OutBook Book Club

The OutBook Book Club is supported by The Palm Springs Cultural Center and the Palm Springs Public Library. Selections highlight a mix of new LGBTQ releases and influential classics.

OutBook meets on the first Wednesday of the month on Zoom from 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m. (PST). To receive meeting information for the OutBook Book Club, please email book club coordinator Hubertus Zegers in advance of the meeting at hwzegers@gmail.com

Click here to see other selections for the OutBook Book Club.

May 5, 2021

In the Absence of Men by Philippe Besson

Like Michael Cunningham’s homage to Virginia Woolf in The Hours and Jean Rhys’s to Charlotte Bronte in The Wide Sargasso Sea, Philippe Besson’s extravagantly praised first novel pays tribute to Marcel Proust. It also dares to introduce an asthmatic middle-aged Proust into its masterfully manipulated plot and invents a series of deeply felt letters written by him to the novel’s young protagonist, Vincent de l’Etoile. In the summer of 1916, the emotionally precocious Vincent, who is the same age as the century, awakens to the possibilities of both erotic and platonic love. In the course of one week—at literary salons, at the Ritz, in cork-lined rooms—Vincent launches an intense friendship with the celebrated Proust, while at his parents’ house in Paris he embarks on a sensual journey with Arthur Vales, the soldier son of a family servant, on leave from the front. Unknowingly, Vincent is also beginning a passage into a manhood that will be haunted by the secret he uncovers behind the love he bears for a doomed French infantryman and a famous middle-aged Jewish writer.

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