A transfixing collage of gorgeous prose and manipulated illustrations, with themes of cultural erasure and the effervescence of lust and love ... Easily 2023's sexiest novel ... Astonishing ... It steers clear of contrivance, thanks to edgy illustrations, an origami structure, and the author's exquisite eye and ear. This is a novel of ideas, too, brimming with queer history, racial defiance and the injustices of the Freudian era ... Run, don't walk, to buy it.
Torres’s lyrical new novel, Blackouts, these two forms — erasure poetry and queer history — collide to create one epic conversation between a pivotal 20th-century queer sexology text and two unreliable queer Puerto Rican narrators ... The supreme pleasure of the book is its slow obliteration of any firm idea of reality — a perfect metaphor for the delirious disorientation that comes with learning queer history as an adult ... Torres haunts this book full of ghosts like a ghost himself, and with this novel, he has passed the haunting on, creating the next link in a queer chain from Jan to Juan to nene to you.
Shimmering, fable-like ... Amorphous ... Despite its compactness and occasional obliqueness, Blackouts has within it some of the same strangeness, wildness and defiance of this hyena. Playful and mysterious, there’s much in it to admire — and perhaps a little to fear.
Begins to artfully blur history, autobiography and fiction ... Mr. Torres is purposely coy about the information he presents, leaving it partially obscured like the blacked-out text ... Invites readers into the smaller consolation of shared sadness. Even if it had something transcendent to impart, after all, we would forget it anyway.
Strikes me as a traditional novel wearing the costume of 'experimental fiction' ... Even though Blackouts is festooned in dizzying layers of tales-within-tales, photographs, film scripts, scholarly-sounding endnotes and fictionalized accounts of real-life figures, at its core is a classic conceit ... Sweeping, ingenious ... The kind of artfully duplicitous novel which makes a reader grateful for Wikipedia ... At the still center of this spectacular whirl of talk and play, remain the remarkable figures summoned from history and Torres' imagination, whose lives were animated by their outlawed desires. Torres articulates a blinding blizzard of hurt in these pages.
That marvelous thing: a book at once steadily, exuberantly ambitious and an unstinting pleasure to read. The novel’s ambition is in its historical sweep and purposeful queering of the past, its formal surprises and structural dexterity. The pleasure is in the teasing sweetness between the two characters whose voices make the story, the scavenger hunt their many references send us on, and the carefully tuned pitch and precision of Torres’s sentences ... Erudite, affectionate, wryly tart, Juan becomes the narrator’s mentor, queer father figure, romantic friend, therapist, confessor, home. He is the beat and breath of the book, and also a device, in that he’s the source of many of the novel’s intertextual references ... For this counternarrative centering telling and exchange, the loose threads are another act of generosity, inviting readers to take up the tale from here.
Beautifully frames Torres’s wide-ranging investigations of queer sexuality, mental illness, and the legacy of Puerto Rico’s colonization ... Some of the most memorable scenes and exchanges in Blackouts are those in which Torres poignantly depicts the narrator’s sense of indebtedness to Juan ... Also a deeply moving queer love story. I won’t give away how that story culminates or what follows, but suffice it to say that Torres has produced a novel as complex and vulnerable as that Tress photograph displayed at the beginning—a novel that will richly reward those who grant, as Juan does, the narrator’s wish to be made naked, opened, and read.
Disorientation is a pleasure. You might wonder, at first, if you’re being duped by these characters or invited to share in their confusion. We’ll get to the reasons for that confusion, which is to say the plot, but plot is less the point than form and a nebulous atmosphere. Short chapters, shifting perspectives, and doctored photographs give the novel the air of an enigma to solve ... Torres excels at the art of cutting tragedy with tone ... An earnest project that does not seek to distill settled conclusions from the queer past.
It slips in the door like some soft-footed night creature: paratextual, meta-fictional, multimedia, form-slippery ... Torres’s novel is a hymn to this resilience, but it is also a celebration of that most transitory and fallible of archives: the body ... Blackouts revels in the grotesque, impossible beauty of human rot. It is a novel of mercies and indignities; bruises and bones; the ever-tangled eroticism of life and death.
Fascinating, inventive ... Torres’ intricate web of narratives is gripping from beginning to end. His richly drawn characters are passionate, but painfully self-aware.
Brings together several strands of both Latin American and queer literature, making for a moving metatextual conversation ... Manner is something like a way of being and acting, a way of holding memory, and Blackouts limns it intimately, in all its cultural and geographical insanity. Juan and nene see each other, they come together and they bring us with them.
The novel shines and surprises, though, in sections where the characters interweave cultural and historical artifacts, as well as memory and literary references, to reconstruct and revise queer history. Here, the novel’s central question about where storytelling ends and history begins comes to the fore, albeit with no clear resolution. It's up to the reader, the narrator concludes, to decide where truth and fiction converge. An inventive novel that displays the scope of its author’s ambitions.
