What the Night Tells the Day

by Hector Bianciotti and Hect Bianciotti

Book Overview

Compared to Conrad, Nabokov, and Beckett by Octavio Paz, Argentine-born Hector Bianciotti is one of the leading literary figures in his adopted homeland of France. What the Night Tells the Day, his first novel to be translated into English, is the fictionalized story of Bianciotti's youth among poor immigrant peasants in rural Argentina during the late years of the Per n regime, and a moving and sensitive portrayal of a boy's discovery of...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565842405
• ISBN13: 9781565842403
• Release Date: April 1995
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Gorgeous Writing in Gay Autobiographical Fiction

Words drop slowly, one after another, in long languid sentences. Reading WHAT THE NIGHT TELLS THE DAY is a bit like sitting at the knee of an old storyteller and listening carefully to his tale. Like all reminiscences, this one tends to drift a bit. Stories come out to startle the reader, and and then retreat, changing into something else - a philosophical discourse, perhaps. Yet, somehow, the slight unevenness in tone seems to make the book all the more authentic. Disconcerting for purists, the book's "identity" might annoy some readers. The cover declares it to be a novel, but the inside jacket tell us that the writer has turned from his usual fiction and has written a classical autobiography. The problem here may be that no one knows how to classify this beautiful tale. But the style is truly one of memoir; it is not long within the pages of this book that the reader forgets about the question of fiction vs. memoir and gets lost in the power of the writing. It no longer matters whether the words are near truth or disguised truth. One just feels the characters and, most importantly, the feeling. Bianciotti's strength is an almost pastoral sense of portraying the personal. He renders an interior life for an outside audience in a way not unlike a minister interpreting the Bible for his/her parishoners. The book shuld be read by anyone wanting to read prose of tremendous power and by readers interested in the entire emotional package of the homosexual experience, not necessarily the erotic. Bianciotti does all of this well, but not as well as Yukio Mishima who covered much the same material in his classic novel, CONFESSIONS OF A MASK. The two books have similarities, but Mishima's is far superior, and as well as allowing the reader inside of the mind of someone coming to terms with their sexuality, Mishima gives much more of a feeling of Japan than Bianciotti manages of Argentina. Still, WHAT THE NIGHT TELLS THE DAY is highly recommended.