a little coffee

“This book is just…ah…her prose…it’s..it’s… just beautiful,” my normally articulate, witty friend Jessica was reduced to nonsensical sighs as she struggled for the right words to describe Laura Argiri’s God in Flight.

“You have to read it,” she concluded, thrusting me the 478-page novel with a photograph taken by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden on the cover. A shot of a naked man, taken in profile, his head on his knees, sitting on a jagged cliff. The blur of mountains in the background. The write-up called the book a “brilliantly realized story of dangerous love between a professor and a student at Yale University in the 1880s’.” Intriguing. Dangerous love? That certainly appealed to my romantic side. But this was no simple, bodice-ripping romance. The love was between two men, Simion Satterwhite the sharp student, and the artist and Greek professor, Doriskos Klionarios.

The subject matter itself was captivating. A love story between two men set in Victorian New England. But Jessica was right, it’s her prose that grabs you. From the beginning, with the title of her first chapter, Laura Argiri sucked me in. “A Slap on the Jaw.” It gave the first inkling of tension that flowed through the book. Sometime it was palpable and I felt my heart tightening with each sentence and my fingers gripped the pages as if I was dangling from the edge of a cliff. From the slow evolution of Doriskos’s and Simion’s relationship to the internal and external pains that follows each man in their own lives, Laura Argiri showed intelligent and flawed human beings that throughout the novel struggled to understand not only their own place in a puritanical world but what it means to love.

As an 18 year-old idealistic, wannabe writer this book blew my mind. If only I could write with such depth! And such passion! At the same time, too, I realized I knew nothing of love except these silly, adolescent romances I concocted in my mind. But The God in Flight showed me a glimmer of what love is, at its most beautiful and passionate and most ugly and destructive.

Re-reading The God in Flight now, I am still moved by this vivid world filled with such texture you think you can touch it, filled with characters you fall in love with and others you hate. Prose that makes your jaw drop. The novel has proved more inspiring to me and as I continue to write, I hope to one day create something that has such feeling that it makes the reader think their heart is being squeezed.

Since I can think of no better way to end this entry, I will leave it in the words of Laura Argiri:

“Lovemaking is the consolation for living in the body just as art is the consolation for living in the world.”