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reviews_and_ramblings
Life on the List is probably one of the best gay erotica tales book I have ever read. Well, despite what you can think, I haven’t read many of them, since usually, after a page or two, I’m bored by all the sex, and well, an erotica without sex is pretty much non-sense. So, first Jeffrey Essmann managed to catch me for more than two pages; the secret? He quoted Dante’s Inferno. All right, it’s a dirty trick to do with an Italian, you “have” to study Dante at school, and so he is like your nightmare, probably like Shakespeare for the Englishmen, but poor Dante is also a very good writer, at least in the Inferno part of his opera (and if Jeffrey Essmann was not feigning the lack of memory, they were Paolo and Francesca who that day read no further…). Second, I’m probably quite different from most of the hook-up Jeffrey Essmann, or his alter ego, hosted in his apartment: I would have spent a lot of time going through his library losing probably interest in the sex.
Basically, Life on the List is an endless recount of Jeffrey Essmann’s encounters made through a sex list; he tells you the basic, the how to do and what not to, the etiquette of this world, and then he plunges in it. The narrator is lucky, mostly since he is sincere with himself: he is not searching a life partner, he is searching sex. More than one time I was sidetracked by his words, he seemed so taken by some of the men, that I was thinking, yes, now is the moment when he will realize that love is better than sex, now he will open his eyes and see the true… but no, the narrator is not wrong in what he is doing, he perfectly knows it and is enjoying every bit of the cake. The violinist, the academic, the face, the narrator “loves” all of them without regret; he “equally” loves all of them since he doesn’t love any of them. I really don’t know if he has an hidden agenda, if he is prowling the list in the wrong hope to find Mr Right, what I know is that he doesn’t seem unhappy.
The narrator plays different role, from the newbie to the expert, he seems to enjoy more the game when there is no chance for an encore, but if it happens, he is also willing to play along… for a month or two. Some “relationship” last a chapter, some other neither 3 rows. All of them are complete. The author/narrator is so good in his job that even with a nickname and a sentence he is telling a full story. Some men are worthy of more time and page after page the reader is building their world; but then they exit the scene, and you realize that they don’t exist out of the narrator’s apartment and out of the list. You don’t know what happened to them, you have no way to know, if not by accident, meeting them on the street, in the metro.
In the middle of the sex, the reader starts gather info on the narrator, on his present life, but also on his past; you put piece after piece, and, well, you come out with a pretty good life. The narrator seems happy with it, as I said, he is not regretting anything. And in a “cirle” theory, the first man he told us about is also the last we meet: maybe he was not ready at the moment of that first page, maybe the narrator was not ready, or maybe I’m again totally wrong, and this is only good sex. Very good sex.
http://fannypress.com/2009/09/24/life-on-the-list/
Amazon: Life on the List: Assorted Sordid Tales and Unsavory Revelations
Reading List:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog_bott
