User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
”It was horrible, really, what I was feeling, the sense I had that I was running a terrible risk every minute of my life - risking my family, my career - but not being able to help it; somehow just not being able to help it. I was thinking every day how I had to change my life, how I couldn’t go on this way; but I knew the more I thought that, the farther I was getting from where I thought I should have been.”[Owen Benjamin]
The Lost Language of Cranes is David Leavitt’s first novel and was published in 1986. It explores the terrible secrets that families keep from one another, and the consequences of their discovery.
Set in 1980s New York against the backdrop of the Aids epidemic, the novel recounts the lives of the Benjamin family; parents Rose and Owen (both 52) and their son Philip (25).
Rose is a copy editor, and Owen, the director of admissions at a private boys’ school. They lead a tightly structured life, devoting their days to work and their evenings to reading. While Rose and Owen both know that their intimacy has faded, neither is willing to question the basic value of their relationship. Every Sunday, they go their separate ways; Rose reads the paper and works in their apartment, while Owen spends the day at a gay pornographic cinema. Rose has no idea how Owen spends these Sundays and would never dream of asking. When she accidentally meets Owen on the street one Sunday while taking a walk, Rose realizes that after 27 years of marriage, she hardly knows him:
“She had stumbled into her husband on a strange street corner, running some mysterious errand she knew nothing of, and they had spoken briefly like strangers, parted like strangers.”
The first cracks appear on the surface of the Benjamin family life when Rose and Owen learn that their New York City apartment will be converted into a co-op, and they must either buy it or move out. Once their sanctuary from the outside world is threatened, the rest of their carefully structured life begins to crumble as well. Their son, Philip, infatuated with a new lover, wants to share his happiness with his parents and finally summons the courage to reveal that he is gay. His disclosure has an immediate impact on their comfortable, settled lives. Rose feels shocked grief, driven by her fear of the sexual danger that her son has to negotiate as a homosexual. Owen is inconsolable, confused by the upheaval in his family, and overwhelmed by his inability to cope with his own undisclosed homosexuality.
The Lost Language of Cranes is a multilayered work of sensibility, delicate on the surface yet packing the punch a reader may feel upon discovering that the title refers not to long-legged birds but to machines employed in lifting materials for building. In a psychological case history discovered by a lesbian friend of Philip's, a boy named Michel who was neglected as a baby is found to have identified with the cranes he saw working outside his nursery window.
”He moved like a crane, made the noises of a crane, and although the doctors showed him many pictures and toys, he only responded to the pictures of cranes, only played with the toy cranes. Only cranes made him happy. He came to be known as the 'crane-child.'”
As Philip's friend muses:
''How wondrous, how grand those cranes must have seemed to Michel, compared to the small and clumsy creatures who surrounded him. For each, in his own way, finds what it is he must love, and loves it; the window becomes a mirror; whatever it is that we love, that is who we are.''
Perhaps in personal relationships our life experiences have shown us that maybe that line should read:
Whoever it is that we love, that is who we are
David Leavitt is gifted at portraying both the mundane as well as the emotional interaction of family members, particularly the marriage crises brought on when Rose and Owen realise they've been living a lie for the past three decades.
This is a beautifully written and perceptive novel about sexual identity and family; about people struggling toward a sense of self in a world where
feeling love is a certainty even if
being loved is not.
4.5 stars
TV FILMThe Lost Language of Cranes was adapted to a BBC TV film in 1992. The setting was changed to London from New York. While the movie is a fair adaptation of the book, the book (in my opinion) is way better.
The TV film is available on You Tube (free) at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nmQxY...
THE AUTHORAt the age of twenty-three, David Leavitt burst on the American literary scene with a collection of short stories entitled Family Dancing (1984). The stories dealt with issues of sexuality and terminal cancer. Family Dancing received the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Because of his youth, Leavitt received much attention and was hailed by some as the new voice of his generation.
Two years later,
The Lost Language of Cranes, Leavitt’s first novel, appeared to mixed reviews. Focused more clearly on homosexual themes and characters, it established him as a gay writer. During the mid-1980’s, the gay rights movement was well into its second decade and approaching a certain maturity; Leavitt’s novel was noted for dealing with gay themes in a very accessible and universal manner. Despite the critical response,
The Lost Language of Cranes spent many weeks on best-seller lists and was a popular success. In 1992, the British Broadcasting Corporation filmed an adaptation of the novel, transferring the story to London.
Leavitt’s other works include Equal Affections (1988), a novel about a family facing its matriarch’s slow death; a second collection of stories, A Place I ve Never Been (1990); and a novel set in wartime England entitled While England Sleeps (1993). His other books can be viewed at his author page David Leavitt. Leavitt has lived in Europe, and his work enjoys great popular and critical success there.
The Lost Language of Cranes is also listed in the recently updated 1001 books you must read before you die
Rating: really liked it
The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt is a perfect example of why one should push one’s self to complete a book once started, even if it is giving you trouble. I was going to dump this, but by the time I reached its end I had come to like it a lot!
The book’s central issue is the process of accepting and having the guts to speak out about one’s sexual identity when it diverges from the social norm. The book is set in the 1980s in NYC. The gay pride movement was gaining momentum having begun in the early 1970s. Many, many gays still remained closeted in the 80s. This book focuses on the process of “coming out”. Through its fictional characters the arduous process is exceedingly well drawn. Starting from denial through to self-awareness and finally self-acceptance, the reader comes to emotionally feel the protagonists’ journey through bewildering confusion, recriminatory and vituperative bouts of anger and blame, heartbreak and loneliness. A father and a son fight this battle. The mother remains entrenched--(view spoiler)
[unable, unwilling to change her expectations or accept what has been hidden for years (hide spoiler)]. Through these three central characters and diverse lovers, acquaintance and friends, a full gamut of emotions are drawn.
This is a book about love—heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual. It is also about familial love. One type of love overlaps another. The book looks at each of the characters’ ability to feel love, show their love and respond to love. Each character draws their own limits. They do not react in the same way, allowing different behaviors to be observed.
Love has a physical and an emotional component. In a healthy relationship they overlap, they grow simultaneously, they exist side by side. The book gave me trouble at the beginning because the physical sexual component is thrown at the reader before any attachment is felt for the partners. Physical sex without an understanding of the underlying emotional ties is erotica, sex meant purely to titillate. I was not turned on by the graphic description of lickings, penetrations and masturbation of characters toward whom I had not yet come to feel any attachment. As you proceed, the focus shifts to the psychological and emotional aspects of love, which is what I was looking for. I didn’t pick up the book for erotica. I picked it up to better understand the emotional turmoil and difficulties associated with being gay. This is delivered, but you must read to the end.
The prose is straightforward. How individuals talk to each other on an everyday basis is what is delivered. The dialogs are excellent.
The ending is good too--neither a fairy tale ending nor too brutal.
The audiobook is very well narrated by Jonathan Davis. His intonations capture characters’ emotions well. Dialogs are well performed. Varied inflections are used to mirror the respective character’s sexual identity. There is no overdramatization. The performance draws a picture that I perceive as authentic, genuine and real.
The bottom line is that having now read the book I think I better understand the challenges a gay person must face—not so much on an intellectual level but rather on an emotional level.
*****************
The Lost Language of Cranes 4 stars
The Two Hotel Francforts TBR
Equal Affections TBR
The Indian Clerk TBR
Rating: really liked it
What I admire about this novel is that Leavitt explores the significance in mundane details of the characters' lives. Grabbing a stranger's cock or fighting with a loved one is easy, but talking to those people takes immense courage. The characters find that opportunities come and go, and many aren't worth pursuing, and others can be created. I find their internal lives believable, and this book hooked me and kept me reading far too late for a few nights. But I wouldn't want to be any of the characters, except maybe briefly to experience the excitement of coming out or falling in love for the first time all over again.
Rating: really liked it
The Lost Language of Cranes strikes me as effortlessly comprehensive in its portrayal of gay characters in different walks of life, but also an examination of other characters and tropes that have been staples of gay literature. In many ways, Cranes is a product of its time. The gay identity has certainly evolved a lot since the 1980s, and the struggle of the closet is much less at the forefront. However, this book remains a moving portrait of acceptance and passion. It tells the story of several people who experience coming out in a different way: the woman whose parents disown her, the boy raised by gay parents who experiences acceptance from the beginning, the married man with private fantasies. It explores the excitement and passion that arises from being truthful with your sexuality.
Leavitt’s prose sucked me in and left me wanting more. My only complaint is that I felt the ending was a little unfinished, as we’re offered no resolution to some issues that arise throughout the story. I was sad when the story came to an end, as I wanted to spend more time in the lives of these characters that were so beautifully written. Not one character had a sense of feeling false or undeveloped. Even the wife, who is usually portrayed as shrill and overbearing, felt here as a vulnerable and raw person truthfully dealing with the revelations her family is going through.
Rating: really liked it
As far as I'm aware, this is Leavitt's first published novel, and it's an impressive effort. Leavitt's theme is that of many of his stories in Family Dancing - that is, family relationships from a specifically gay standpoint. In a way, you could analyze this novel down into a rather pedantic series of illustrative dissertations on possible varieties of family response: there's Jerene, the black lesbian whose parents have entirely disowned her; there's Eliot, brought up as the adopted son of a settled & sophisticated gay couple - Eliot who somehow has never managed to develop a capacity for emotional intimacy; there are the two principal characters, Philip and his father Owen, both gay, and both making that revelation in the course of the book. The generational difference is nicely etched - differences in expectations, in guilt level, in ways of going about things. The last main character to mention is Rose, Philip's mother and Owen's wife. She cannot fully accept or understand what she finds out about the two men in her life - but what I find interesting is that she is portrayed neither as monster nor victim. I think I mentioned elsewhere that Leavitt seems to have a surprisingly strong sense of his female characters. Anyway, the point I started out to make and didn't quite finish is that these characters seem to me not only to be perceived/analyzed but to be felt. I really can't think of much higher praise for a modern novel. This is a post-AIDS book, by the way. It's not mentioned by name, but the consciousness of it is everywhere. One last thought just struck me. There are no straight men in this book - gay men, straight women, and gay women, yes.
Rating: really liked it
Today is World AIDS Day. Since AIDS was first really recognized in the early 80s I think the numbers have reached over 25 million deaths. Pretty staggering when you think about it, and when you think about all the lives that have been touched in some way by this pandemic. It's not just about the big names you see on the news. It's about their families too, the ones you don't see on TV. It's about people in your neighborhood who could also be sick. It could be about just anyone. Friends, families, lovers.
It was not intentional that I finished The Lost Language of Cranes on World AIDS Day, but I'm glad I did. It's first the story of Philip Benjamin, a young gay man who struggles with the first stage of informing his parents of his homosexuality. The story covers not only Philip's perspective but also those of his mother, Rose, and his father, Owen. A double-whammy for Rose when she finds out Owen harbors his own homosexual tendencies. The three members of the family are forced to deal with their own opinions, feelings, emotions, and fears that come with these realizations. On the other end of the spectrum there is Philip's boyfriend, Eliot, who was raised by a homosexual couple after his parents died. The relationship between Philip and Eliot is often sad to read, and hard in other parts to see Philip try so hard to make something of the relationship that perhaps was never meant to be. Other characters - such as Eliot's roommate, Jerene, who has spent the last seven years writing a dissertation about lost languages - also serve pivotal roles in the telling of the story.
The story itself is filled with a lot of beauty. The writing is almost flawless as far as I'm concerned. I've read Leavitt's The Body of Jonah Boyd and was not that impressed with it. The Lost Language of Cranes felt much more powerful and much more complete. I was able to commiserate with each of the characters individually, though I've never dealt with the experience, for example, of having my son tell me he is gay. Leavitt managed to tell a universal story of the difficult and often controversial subject of homosexuality, especially considering the publication date of 1986 - when the AIDS pandemic was relatively new and so many people still thought you could contract the disease by drinking out of an infected person's glass.
The story itself also takes place in the 80s and there is a good deal of discussion about AIDS, particularly in relation to Philip's character and his own fears and worries. I saw somewhere that the story felt to someone to be "dated", and I didn't get that feeling at all. This could have been written today and still been about the 80s. Leavitt's experiences with being a gay man in NYC in the 80s gave him a lot to go on for this book, a lot of material, right down to articles published at the time suggesting homosexuals limit their sexual partners to 10 people - which of course grew to a smaller number as it became evident that HIV/AIDS was not something that was just going to go away. So "dated" is not the word I would use here. I find it just as relevant today, if not more so, than in the 80s when The Lost Language of the Cranes was first published.
Rating: really liked it
A story of family and friends coming to grips with who they are and redefining their lives in the process.
These have to be some of the most real, vivid characters I've ever encountered in a novel. Really incredible. So why didn't I give the book 5-stars? I just wasn't compelled or all that interested in the story until about 2/3 of the way through the book.
If you love great, interesting, complex and evolving characters, this is the book for you. If you need a bit more plot, maybe not.
I also wonder if some of my inability to latch-on to the story was that it was set in Manhattan? I've always found the ways of New York life to be foreign, and I never quite 'get' it.
I really loved how the book captured the mid-eighties, like a little time-capsule. There were quite a few pop-culture references, which was nostalgic. I was also fascinated by the discussions of AIDS and how it was impacting the gay community in those early days.
Rating: really liked it
Set in New York in the 1980s, the central character, Philip, is gay. He comes out to his parents. At that time, neither Philip, nor his mother Rose, realises that Owen, husband and father, is also gay.
Interesting character drawings and sketches of relationships. The importance of the family unit is central to the main story with the acceptance/rejection of the child and lifestyle. Rose is perhaps the best drawn character in the book and the one who evokes the most sympathy. Cold and rather self-contained she could be said to have “lost” her husband and son by the end of the book. Philip seemed weak and wimpish.
First impressions of the book were that it was trite in style but I was won over as I read on and enjoyed reading it. I could identify with the growing up process and the coming to terms with self and consciousness of same.
Rating: really liked it
I've kept this on my shelves for a long time, never really feeling in the right mood to read it as I somehow expected the book to be too keen on political correctness, to centred on the homosexual theme everyone knows about when purchasing this book, and I also kind of thought it'd be too eighties. I don't know where these ideas came from, and I'm so glad that I was completely wrong.
The Lost Language of Cranes is one of the most engaging books I've read in a while with characters that are so psychologically acurate that one actually believes them to be autobiographical because they're so much like real people. Even secondary characters are drawn in a precise and loving way, the dialogue is believable and the every-day drama of a family torn because of secrets revealed and the pain we all inflict on our loved ones we often choose not to know as they are in order to have our own way is all-encompassing. Leavitt's prose is lucid and beatiful. Great literature, no matter if you're straight, gay or bisexual. Everyone will end up identifying with the people in this book and that's the greatest achievement in a book for me. Thus the five stars.
Rating: really liked it
I reread this book to kick off spring break. It is as gorgeous and moving as I remembered. Lost Language of Cranes centers on the lives of Owen, Rose, and their son Philip. While this book is on its face a story about coming out, it is also a book about find love. In my reread, I was again smitten by the character Jerene, a graduate student. Jerene studies lost languages for her dissertation, though that too is a language she loses when she drops out. Leavitt writes about Jerene learning about a child who spoke the language of cranes: "he moved like s crane, made the noises of cranes." Jerene thinks: "What did it sound like? What did it feel like? The language belonged to Michel alone; it was forever lost to her. How wondrous, how grant those cranes must have seemed to Michel, compared to the small and clumsy creatures who surrounded him. For each, in his own way, she believed, finds what it is he must love, and loves it; the window becomes a mirror; whatever it is that we love, that is who we are."
Rating: really liked it
I first read this book when I was in my early 20s, when I was the son Phillip’s age. Now I’ve reread it as I’ve reached my mid 50’s, Owen the fathers age. It made me recollect how much I connected to the son and how this novel gave me hope for love. I still love this book and am so thankful that I was lucky enough to live a life of truth unlike Owen who was only able to reveal himself at my age.
Rating: really liked it
I can imagine this novel was more groundbreaking and compelling when it was originally published in 1986--but it seems very dated today in 2020. Leavitt awkwardly attempts to up the literary significance of his story with his frequent ponderings about language--but this is basically a domestic drama centering on some mostly whiny characters who engender little sympathy or interest. For a period piece, it has some value--but we seem so far from that time in so many ways.
Rating: really liked it
Stunning. Will be thinking about this for a long time
Rating: really liked it
an excerpt, when Rose realized his husband is gay:
But how could she have know that then? Homosexuality was a peculiarity to her, a condition to be treated in hospitals - not a way of life to be embraced or saved from. She had marched down the aisle, and now it seemed to her ironic that she should have seen in Owen's face assurance,a sign that she was aking the right decision, when in fact she was making the first and largest of a series of mistakes that would carry her out into her life like an undertow, then cease , leaving her stranded, fifty-two years old, with nothing to look back on but a chain of wrong decisions carefully made, blindly made, an exam failed bacause the student has made one essential, thoughtless error over and over. Oh, why hadn't he told her? Why hadn't he let her know? Perhaps he imagined that those secret feelings he harbored would go away, fade with time; perhaps he thought he could cure himself, or that she could cure him. No, even if he'd told her, she realized (and it was a vague consolation), she would have married him anyway, would have believed, as he did, that marriage would provide the cure for the disease. The secret was thus buried, but even from underground it had its influence. A single lie, twisted and preserved, riddled the fabric of their lives together like a flaw in silk, so that a single rip might tear everything apart. They were not, and never had been, what they seemed; that she had somehow known all along. But how shameful that she had lived this life for more than twenty years, and never known, not even secretly, what it was they were.
and at the confrontation:
Don't interrupt me. No. And not for the stupid reason you think I'm thinking. Because I was very careful, Owen. I made sure I never disrupted our lives together. It was a separate thing, something i needed - for reasons which are now clear and obvious. But with you - what you're saying is the the whole premise of our marriage has been a lie, a sham. And that's bigger than cheating on someone. Because it means for you that our marriage was the cheat, your - other life, that was the real thing." her voice grew suddenly softer. "With me," Rose said, "you were always the real thing."
Rating: really liked it
After reading the blurb for this one, I was a bit concerned that I was setting myself up for the Manhattan Hollinghurst. Luckily, this wasn't the case. There's none of the pretentiousness in Leavitt's writing, he's a straight forward, but evocative writer, and the whole book had more humanity in the first 20 pages than the whole of the damned Swimming Pool Library. It is guilty of being overly romantic in the odd place, and the ghoulish spectre of AIDS feels old fashioned, which is enitrely not the fault of the author.
While the story is ostensibly about Philip, the son of two scholarly parents, who has known he's gay for as long as he can remember, finding his way in a city full of casual sex and barely concealed prejudices, it's more about the effects of a society beginning to fulling accept and embrace homosexuality on individuals most affected by it. The story of Jerene, the lesbian friend of Philip's boyfriend Elliot is heart breaking. The story of Owen, Philip's closet homosexual father, is handled a little more heavy handedly, and I feel may have been more affected if the two of them weren't so closely related. The effect on their mother Rose, is genuine. The real difference between this novel and some of the other gay fiction that appears on it, is that Rose is a wonderfully written character, flawed but no victim, and at the one, you're left feeling devastated for her.
Well written, moving, but nothing spectacular. And not a Hollinghurst type character in sight, even if Elliot does scrape worringly close occasionally.
