Customer Reviews

Outline of My Lover

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I received this book as a gift and was ready to read it out of morbid curiosity then scoff at it, knowing who the famous Lover is that the author refers to. Instead, in a bout of insomnia, I read the book through to the end in the early hours of the morning. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a tale of love, loneliness, yearning, need, and loss, with all the details and small obsessions ringing true. Rather than completely malign his ex-love Martin chose the better part and gave a ruthlessly honest portrayal of a relationship in which both sides are flawed, real people, and both sides also have love and kindness in them. It's a fragile little story that anyone who has ever fantasized about having a passionate affair with a famous person, can identify with. My main concern is that now that he has 'spilled the beans' will his former Lover still mail him new sheets?

Douglas Martin in this his first novel has created characters and situations that are as real as your best friend's (or your own) real life experiences. Every page in this short work that you should read in one sitting cries out the truth. The narrator grows up in less than a perfect family, to put it mildly, goes off to college-- a state college in Georgia-- and falls in love with an older celebrity singer who is never named. Most of the story is about that relationship. The narrator is pretty sure from day one that he will not grow old with this man. There are too many things standing in their way. The singer must protect his reputation and certainly could never have an open relationship with this man (although he does keep him supplied with expensive bed linens) so the narrator travels with the singer's group of friends and would be the unnamed person in a group photo. Starved for love and affection ("He [the singer] will never need anyone like I have always needed someone"), the narrator's own self-esteem is determined by his lover. "I am some attachment, someone hanging on to him."

Some of the most touching passages are about the unraveling of this couple's relationship. The lover, for example, cuts short a trip in order to be present for their anniversary but brings a gift to the narrator that he picked up at the airport.

The social workers among us will find enough about this hopeless relationship to write papers about. The rest of us, however, will marvel that Mr. Martin has written a searing love story that goes right to the heart. I suspect that most readers, if they are honest with themselves, will see at least glimpses of people and events from their own lives. After all, isn't that what good writing should do?

this is an excellent very sensitive book. i wouldnt rank it as a classic, but i do think that it is exceptionally frank and shows a sensitivity hard to find both in books and in people. i lent this book to a number of my friends. they all thought this is one of the best books they read in a while.

How this book is classified is obviously erroneous. There is an emotional veracity that makes it well worth spending the time absorbing its examination rather than flipping through it looking for names. If this is a diary, it is one written with a complicated command of perspective and that the narrator began as a child and managed to keep before he has even gone off to school, as the first forty-four pages dealing almost exclusively with the terrain of early childhood, roughly an entire third of the page count, attest.

Ridiculous as it may seem, the narrator goes to Athens for the same reason a number of people go to Athens, the difference here being that the book's narrator is successful. This "cycle" of the book spins slowly out the narrator's control, placing both characters' continued identities at stake. Whether or not the story actually ever existed in the past (the narrator claims for the only evidence two pictures, one of which each of the ex-partners hold), by casting his journey through a first person subjectivity struggling to be as objective as possible in overwhelming circumstances, the narrator has little to laugh about, as well as few people to turn to, as in this sort of dynamic it is the powerful who will always be represented as right. I would wager some liberties have been taken to make certain points.

Indeed structured as an Outline, the narrator constantly belies an awareness of being educated by men, the shortcomings of such teachers, and of setting up a story. I'd point out a parallel/shortsightedness on the narrator's, but not the author's, part between his lover and his father's alcoholism (outlined in the first section) as a projection onto the disappointing lover.

As for manipulation, Martin does indeed imaginatively make some of guessed rock star's favorite imagery underlying motifs of the narrator's im(pen)ding fate. Here you have just the beginning, and the developing of the concerns Martin first began expressing several years ago in books then classified as poetry.

This is a lovely book to hold; it's tiny, compact, with a well-designed cover -- things that made a big difference to my initial perception of it. The content of "Outline of my Lover", however, is not so much a novel as a collection of more-or-less plotless but poetic ruminations that are enjoyable in the way they are conjoined and juxtaposed.

I was expecting a little more of a story, but what conventional plotting does take place in this novel is handled so delicately that it is barely perceptible. Nevertheless, Martin's reflections on stardom are important observations of our society, where we often live side-by-side with celebrities but rarely acknowledge them in any human sense.

This book, despite its sparse tone, is a promising addition to Martin's literary career. REM fans looking for voyeuristic detail won't find it here, but readers looking for a sensitive, thoughtful interpretation of the persistence of love will be rewarded in abundance with this novel.

Outline of My Lover is a beautifully written story of love and self-identity. Martin's characters are not people who have been idealized or vilified, but instead are very human; this humanity, with all its strengths and weaknesses, is what makes this story powerful. It seems so honest because nothing is romanticized- not even love. Outline of My Lover is a beautifully poetic, and very emotional book.

This book is transgrassive and entirely ahead of its time. People are probably better able to understand the concepts it explores now that we are subjected to so much celebrity news. We can see how seductive the life is, how expensive the giftbags are and how much better people think you are of you're famous. Mr. Martin's book has beautiful, careful prose and gorgeous passages. His writing takes you right there.

This books is an amazing accomplishment.

We've all read a million coming of age novels, and gay ones tend to be of the corniest I-love-my-hustler-room-mate variety, but to read this one is to remember how you truly felt as a nervous adolescent, confused and uncomfortable in your own skin.

I guess that everyone will major on the Famous Rock Star angle of the book, which is undoubtedly fascinating, but this love letter is much more than just a scurrilous thrill. It's written in a terse, poetic, dreamy style that would be familiar to readers of the marvellous Jim Lewis, and it speaks of recognisable emotions in a fresh and sparkly way.

Well worth reading and thinking on.

Irresistibly inadvisable and utterly devastating, this book belongs (as testimony from Dennis Cooper might suggest) among the very best transgressive literature, which is to say that its reader is not allowed a pleasant distance from the text. Martin writes with an urgency that is as absorbing and obliging as the work of Hervé Guibert. And, as with Guibert's TO THE FRIEND WHO DID NOT SAVE MY LIFE and Lydia Davis's END OF THE STORY, the alert, clipped and radically modest prose rouses a complicated response.

Partly due to his calling the work a novel, Martin deliberately fuzzes the relationship between author and narrator. To the reader who is inextricable from this story of extreme passivity in and around desire, the beguiling speaker thus seems at once generous and solicitous, public and private, vulnerable and severe, rough and tumble-dried. I was enchanted by the book the day I read it start to finish, and am shaken since.

This book was fascinating. I could not put the book down. The tale is obsessive and heartbreaking. Anyone can relate to this book. The intimacy and detail of the relationship between the protagonist and the rock star lover is amazing.