GLR July-August 2024

talking, the two don’t really do much of anything. Similarly, in Edorta’s diary entries, we get his melancholic reminiscences of times that he and Koldo have spent together over the years, adventures they’ve shared, and things they have discussed—or that at least that Edorta has tried to discuss with Koldo. But there is no conventional plotline to follow in Edorta’s writing. He begins each entry with a variation on “The worst thing of all is the light...” The light of November, the light in a locker room, the light in August, the light on the beaches, the light of winter through frosted windows. These different manifestations of light seem to trigger Edorta’s memories of times during their years-long friendship, when he was physi cally close to Koldo, caressing Koldo as he cried after the death of his mother, smoothing his hair in the rain, watching him as he lay on a beach towel, feeling Koldo’s erection as they wres tled playfully in the schoolyard. Edorta remembers masturbat ing alongside Koldo as teenagers, while (he tells himself) always thinking of girls. His yearning for a more overtly phys ical relationship with Koldo is palpable: “I want to kiss you,” he thinks but never says aloud. Edorta, like Serrano, is trying to parse the nature of an in tensely loving relationship between two heterosexual men who both fear being thought of as maricones , Serrano for the sake of finishing his novel, Edorta for clarity about his relationship with Koldo. By the end of the book, Serrano’s and Edorta’s voices become almost indistinguishable in both style and content. “I never write a normal novel,” the narrator tells us early on. “What’s more, I’ve always made it very clear that I’m unable to tell a story.” Is this Serrano himself or a manufactured narrator speaking? Is it genuine modesty or a cunning ploy to accentu ate the unconventionality of the novel in hand? The narrator also tells us at one point that his novel will ask a slew of ques tions but provide no answers. In that regard, The Worst Thing of All Is the Light certainly delivers. _______________________________________________________ Hank Trout served as editor of A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine.

H ANK T ROUT Metafiction Meets Itself THE WORST THING OF ALL IS THE LIGHT by José Luis Serrano Translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel Seagull Books. 161 pages, $25. R EADERS MIGHT THINK of “metafiction” as a post modern, 20th-century invention, but it’s a narrative tech nique with a long history. Two early examples that come to mind are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy . Self-aware and self-referential, “breaking the fourth wall” between the work itself and the reader, self-con sciously commenting on its own narrative structure and re minding readers that they’re dealing with a manufactured artifact, metafiction seems to take delight in its own artificial ity. The technique had something of a heyday in the 1960s: John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, among others, all employed metafiction tech niques to great acclaim. To the list of great works of metafic tion— Pale Fire , Slaughterhouse-Five , The Crying of Lot 49 —we can now add José Luis Serrano’s third novel, TheWorst Thing of All Is the Light , an astonishing, multi-layered work from 2015, now available in English thanks to Lawrence Schimel’s translation from the Spanish. On its surface, Serrano’s novel tells two interdependent sto ries told in separate, alternating chapters. In one narrative, which constitutes the framework of the novel, the narrator (let’s assume, for now, that the narrator is Serrano himself) records and comments on dialogues he has with his (unnamed) husband as they wander from one pueblo to another on a two-week sum mer holiday in the Basque region of Spain. They discuss sundry matters, primarily Serrano’s plan to write a novel about two het erosexual men, Edorta and Koldo, who share a deep, perplexing love for one another. The second story consists of segments of that novel, diary entries written by Edorta, musing on his rela tionship with Koldo, which can also be read as unsent missives to Koldo, discussing their relationship and Edorta’s wanting more than the platonic relationship they share. Some of Edorta’s writing closely mirrors Serrano’s, which is not surprising, since Edorta is Serrano’s creation who embodies the experiences, thoughts, longings, and regrets that Serrano imagines during his walking discussions with his husband. As Serrano’s under standing of what he wants to say (and how to say it) grows clearer, Edorta’s writing absorbs and repeats Serrano’s ideas. There is scant plot in The Worst Thing of All Is the Light . In Serrano’s sections, he and his husband eat and drink their way through various villages and ports in Basque country, lounging on the beaches, bicycling, or taking the train from one town to the next, talking incessantly about the novel in progress, about sexuality, relationships, gender, the different social pressures imposed on straight and gay people, and the nature of love. He tells us about watching fireworks in Bilbao or watching people on the beaches, but other than eating, drinking, walking, and

An Exhibit to Revisit

J OHN R. K ILLACKY

ABOUTFACE Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art by Jonathan D. Katz The Monacelli Press. 272 pages, $65.

J ONATHAN D. KATZ is a pioneering historian and curator working in queer and gender studies. He co-curated the 2010 exhibition, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture , at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington D. C. Featuring painting, draw ing, photography, installation, and media images of lesbian and gay identity in the 20th century, the sumptuous catalogue is a keepsake with its contextualizing essays and exquisitely pro duced plates of over 100 works. In 2019, Katz curated About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and

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