![]() Set for the most part in the suddenly former German Democratic Republic, Grattan’s book inserts its barely teen-age American protagonist, Michael Sullivan, into the awkward reconciliation between the two Germanys. ![]() ![]() The newest addition to this subgenre is Thomas Grattan’s “ The Recent East” (MCD), a sharply accomplished first novel by a forty-seven-year-old author who up to now has published just a scattering of quietly daring short stories. In his native country, Ludwik had been in love with Janusz, a go-along apparatchik who was happy, even from the down-low, to cling to the Party line: “Having oranges and bananas every month of the year-is that freedom to you?” Although only tentatively out, he feels sexually ahead of the local historical curve: “It occurred to Jacob that he might not have arrived too late for the liberation of Eastern Europe’s gay people.” Tomasz Jedrowski’s “ Swimming in the Dark” (2020) runs in the reverse East-West direction, telling the story of a Polish student, Ludwik, who flees Warsaw for New York before the Solidarity movement is crushed by martial law. In Caleb Crain’s “ Necessary Errors” (2013), Jacob Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate, heads to Prague in 1990 with a “wish to follow history” just after the Velvet Revolution. The end of the Cold War has allowed for a particular niche of historical fiction, transnational novels whose gay male protagonists live out their coming of age against a backdrop of national struggles for freedom and renewal. ![]()
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