Reviews for The way of a virgin: being excerpts from rare, curious and diverting books

The average rating for The way of a virgin: being excerpts from rare, curious and diverting books based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-27 00:00:00 Patrick Jesu Real Rating: 5+* of five There might be another perfect read for me this year, but I doubt very much it will come at me from this angle or evoke in me this memory. In everyone's life there is a piercingly perfect moment. Its sounds and lights and emotions are all, in one frozen frame of the film it seems we must make for ourselves, exactly and precisely right. I had mine on a chilly autumn afternoon. My true love and I were walking the length of Broadway starting at 110th Street. We had reached the corner of Canal Street, many hours later as sunset was at its blue and rose and gold peak. I reached out and held his hand, looked down at the brown eyes laughing at my perceived reluctance to cross against the light. I was transfixed by the beauty of the scene. I was pierced by the sad certainty this would be the last time we would make this walk. I was utterly, completely, fully present for one of the few moments in my life. I smiled and sniffed and spoke some nonsense or another to him. The world started again, we stopped in a bodega for coffee and some kind of lumpen doughy things to ease my hunger, his had already flown away from him as AIDS began to draw its noose. I could have eaten the entire place and been hungry because I was empty in a way I never knew I could be. Perfection has a price. I'm still empty. I'll never be full; it's impossible. But age, aging anyway, lets me look at the size of the space I once filled and say, "my love, my love, I'll never have you or see you again, but how perfect you are and always will be." He died eighteen months later. That was twenty-nine years ago. Xas survived his love as well, and I feel him my brother as grieve my quiet way through the years.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-07-02 00:00:00 Normand Boucher he is neither soldier in the armies of the Lord nor adherent to the Day Star, son of the morning. he is his own creature, bound to earth. oh sweet angel, caught between ice and fire; oh sweet prose, liquid and lapidary; oh sweet story, sinuous and subtle, that says so little yet feels so much. a soulful and nourishing novel.