Customer Reviews

Borrowing Time: A Latino Sexual Odyssey

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Gay and lesbian "coming of age and coming out" novels and memoirs have become so common over the past few years that they virtually constitute a subgenre in their own right, with such titles as Paul Monette's BECOMING A MAN and Augusten Burroughs' RUNNING WITH SISSORS leading the pack. In BORROWING TIME, which author Carlos T. Mock describes as fiction with a somewhat factual basis, the genre takes a slightly different turn: both author Mock and the story's narrator Juan Subira are Latinos from Pureto Rico living in "white America," and the novel offers us a image of the American gay community as seen through their eyes.

The story opens with Juan rushed to the hospital: an HIV patient suddenly suffering from acute pancreatitis. A doctor himself, he floats on morphine between present and past, contemplating the impact of his background, be it for good or ill, upon his status as gay man. The boyish uncertainties, the teenage angst, the sexual confusion, the drive to be some one of significance--all are placed on full display.

BORROWING TIME is not a "literary" work in the sense of BECOMING A MAN nor is it a story in the sense of RUNNING WITH SISSORS; it lacks the elegant formality of the former and the story drive of the latter, and there are occasions when the narrative seems self-contradictory and now and then even mundane. But that, rather surprisingly, is rather the point; our narrator is morphine-laden and the experiences he recalls, while Latin-inflected, are universal in nature. It would be difficult to find a gay man who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s who could not tell much the same. In consequence, Juan emerges an "everyman." His experiences are the coin of the realm.

Althought the prose here is more workman-like than stylish, Mock does now and then conjure up a glittering passage--most often in his descriptions of location. His passages on Puerto Rico are particularly memorable, giving one the sense of a unique location alternately sparkling with sun and mysterious with shadow. Juan's love-hate relationship with his own background, his own culture colors the novel throughout in a particularly interesting way: the social norms, the customs, the religious edges of Puerto Rico inform the work and in often provides the book's most eloquent edges.

I found the sub-title, "A Latino Sexual Odyssey," poorly chosen and rather misleading, for it implies that the book is erotica--and although Mock has a fair amount to say on the subject of sex one would hardly describe the book as sexy, much less erotica. I must also note, and with tremendous irritation, that Floricanto Press has done a great disservice to the book in terms of page lay-out. Each page is "boxed" with a thin-line frame that has the effect of highlighting some of the most awkward paragraph spacing I have ever seen. This might seem inconsequential, but in this instance the effect is horrendously distracting. One hopes that this will be corrected in any future edition of the work.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer