2020/004: The Wild Swans -- Peg Kerr [reread]

It was all there in the background, Elias realized while looking through the album later, like the distant cacophony of traffic on the other side of a closed window. You think you can ignore it, but it keeps getting a little louder, a little closer, irritating at first, and then more and more ominous. There was a kind of anxiety among their friends, even the ones who seemed entirely healthy... [loc 2802]

The story is told in two parallel strands: Eliza, in the 1680s, discovers that her stepmother's changed her eleven brothers into swans; and Elias, in 1980s New York, is learning to live with his sexuality as a gay man, even while his friends are dying of a mysterious illness. Both Elias and Eliza have been disowned by their parents, but find love and friendship elsewhere; both are silent, though silence = death; both find love unexpectedly, though Elias has to endure the lingering death of his lover Sean.

There are other echoes: a man of the cloth questioning his faith; food placed just out of reach; the role of the mother, or the stepmother, in bringing doom to a son; the need to create art in the face of a curse ... And there are hints that the two stories might be connected: that Eliza might be Elias' ancestor, and that another (trans) character might be the reincarnation of someone who deeply regretted her inability to help Eliza. But these are only hints: Kerr has a light touch. She doesn't hammer home the parallels, or sentimentalise either Elias' or Eliza's suffering: nor does she glamourise the gay scene at its brief heyday. Neither protagonist is given to dramatics, but both experience profound emotion. The Wild Swans is a powerful story about love, and hope, and -- to a certain extent -- self-sacrifice.

I read this novel when it was first published in 1999: I haven't reread it since, and recalled very little of the plot, though I did remember the characters and themes. It's aged surprisingly well, and I'm happy that it is now available again, in ebook format, from new publisher Endeavour. (I received a free e-copy from NetGalley in exchange for this honest review.) There's also a new foreword by Peg Kerr, which highlights how far we've come in those two decades: not only in treatments for AIDS but in marriage rights.

Read for the 'Either a Favorite or a New-to-You Publisher' rubric of the 2020 Reading Women Challenge