The Book.

I finished The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith several days ago, and, as it is a book I intend to read again, I recommend it. Some books are enjoyable but unworthy of a second reading; this is not one of them. I would like to read it now that I am familiar with the storyline so that I can pay more attention to the intertwining relationships whose ties lead to Tristan.

It has a fantastical air about it, but, with this threaded throughout, it is still a "realistic" story. The setting has elements of a post-industrial society even while a large part of the social fabric is comprised of “Sirkuses,” where performers routinely defy death, sometimes losing their footing or their lives.

Tristan’s a grotesquely malformed human, to the eye more creature than man. “A lipless little tragedy with a gaunt little praying mantis head” who narrates the story with sensitivity, intelligence, and humor.

One of his three father-figures, all of whom fail Tristan in one way or another, is an ex-convict named Wally. He exhibits the truest love to Tristan, although even his love, like most human love, is an equal mixture of need. Wally is faithful in the wake of others' failures, though. By the end of the book, this scarred and homely thief, cranky and unpolished, looks nothing less than beautiful.

Finally I permitted myself to look down at my audience. The ground was not more than twenty feet below me. Faces were tilted up towards me. I turned to them.
The faces were all wrong.
They were not faces looking at an actor. Nor were they looking at something as simple as a boy on a pipe. The faces looked at something like snot, like slime, like something dripping down towards them from which they wished to take their eyes and which, the clearer and closer it became, produced in their own eyes and lips such grotesque contortions that I knew—properly, fully, for the first time in my life—I was a monster.
Wally, his mouth tight, his eyes brimming, stood on an oil drum at the base of the pipe. He held his pale freckled arms out towards me. When I fell into his arms he crushed me to him, as if, in holding my snotty face so forcibly against his neck, he could block out everything I had just learned.

At times, God must look at us like that. He knows our brittle frailty and ugliness, but in spite of all, He crushes us to Him.