Edited by Alistair Sutherland and Patrick Anderson
Synopsis: Typically, in this spot, I put the synopsis provided by the publisher. Despite searching somewhat extensively, though, I cannot find any synopsis for Eros, so to summarize the text: Eros is a collection of excerpts from novels, journals, and essays, as well as poems, that relate to what the author’s call “erotic friendship,” that is, friendship between men that is sexual in some way, whether that means these friends actually have sex or not. These excerpts are almost wholly from authors from Europe and the United States, and they span from classical antiquity to the 20th century. Eros: An Anthology of Friendship won the Stonewall Book Award in 1975.
Genre: Adult Nonfiction
Content Warnings: Antisemitism, Homophobia, Misogyny, Pedophilia/Pederasty, Physical Violence, Racism
Why You Should Read It: As I said above, I could not find a synopsis for this book, so I had basically no idea what I was getting into when I started to read it. All I knew is that it had won the Stonewall Book Award, and was thus part of my personal reading challenge to read all of the Stonewall winners. Despite not really knowing what I was getting into, I did still have some expectations for what this book was going to be. For one, it says “anthology,” so I knew this book was really a collection of other pieces. I also knew it was published as part of a series called Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature, and the whole series technically won the Stonewall Award. Based on the name of the series, I was able to infer that this is a nonfiction anthology, and thus it is likely a study of “eros” and “friendship” in historical documents or historical literature. I was somewhat right in that this is a collection of appearances of “eros” and “friendship” in historical literature. What was missing from this book is what I was really hoping to see, which was the study. While I do think the excerpts featured in the book are interesting, I think the book would have been greatly improved if there had been more analysis of the texts compiled. Every now and again there would be a paragraph or two about a specific author to provide context, but for the most part, the excerpts are left floating between title and citation with no additional information. Because of this, this book just did not work for me as a casual reader, which is why it took me a month to get through. I’m sure it would be helpful to somebody writing a paper who needed these excerpts pre-compiled for them for easy access, but it’s not one I suggest for the general reader to just pick up and browse. I was further frustrated in my reading by the inclusion of randomly untranslated passages. For the most part, texts not originally written in English appear in this book in translation; however, every now and again there would be paragraphs or poems written entirely in French, without any accompanying translation. There was also an instance of a poem appearing in the original German, but it is accompanied by an English translation. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why the French was not thusly treated.
Overall, I struggled to finish this book, and it is definitely not one I would recommend as just a casual “sit down and read” book. Some of the excerpts were certainly enjoyable, but I find the volume as a whole was a bit too disconnected to make it truly worht reading.
My Rating: 2/5 stars
Library to Living Room 