At Certain Points We Touch

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Tracing, or rather excavating, this relationship from its beginnings a decade earlier up to the present day, as the narrator sits at a kitchen table in Mexico City covered in old letters like “an endless tundra speckled with cigarette ash and dotted with cans of Coke,” is a task the book accomplishes with virtuosic skill. I was pleased to see mention of Ocean Vuong around the 85% mark because there are so many things about At Certain Points We Touch that reminded me of Vuong’s work. But why should a Myspace profile be preserved when whole civilisations have been annihilated to boost the egos of European monarchs? There’s something too painful in remembering how full of potential everything seemed back then when the world was ours”. Now there’s no you, eventually there’ll be no me, but everything that has happened between us is how we have come to know ourselves.

Gargantuan heavy goods vehicles, massive petroleum tankers and enormous Coca-Cola trucks thunde[r] across the dying night, bellowing diesel through the city, causing the pavement to rumble beneath our feet. Her prose is tender and lyrical, yet also raw and unflinching as it jumps between love and pain, living and grieving, memory and the fleeting nature of time. On the anniversary of her lover's death, she descends into a fit of hypergraphia—chronicling—through an open letter directed at the deceased reader—her life predominantly through the lens of the tremulous and exultant relationship with the complex rendered dead. Especially when it drives to the meat of the relationship and then circles around again, not quite ready to come to terms with the really ugly notions this means for Thomas and her. Each of these phrases binds together a story that is about both reality and what we imagine to be real (about ourselves and others).particular scenes, such as a Barbra Streisand act whilst high on Vicodin - were fun and well observed but like I say, the individual passages could not add up to a cohesive whole.

Even so, it takes a decade to run its course, providing moments of dizzy intoxication and wild abandon before cruel betrayal kicks in. From the millennial club scene, to philosophy, to religion, to history, and popular culture this a book that hasn’t met a reference it doesn’t want to squeeze in somewhere. At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco, and New York-a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age story that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.There were only those you esteemed, and those you detested, and I had the dubious luck of being pinched between the two like loose cargo on deck, thrown between prow and stern on turbulent seas.