you can never read the same book twice

I've been re-reading bits of Mary Renault's The Charioteer, mostly because I've been thinking a lot about queer life during the Second World War and Renault's novel is among the few that deal with it from a historically close position (the book was published in 1953).

I still have the paperback copy of The Charioteer that I bought when I was 15 years old. It cost $3.95, which was a lot of money to me then, and I can still remember the thrill of wonder at finding a book that had actual gay men as main characters. I'd been reading about queer men before then, but largely in form of a few (usually dismissive or pitying) lines in a biography, or the more revealing bits of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Then, in a chain bookstore in Minnesota, there was this. As I recall, I nervously put it back on the shelf (what if someone had seen me looking at it?) and went away, only to come back a week or two later, having worked up my courage to buy it.

I read it and re-read it obsessively, struggling with the things I didn't understand (pretty much all of the historical background, the British idiom, and the indirection with which Renault described emotional and sexual matters). I still remember certain passages more or less by heart.

I still love it, or I love the essence of it, the characters and their personal story. But ( Click here to read more; 'ware spoilers )