Blackouts (2023) by Justin Torres

 Book Review

Blackouts (2023)

by Justin Torres

    Congratulations to Blackouts and author Justin Torres, who won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction last week.  I just happened to finish the Audiobook right after it won the NBA Fiction.   Torres blends fact and fiction, history and the present in a way that very much reminded me of W.G. Sebald.   The plot is straight forward and elusive at the same time: An unnamed narrator comes to visit Juan Gay, an elderly Puerto Rican member of the LGBTQ community who is dying in a flop house in an unnamed city.   Gay has used his copy of Sex Variants- a 1941 book that purported to be an objective "study" of homosexuality to create black-out poetry- where the creator takes an existing book and blacks out large amounts of text to create a poem with what remains. 

   As Juan and Nene (the narrator) sit/lie waiting for Juan to die, he recounts the history of the 1941 book, specifically the roll played by Jan Gay- a real-life trailblazer in the LGBTQ community who contributed her own descriptions to the 1941 book, only to see them used in uncredited fashion.   No need to proclaim how good Blackouts is- it just won the National Book Award!