Lie With Me
Ratings53
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings53
Average rating4.2
The award-winning, bestselling French novel by Philippe Besson—“the French Brokeback Mountain” (Elle)—about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress/writer Molly Ringwald. We drive at high speed along back roads, through woods, vineyards, and oat fields. The bike smells like gasoline and makes a lot of noise, and sometimes I’m frightened when the wheels slip on the gravel on the dirt road, but the only thing that matters is that I’m holding on to him, that I’m holding on to him outside. Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Without ever acknowledging they know each other in the halls, they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair. Dazzlingly rendered in English by Ringwald in her first-ever translation, Besson’s powerfully moving coming-of-age story captures the eroticism and tenderness of first love—and the heartbreaking passage of time.
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Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy.
I discover that absence has a consistency, like the dark water of a river, like oil, some kind of sticky dirty liquid that you can struggle and perhaps drown in. It has a thickness like night, an indefinite space with no landmarks, nothing to bang against, where you search for a light, some small glimmer, something to hang on to and guide you. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping silence that weighs you down and puts you in a state where any unforeseeable, identifiable sound can make you jump.
This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.”
Molly Ringwald, please, review your translations before publishing.
The rating is not regarding the translation, though it might as well be. Some sentences got me wondering how much of Besson and how much of Molly they were. The second half was well written but the first half's “playgrounds” and all the other eye catching bad wording choices got me
i really really tried to read this fully with complete attention and enthusiasm but i failed. It was not that it was awful or boring, in fact it was a nice read but it just didnt have what it would take to keep my attention.
DNF at 52%
Nas palavras da grande filósofa Taylor Swift: “What a Sad, Beautiful, Tragic love affair”.
