Title: LOVE THAT ILLUMINATES
Product review: Colm Toibin's "Love in a Dark Time" is a superior group of essays by one gay writer about other gay writers. What distinguishes this 2001 collection is how effectively Toibin sells the work of each figure essayed. I was never interested in James Baldwin before, but after reading Toibin's take, I ran out and enjoyed two Baldwin books. In the piece on Thomas Mann, we see how many of his male infatuations Mann turned into art--which infatuations into which stories--a subject being studied in detail only now by his biographers. And in the profile of Pedro Almodovar, we meet the Spanish torch singer Chavela Vargas, whom Almodovar rescued from obscurity because her confessional art mirrored so closely the values of his own cinema of women. A wonderful collection of essays that illuminate, indeed sell, each subject.
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