Worlds Apart: A Memoir

This is novelist Plante's (best known for his "Francoeur" trilogy: The Family, The Country, and The Woods) fourth book of nonfiction. Like the author's Becoming a Londoner and The Pure Lover, it is drawn from his extensive diaries and edited to focus on a particular narrative—this time, Plante's often long-distance relationship with the poet and publisher Nikos Stangos (1936–2004). The melancholy tone is reminiscent of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin but without the feeling of the Nazi specter looming—although the AIDS epidemic emerges during the period covered by the text, adding a mournful gloss to occasional oblique glimpses of a soon-to-be-decimated 1980s gay subculture. It would be a mistake to pigeonhole this is as an LGBT title, however, as the world Plante and Stangos inhabit is one of authors and artists of all genders and persuasions. Indeed, the many crisscrossing relationships—regardless of how briefly they appear—are given their own individual and complex podium, setting each apart in a way that still somehow universalizes what could initially seem like a very rarefied set of experiences.