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Take Nothing With You

von Patrick Gale

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12110224,107 (4.18)8
1970s Weston-Super-Mare, and 10-year-old oddball Eustace, an only child, has life transformed by his mother's quixotic decision to sign him up for cello lessons. Music making brings release for a boy who is discovering he is an emotional volcano. He laps up lessons from his young teacher, not noticing how her brand of glamour is casting a damaging spell over his frustrated and controlling mother. When he is enrolled in holiday courses in the Scottish borders, lessons in love, rejection and humility are added to daily practice. Drawing in part on his own boyhood, Patrick Gale's new novel explores a collision between childish hero worship and extremely messy adult love lives.… (mehr)
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Take Nothing with You
The opening chapters of Tale Nothing with You set me on a course to expect an entirely different novel than what the book turned out to be.
The opening begins telling about a man, Eustace, who has kept up contact with another man, a soldier, over social media. Eustace finds himself greatly enjoying the cyberchats with the other man, Theo, who is an officer in the Marines deployed to the Afghan combat zone.
The two have begun their conversations with no intention in ever actually meeting or seeing each other. As they continue their contacts, they find that they are becoming romantically interested in each other.
The soldier is about to come home on a short leave-of-absence and the two men decide to meet-up in person at Eustace's home during his short leave.
At the same time, Eustace receives a diagnosis of cancer that severely restricts his throat and requires immediate surgery. The operation and recuperation will take place just as Theo is about to come to Eustace’s home while on his two-week leave. The timeline clearly cannot work. And then….

The author suddenly, abruptly, and without any transitions skips backward in time to the real and more significant plot of the book.
In this storyline, Eustace is 14, growing up in a very unhappy family with limited financial resources, little communication, and even more limited affection for one another. At 14, Eustace discovers an incredible love for and talent for music, specifically the cello.
Much of the plot deals with the details of his education in learning the instrument, but, at the same time, it reveals his adolescent struggle to confront and accept being gay.
Interestingly, the “gay” aspects of the plot generally occur subtlety and never as the most important features in the storyline. The book is really about developing a deep love for music while the youthful protagonist discovers along the way that he likes other boys.
Just like the romance with the soldier in the opening storyline, in this part of the storyline about Eustace’s early sexual experiences, the experiences occur without forethought or intentionality. Eustace and his long-time friend Vernon have a sexual experience together. Since most adolescent boys first experience sex with another boy, this is not necessarily a hallmark of Eustace’s sexuality, but as he repeats similar experiences, he does have to confront his sexual orientation.
Excellent writing throughout the novel make it a pleasure to read. One particularly strong segment of character development relating to the character Vernon. Eustace’s father says, “he chose not to be interested’ (in how people perceived his behaviors). Vernon amused Eustace’s father, who said, “He was like a late middle-aged man (who) ‘unexpectedly landed in a small boy’s body and making no allowances for the change in habitat’.”
Very far into the book, the author includes a solitary chapter that recalls the book’s opening and reminds readers of those circumstances which began the book and which will end it. There is no transition into this chapter a or away from it, and again none to those chapters at the end of the book. This lack of transition makes for a jarring and confusing set of circumstances. Other than that, however, I liked the book. I respected that it did not make sexuality the chief feature of the plot, subsuming it in order to make the sexuality feel like “just one of those things” rather than the driving and most prominent part of life.
Adolescents must face the advent of sexuality on their way into adulthood whether they are straight or gay. Since Take Nothing with You dwells so little upon it, it is just a good book, not simply a good gay book. ( )
  PaulLoesch | Apr 2, 2022 |
A kind, compassionate coming-of-age novel: no rose-tinted glasses, no overdramatisation; three-dimensional characters, none of them faultless, none of them willingly wicked. Probably one of the best Patrick Gale books I've read so far. ( )
  Stravaiger64 | Dec 14, 2021 |
Een mooi coming of age boek over een jongen die opgroeit in een verzorgingstehuis (gerund door zijn ouders). Hij ontdekt zijn homoseksualiteit terwijl zijn moeder een relatie aangaat met zijn cello-lerares. Vooral de stukken over muziek en spelen in een kamerorkest zijn erg mooi om te lezen. ( )
  elsmvst | Jul 23, 2019 |
A coming of age story set in Weston-super-Mare. I found this enthralling despite the many pages devoted to the study of the cello. The chapters set in the present day were heavily outweighed by the bulk of the story of Eustace's teenage years, with passing references to the middle section of his life. The author managed to make both his parents sympathetic characters (the mother perhaps less so!) despite the ways in which they failed Eustace.

It was hard to keep in mind that this is a novel and not an autobiography. ( )
1 abstimmen pgchuis | May 30, 2019 |
I've read one other book by this author and it was completely different from this one. A Place Called Winter is mostly set on the Canadian prairies at the beginning of the 20th century. This book takes place in two different time periods: present day in London and the 1970s in Weston-super-Mare. Both locales seem just as realistic as the prairie locale in A Place Called Winter. That is the hallmark of a good writer.

Eustace lives with his parents in Weston-super-Mare, which is an English seaside town to which tourist flock in the summer. The house is also an old folks home which came about when Eustace's paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather needed assistance and his parents figured they might as well open up their big house to other paying guests. Eustace goes to a private school but the fees are a struggle for his parents to meet. He has only one good friend, Vernon, the son of an artist with Parkinson's Disease and a mother who died of breast cancer when Vernon was young. Eustace and Vernon are equally bad at sports which bonds them from the first. When Eustace starts taking cello lessons from Carla Gold, a former soloist, he is very good. It looks like Eustace might have a musical career ahead of him and he is encouraged to apply for a scholarship at a prep school in Bristol. He is also encouraged to take a week's course with Carla's teacher who takes only a few students at her house in the Scottish countryside. In between school and practising and lessons Eustace is also entering puberty. He realizes that he is not attracted to females but males do really turn him on. He and Vernon have some exploratory sessions before he goes off to Scotland for the course. Meanwhile he had sat the scholarship exam and had been awarded the scholarship but then his father found out that the scholarship would only cover the costs of the music lessons. Suddenly Eustace is facing attending the local comprehensive school which is not as bad as he feared especially since Vernon is also going there. Eustace faces a major upheaval at home when his mother is badly injured in a car accident and Eustace learns that she was leaving his father to be with a lover. The lover is never identified but the reader can easily figure it out even if Eustace never twigs. The mother moves back in to the house after she recovers from the accident but she has changed; in particular she has become religious. This results in a major falling out for the family.

In the present day Eustace is in his 50s living as a gay man in London. His first great love died and his second became abusive so Eustace is now alone. His friend Naomi (whom he first met when they were both cello students in Scotland) talks him into looking for someone on a gay dating sight. Eustace ends up falling in love with a soldier on deployment in the desert and they make plans to meet when he has leave. And then Eustace is diagnosed with cancer and he wonders if he has any future. This causes him to think about his past which is how we get to see what his boyhood was like.

I enjoyed this book but perhaps not quite as much as the first book. And readers should be aware that there is a fair amount of discussion about masturbation and pornography and gay sex which might be offputting for some. ( )
  gypsysmom | Apr 22, 2019 |
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At an age when he was reassured that life was unlikely to surprise him further, Eustace found, in rapid succession, that he was quite possibly dying and that he was falling in love for the third time.
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1970s Weston-Super-Mare, and 10-year-old oddball Eustace, an only child, has life transformed by his mother's quixotic decision to sign him up for cello lessons. Music making brings release for a boy who is discovering he is an emotional volcano. He laps up lessons from his young teacher, not noticing how her brand of glamour is casting a damaging spell over his frustrated and controlling mother. When he is enrolled in holiday courses in the Scottish borders, lessons in love, rejection and humility are added to daily practice. Drawing in part on his own boyhood, Patrick Gale's new novel explores a collision between childish hero worship and extremely messy adult love lives.

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