 or 3 lead characters? What were the intentions of the putative 3rd character's penultimate and last actions? I'm not haunted by the questions, but they DO nag at me a little.
Highly recommended, as long as you don't require a HEA ending.
Exquisite, soft and shattering.
“Everything in this room that belongs only to us. Everything that is incommunicable to the rest of the world.”
A delicate, lyrical, melancholic memoir that follows Besson's first love with Thomas, a boy who is distant, already resigned to a tragic fate, a life of suppression. Such an intimate portrait of youth, vulnerability, desire, love.
“Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?”
Do I give too many books 4-5 start ratings? Perhaps, but I can't help it when the writing is this incredible!! I have too many quotes from this that I love.
“We are alone in the world. I've never enjoyed the rain so much.”
“My father never reads books, but he's read yours.” A beautiful story about a love that couldn't have endured, “tomorrow there will be emptiness”. There's something so tenderly sad about this, how he meets his son twenty years later. The son knows, understands the relationship between him and his father. It is so beautiful that their love could be seen by others, even when they had tried to hide from it themselves.
“I go back to what I was before, the boy who intrigues, not the boy who satisfies. I tell myself that pleasing him was just an illusion, and that pleasure itself lasts only as long as an embrace in a closet.”
Heartbreaking, tender, passionate, loving. A beautifully sad story about a love that could never be.
“I'm seventeen years old. I don't know then that one day I won't be seventeen. I don't know that youth doesn't last, that it's only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it's too late. It's finished, vanished, lost.”
Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy.
I discover that absence has a consistency, like the dark water of a river, like oil, some kind of sticky dirty liquid that you can struggle and perhaps drown in. It has a thickness like night, an indefinite space with no landmarks, nothing to bang against, where you search for a light, some small glimmer, something to hang on to and guide you. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping silence that weighs you down and puts you in a state where any unforeseeable, identifiable sound can make you jump.
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.”
Nas palavras da grande filósofa Taylor Swift: “What a Sad, Beautiful, Tragic love affair”.
i really really tried to read this fully with complete attention and enthusiasm but i failed. It was not that it was awful or boring, in fact it was a nice read but it just didnt have what it would take to keep my attention.
DNF at 52%
Molly Ringwald, please, review your translations before publishing.
The rating is not regarding the translation, though it might as well be. Some sentences got me wondering how much of Besson and how much of Molly they were. The second half was well written but the first half's “playgrounds” and all the other eye catching bad wording choices got me
What do I say? Such beautiful writing. Maybe I will try this author in the original French?
“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.”