If you have ever been spurned in love, then you know exactly what the unnamed narrator of After Delores is going through. And over the four months of the book she goes through a lot and most (if not all) of it is somehow connected to Delores. This book counts as number 10 of 25 for the 2012 Mount TBR Reading Challenge. This is also my 18th book of the year, meaning I have read 30% of my goal of 60 books this year putting me roughly 6%/4 books ahead of schedule allowing me a little flexibility over the next few weeks.After Delores reminded me of how much one event can effect an individual’s life. Something as seemingly small as a break up (especially a bad break up) can be life defining. It is clearly a stretch, but this made me think about history and those epic events that happen in an era (think 9/11, any major war) and how the news media casts everything in either the pre- or post-event light. This is what Schulman does but on the individual scale.Click here to continue reading on my blog The Oddness of Moving Things.
My book club chose this book for our January meeting. At best, I am assuming it was voted on because we here in San Francisco are feeling nostalgic for the pre-tech boom Mission, the fantasy of an earlier queer utopia, and the days when you could be a junkie and an inconsistent waitress and still pay the rent. I definitely didn't love this book, but I sailed through it. And it did tap into the feelings of loss I have for a grittier, livable city where artists and queers and sex workers and punks had the potential to thrive, whether that be New York City and the Lower East Side or San Francisco and the Mission. Even if I am too young to have actually lived in the time of possibility.
Stinging from a break up with her lover Delores, our heroine drunkenly roams the parks, tenements, and alleys of the Lower Eastside seeking comfort and finding trouble. She further unravels when the body of a girl she has just met surfaces in a river, strangled in her sanguine youth. Compelled by loss, the narrator sets her sights on getting even with the killer and others in her life. Dark and captivating. Delores seems to get the ground work for Schulman's later novel, Rat Behomia.Reading this and Rat Behomia I keep with that instead of being two years old in 1988, I had been out wandering the dark streets of New York City with S.S.
—Taylor
Honestly, I think that every thinking reading person should own this book. It is just about one of the most vivid executions of heartache and style I have ever read, and I've read it a few times now--actually, it improves with re-readings (always a good sign).I still remember being drawn in at first by the rather intriguing cover, and then being absolutely blown away by the poignancy, the detail, and the sheer audacity of the prose, disguised as a "murder mystery." Yes, and Othello is a play about interracial marriage.Find it, get it, read it.
—James
