Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.\u201cFlower & Herb soon fill the air with an innumerable Dance,\/ Yet all in order sweet & lovely, Men are sick with Love,\u201d reads the epigraph \u2014 taken from William Blake\u2019s Milton \u2014 of Se\u00e1n Hewitt\u2019s Open, Heaven. It\u2019s amour fou that afflicts the protagonist of this heady debut novel, from his boyhood until he becomes the middle-aged, divorced, nostalgic librarian who narrates the story. Scouring his memories of one formative summer when he was a teenager, the self-professed \u201cfantasist\u201d looks back over a time that left him suspended in a state of insatiable, delirious longing \u2014 and, in adulthood, unable to commit to an attainable relationship.James\u2019s lovesickness stems partly from the fact that he is gay. Since he was a boy he has \u201cfixated only on those I thought would not reciprocate\u201d. Hewitt captures to heart-rending effect the shame attached to queer desire, his young, anxiously timid character fearing it could \u201ctear right through the fabric of the world\u201d. The propulsive, hormone-addled events of the novel play out against the intoxicating, often cloying atmosphere of an unspoilt English villageAfter coming out to his parents and, inadvertently, the entire village of Thornmere, James becomes well versed at concealing and stifling his yearnings for male classmates to avoid bullying \u2014 but with such suppression, his torment only deepens. Into this tinderbox of emotion, the dashing stranger Luke arrives, cast out by his mother to live temporarily with his aunt and uncle on their farm. He is a harbinger of \u201ctrouble\u201d. (A little heavy-handedly, the recent school-leaver is the son of a prison inmate and something of a rebellious miscreant himself.)Cheshire-born, Dublin-based Hewitt is best known as a poet, and his first foray into fiction is unsurprisingly sensuous and decadent. As in Rapture\u2019s Road, the eco-poet\u2019s 2024 collection which is shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, a sense of lament ties together resplendent descriptions of nature with personal tragedy. The propulsive, hormone-addled events of the novel play out against the intoxicating, often cloying atmosphere of an unspoilt English village. In this \u201csunlit reel of days\u201d, James remembers \u201cbroken windows choked with ivy\u201d, \u201ca wood pigeon started up like a metronome\u201d and \u201cyellow cowslips and celandine like buttery stars\u201d. In equally heightened and unflinching prose, James recalls the agony of queer adolescence: the school changing rooms where \u201cthe sight and smell of the boys undressing was almost unbearable\u201d. Sprawling passages are pierced by the acute observations of an outsider looking in on other boys\u2019 lives. Repeatedly he finds \u201cit hard to imagine what men spoke about\u201d.The detailed account of James\u2019s coming-of-age nearly eclipses his love interest, Luke, entirely. The swaggering, nonchalant newcomer James first meets while he mucks in with a milk round is as much as a figure of teen fantasy as a real character, though behind his ineffably cool veneer is an occasional glimpse of \u201ca different person to the one I remembered\u201d. Given his back-story, James believes Luke has \u201clived a longer life than I had\u201d and, in spite of his obvious vulnerability, imagines him to have a violent streak, an \u201canger that could travel from one generation to another\u201d. As they grow closer and James pines for him, the nature of their relationship begins to cloud. The short-sighted self-absorption of Hewitt\u2019s protagonist-narrator \u2014 and the resulting flatness of others \u2014 sometimes makes him difficult to get onboard with. Yet Hewitt\u2019s wistful, reverie-like writing captures the painful queer experience of confusing friendship for romantic love. At the heart of Open, Heaven is a bittersweet paradox: \u201cIf, by some chance, the object of my desire desired me,\u201d admits James early in the novel, \u201cI had the sense that the desire might evaporate altogether.\u201d Open, Heaven by Se\u00e1n Hewitt Jonathan Cape \u00a316.99, 240 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Caf\u00e9 and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.\u201cFlower & Herb soon fill the air with an innumerable Dance,\/ Yet all in order sweet & lovely, Men are sick with Love,\u201d reads the epigraph<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":287695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-287694","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287694"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":287696,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287694\/revisions\/287696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}