Gilbert Adair's extraordinary new novel constitutes both the exuberant
celebration of, and the melancholy elegy for, that poignantly brief period
in the early 1980s when homosexuals marched collectively, arm in arm, out
of the closet.Not all homosexuals, however. Adair's protagonist, Gideon, a
lonely, horny young Englishman who arrives in Paris at the very beginning
of the decade to take up a teaching post in the local Berlitz, is
increasingly fascinated by the intoxicating atmosphere of erotic banter and
bragging in the school's all-male and virtually all-gay common room. The
moment has surely arrived for him, too, to overcome his own chronic
timidity and actually do what he has only ever dared fantasise about. Yet
Gideon has a secret - a secret he is prepared to share with nobody but the
reader, a secret he is finally obliged to confront, with surprising
results, when the shadow of AIDS starts to cast its sinister net over the
gay community.Wise and witty, Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires contrives to be
many things at once: a flamboyant chronicle of a period of sexual
emancipation now long gone, an incisive dissection of the circuitous route
taken by one young man from self-doubt to self-discovery, a tour de force
of astonishing sexual candour and, not least, a dazzling stylistic
exercise.