Love, Leda

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Leda, our protagonist and narrator, is a bed-hopping bohemian, languishing over an unrequited love and failing to fit in anywhere; his freedom and financial situation dependent upon the generosity of strangers and his more stable friends. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession – one which sends him spiralling into self-destruction. The long-awaited second instalment in Samantha Shannon's Sunday Times and New York Times-bestselling series Tunuva Melim is a sister of the Priory. Surely if one's self can love Christ for what He was and what He did, then one's self should be able to love modern man.

Yet to see lost works only as counter histories obscures the value that they still have for the contemporary reader. While money plays a major role in the novel (Leda is forever sponging off his friends), the idea of the 9 to 5 grind horrifies him.The miserable, stuffy greyness of Britain, the twitching curtains and tutting old ladies on damp double deckers, the bigoted policemen and the weak, milky cups of tea – these are the things that define the world Leda inhabits, one that seemed like it could go on for ever. As a novel there are plenty of things that prevent it quite taking off: it’s one-paced, lacking in any significant character development and ultimately two-dimensional. On the surface, Love, Leda is a straightforward narrative stroll around 1960s Soho, taking in the sights and the characters of the age in variously humorous, awkward and sinister encounters.

This must be viewed in the context of Hyatt’s life, where writing is a kind of exorcism, as these ruminations add nothing interesting to Leda’s story, even if they do flesh out the character’s uneasy preference for a life of aimlessness.The display is a series of extracts from the novel, taking in cruising on Dean Street, taking coffee at Lyons, dropping by jazz clubs off Tottenham Court Road, offering a portrait of Leda’s gay working-class Romany life in a Soho of the 1950s and 60s. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation. At this moment I can hardly understand myself, for I am stimulated by my own emptiness and have no idea how to develop the self in me. Estas transformações estão presentes em sua novela Love Leda, que traz a temática queer na literatura, enquanto a música Arnold Layne de Syd Barrett traz esta temática ao rock (outro personagem seminal da contracultura britânica dos 60, membro original da banda Pink Floyd). He slows down and rests on my back as he ejects the cloud of his body into rip-roaring blood, and rolls off me, leaving an exotic smell behind him.

In the end, Love, Leda is a poet’s novel with its far-flung lyricism and its surprises of precision and revelation.But I can imagine the narrative would receive a complete overhaul in a contemporary creative writing class because it's quite chaotic. But there's also a sadness to this as he's feeling so estranged from life: “I think I live without knowing myself and I laugh at the world to kill my pain.

Once out of the public view and off the street, Leda’s world is described without inhibition but with very little joy. I look out of the window and see a group of young lads out for a laugh, but the size of the window breaks my view. The band discovers it needs a break and judging by the looks of the other people, which give the impression of expressionless virgins on heat, they need a rest too. And then there is the incessant pining for Daniel, the heterosexual priest with whom he is in love, which is less a plot device than it is a symbolic marker for the social conditions of pre-1967 homosexuals in Britain.His tale of unrequited love, loneliness of the flesh, and life on the margins owes something to the curdled realism of mid-century England, and something to the existential riffing of the Nouveau Roman. Could have done without the extended seaside scene at the end, but overall entertaining to read, and I’m glad I did. Raw and uncompromising, "Love, Leda" sort of lost me early on with the mundane details and the repetitive narrative. Love, Leda follows the 20-year-old Leda, a queer vagabond, as he wanders the streets of Soho, frequenting its bars and clubs looking to pass his life away. This leaves him adrift and while he certainly possesses a melancholy streak, he also emits catty asides and biting humour along his journey.