September at Esplanade by Roy Kirby Chaudoir

[reviews_and_ramblings]

I have three books by this author, 2 fiction and 1 non fiction, but I’m sincere, I picked this one since I was hoping it was “easier”; Roy Chaudoir wrote from experience, and it was not a light or funny. But this author is also open and sincere, and raw: raw in the writing but also raw in the feelings, they are without shields, and they can be even too strong sometime. The writing is like an outpouring of words, sometime you even loose the thread and I had to go back and read again from the beginning of a sentence to really understand who was talking/thinking. The novel is not clean-cut or pretty, it’s more dark and self-conscious, like the author was letting the characters “speak” his mind and heart.

September at Esplanade is set in a pre-AIDS era New Orleans, and the young man/main character, Thaddeus, is having his issues to adapt to a life outside the psychiatric hospital he was for the previous three years. Linden, a slightly older man, “adopted” him, and in this way he was able to bring Taddy out of the hospital; they are now having a D/s relationship, but of course it’s not an healthy one, and Taddy wants out. At the same time, I think Taddy is scaring to break the only bond he has in life, that with Linden.

There are recurrent elements in the novel, like the Mettray seminary, that is at the basis of the second novel by the same author; that novel I was not able to face yet, since it deals with abused children, but actually this was not easier as I thought, since also here Thaddeus is the survivor of the same tragedy. Thaddeus is an adult, but his tragedy in a way put a break to his evolution and it’s only now that he is able to start again, in the hot and sweaty New Orleans environment, where Thaddeus is able to live without being considered a freak, and where he will be able to find new bonds, allowing him to have other options other than Linden. But what I like of Thaddeus is that, while he will move on to other experiences, in any case he preserves all the past ones, good and bad, as cherished memories, since they are the reason of who Thaddeus will be.

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