rm | The Catch Trap

I've just finished The Catch Trap, an out-of-print Marion Zimmer Bradley book about gay trapeze artists in love in the circuses of the 30s, 40s and 50s.

It's a strange, difficult to navigate book, in that it is not always easy to distinguish from the internal tone of the book, which is quite pulpy and also set in a time both closetted and constrained, and the external tone of the book, which was published in 1979 and features a more significant disclaimer about how the book isn't making any claims about the sexuality of any real people the book might reference or have even used in the process of research. The book and the book's subjects are both daring and frightened, and this is by turns confusing, fascinating and even cloying.

That said, the book has a lot of interesting things to say about discipline, creative family, dying arts and the heavy burdens of narrow lineages, but it is hard not to read it without wondering what tone it would achieve had it been written today while retaining its original setting.

It is worth noting that I found a lot of things in the book familiar both from fencing (the fact of it and the way I often long for it to be) and from having a big, crazy Italian family and a whole lot of my own temperment. Certainly, there were things about the book that made me grok my profoundly unsteady relationship with atonement.

Good, worth finding (which is apparently incredibly difficult -- this was a birthday gift), especially if you have any interest in teh history of gay literature and identity, or, conversely, if you're just a fan writer who loves the slash and wants to get a handle on teh world before or outside.

Two pieces of trivia worth noting:

There's a circus poster on the cover of the edition I have, for a performance taking place on September 11th.

The family the book is about is the Santellis. A source of grave aggravation amongst fencers is that an equiment maker named Santelli is no more.

Both random oddities made me chuckle.