REVIEWS 75by the Sea was published in the 1960s,
after the twenty years of silence and
poverty that accompanied Rodoreda’s
postwar exile, but has now been trans-
lated into English for the first time by
Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent.
Less ambitious than Doves and gentler
than Camellia Street, it treats strong
emotion with restraint, often approach-
ing it indirectly via description of the
setting’s landscape and its vegetation.
The narrator is an aging widower who
works as the gardener for a seaside es-
tate, witnessing the seasonal high jinks
and occasional tragedies of his wealthy
employers and their friends. Set a few
years before the Spanish Civil War, it’s
full of a melancholy sense of what will
last and what won’t: the gardener feels
an admiring affinity with the eucalyptus
tree, which “does not change ... with
each leaf like a sickle, and each bud a
lead box holding a velvety red flower.”
The mistress of the estate, Senyoreta
Rosamaria, in marrying Senyoret Fran-
cesc, appears to have made the same
kind of brute economic choice in love
that faces Cecília, the narrator of Ca-
mellia Street. In Garden by the Sea, a
slow-motion melodrama plays out, but,
filtered through the eyes of the servants,
it’s kept at a distance. Rosamaria’s per-
spective and those of several other
young women are mostly occluded, so
that they can each be read in almost as
many directions as Helen of Troy or
Norma Jeane Baker—though, again, all
roads lead, if not to ruin, then to pain
and shame. The physical place occupies
the foreground—the colors of plants
tended or mistreated, and the frame of
the vast, ever-changing sea.A
nother coastal elegy, still more
ravishing in its precision and
restraint, is LATER: MY LIFE
AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
(Graywolf Press, $16), Paul Lisicky’s
memoir of the complicated idyll that
Province town offered gay men at the
start of the 1990s. The work progresses
in small, casually linked episodes,
though an intricate structure makes
itself felt toward the end—so that the
form enacts on the reader some of
Lisicky’s inward experience, the per-
spectival shifts that marked him then
and in the decades since. He describes
his years there on a writer’s fellowship,
surrounded by dunes and by sea on
three sides, as well as by a type of
queer community that couldn’t exist
elsewhere and that was already on the
edge of extinction.
What’s affecting here is Lisicky’s
preservation of a multitude of subtle,
ambivalent feelings, of small kindnesses
and cruelties. Nothing is simplified in a
bid for universal resonance, and the text
is richer for that. It bristles with pin-
prick observations. At one moment,
Lisicky accompanies a Canadian boy-
friend on a road trip to visit his family,
and the two men must seek a border
agent’s approval by affecting not to do
so, answering questions “tersely, without
any inflection or any eagerness to
please. We’re performing what we
believe he wants of men, espe-
cially two men sharing one car.” At
another time, Lisicky catches him-
self, at the painful end of a rela-
tionship, thinking, “I don’t know
how to deal with the fact that we’re
both probably going to live.” Or
there’s the night when he can’t tell
his friend, the writer Lucy Grealy,
that the sexual performance in her
dancing is alienating the gay men
around them—this “Sarah Law-
rence dancing,” he calls it, that
“puts sex in quotes,” while the men
keep “some distance between the
bodies, because the possibility of
fucking is scary, is real.”
Lisicky is disciplined about
keeping past and future in their
places. On the rare occasions—
say, at a friend’s funeral—when“the time line breaks, scrambles,” as he
describes it, the effect is profound. Like-
wise, since he avoids presuming much
about other people’s inner lives, the
odd exception he allows himself is pow-
erful, such as the train of thought he
follows when a man he’s seen around
but doesn’t know stands up during a
screening of the bland, well-meaning
Philadelphia, “crying like a baby, a baby
boy, and it wouldn’t be so wrenching if
he weren’t such a tough-looking guy,
leather vest, Levi’s.” “His friends,” Li-
sicky speculates, entertaining one pos-
sibility among many,have bailed on him before and they’ll
bail on him again, and what should he
expect when he’s loved them for their
spontaneity and quick passion and un-
reliability? Dependable people, as he
knows, are boring people, and he knows
what it’s like to abandon others too.Though AIDS shadows and distorts
everything, Lisicky is also attentive to
far smaller pains—the ebbing of desire
between lovers, for instance— resisting
the temptation to idealize even those
people and relationships under imme-
diate threat. Lisicky’s mother, who ap-
pears in the opening scene and is
mostly absent thereafter, haunts the
book. A huge variety of people and
even animals are given consideration
and respect, including those who ap-
pear only on a few scattered pages.
You’re reminded that looking closely
can be a form of love. QLeft: Eucalyptus, by Leon Colinet, from the Encyclopédie de la plante © Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images
Right: “Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1977,” by Joel Meyerowitz © The artist. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York City