Author: Justin Torres
Published: 2023
Pages: 306
Prize: National Book Award – Winner 2023
Project: Identity – sexual
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In Blackouts a young man cares for a dying friend, Juan Gay, who shares stories of joy and loss. Inspired by a real book on queer experiences, Juan’s tales resurrect forgotten lives and loves. As they trade stories, the novel explores the power of narrative, history, and imagination, urging readers to confront the world’s gaps and erasures.
Complexity
CEFR: B2
Plot Complexity: moderate
Language Complexity: moderate
Ideas Complexity: moderate
Blurb
Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay–playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized–has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories–moments of joy and oblivion–and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?
Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Páramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres’s Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made–a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.
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