I Am Not Raymond Wallace

£5.39
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I Am Not Raymond Wallace

I Am Not Raymond Wallace

RRP: £10.78
Price: £5.39
£5.39 FREE Shipping

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There's a kind of sad, dark, depressive ambiance suffusing much of the book, even though in both the historical and modern section there are gay men who accept themselves and live lives full of people, fun, art (but not mostly lasting relationships). There are some lovely major and minor characters - I particularly liked Dolores of the major characters and of the minor characters, Joshua (thrilled to be immortalised) and Sonia (70 but still sure of her sex appeal).

He serendipitously gets into a bar that requires a secret knock and meets Joey and feels a very strong attachment.It's unclear to me what purpose this novel serves, other than to reinforce an outdated narrative that featured privileged protagonists who had the luxury of a closet. In part two which is set in 2003 and starts two thirds of the way through the book - some of the characters use 'letters' to communicate with other people to continue the narrative.

Like so many men of his time and of his kind, Raymond faces a choice between conformity, courage and compartmentalisation.Raymond Wallace, a recent graduate of Cambridge of age 21, arrives in NYC in the summer of 1963 for a 3-month internship with the NY Times. It tells important history of what it was like to be homosexual in the 1950s and 1960s - fear of losing job, being blackmailed, thought to be sick, etc, etc. Raymond is assigned to Doty, a journalist who has piece planned on the ‘overt homosexuality’ which apparently has New York in its grip.

He soon discovers his elusive boss, Bukowski, is being covertly blackmailed by an estranged wife, and that he himself is to assist the straight-laced Doty on an article about the ‘explosion of overt homosexuality’ in the city. And the way that gay men of the time, under the pressure of all that, tended towards hot, furtive, anonymous sex with strangers. Kenyon’s novel explores themes of sexual identity and intolerance with a tender compassion through two very different characters.It is against this recontextualization that Sam Kenyon has written his debut novel, I am not Raymond Wallace, a story about closeted cis men set largely in 1963. He’s told to go undercover, tasked with providing Doty with salacious details for the piece, something which both unsettles and excites him as he wrestles with a sexuality which has been kept firmly buttoned up.

year old Raymond Wallace is going to Cambridge University and is sent to New York for a 3 month internship at the New York Times, and he has no idea that he is gay. Although I needed to take a break during the Paris visit, and I wiped tears from my eyes more than once, it was a beautiful story crafted artfully. It wasn't what I was expecting, in terms of the method of story telling, being a story within a story, but I just loved it. being covertly blackmailed by an estranged wife, and that he himself is to assist the straight-laced Doty on an article about the ‘explosion of overt homosexuality’ in the city. There are and were scenes of gay sex portrayed quite vividly, but this should be a story that anyone and not only gay men or boys, should read if you know what true and real love and love for LIFE is all about.So begins a relationship which sees Raymond becoming part of a family very different from his own at home in Britain. The rest of his life will be spent yearning for the love he found in New York, later writing about the pain of loss and repression. I Am not Raymond Wallace is a multi-stranded story of queer redemption spanning multiple generations, told with precision-tooled prose, sharply-imagined settings and compassionately-observed characterisation. I’d already spotted Sam Kenyon’s I Am Not Raymond Wallace in the schedules when it was pitched to me for review, struck by its blurb.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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