4,5* rounded up

I have no words and I’m still crying writing this. So I’ll use the words of Anna Bonet: „In Memoriam is both brutal and beautiful; the kind of rich and atmospheric and devastating story that you spend days recovering from.“ This book shattered my heart into a million pieces. My poor boys. All those lost souls. This book is for sure part of my personal Roman Empire. I have so many quotes I love: „Death is a debt which every one of us must pay.“ „He recognised that bravery could only exist where there was fear, and so of all of them, only Gaunt was truly capable of heroism.“ „You'll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.“ „He thought perhaps all the pain would sour the love, but instead it drew him further in, as if he were Marc Antony, falling on his own sword. And it was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.“ „ He looked even more like a painting than usual. He radiated peace and prosperity. He was 1912; a world where savagery had been purged from the human spirit, for ever and ever.“ „Their lips met, and things became simple.“ "I wish I could tell you in my own words, he said. "But I can't. And you don't want me to. "Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate, / Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving‘“ „….. he would die, he knew he would, and Ellwood was looking at him as if he was the world.“ „His heart was heavy with something he couldn't understand because it was too huge and too futile. His mind was repulsed by this grief that felt like infinity: impossible.“ „In 1916, it was this: what part of yourself did you most fear losing?“ „How alive it all seemed, and how gracious-to die in an era when your death bought you a brief moment at the centre of something. To be important, rather than one of millions.“ „…he saw empires rise and fall like the swelling and abating of the tide, perpetual, each society blindly throwing its tragedies and flaws onto foreign shores. It seemed inevitable, and yet, from the perspective of the sanded beaches, devastatingly corrosive.“ „If love was stepping off a cliff in the hope of flying, there was a wall at the precipice that had never been there with Sandys, or Ellwood, or even Devi, whom Gaunt had hopelessly adored at thirteen. He felt no fear around Elisabeth, because there was no chance of falling. He was fond of her, but he would never say to her, "Withhold no atom's atom or I die!'" „He kept the lines in his head. He supposed they had returned to him because of the funny way the ground moved with the force of the explo-sions. It was as if the dirt had a heartbeat, and it pounded to be saved, urgently alive.“ „Ellwood remembered what Gaunt had said, about gunfire: how it made you feel as if you were at the centre of the uni-verse. It was more than that, at the Somme. It was like watching the universe split in half.“ „There was no comparison. No animal on earth would have suffered it. No creature would walk so knowingly, so hopelessly, into the jaws of death.“ „ELLWOOD WAS BURNING. He would die with the fire in his bones, because when it went out, there would be nothing left. Everything was ash.“

I need to say, that I cried quite often while reading this book. It's one indication for how good this book was. Although the topic is not that easy, war and love story were in a good balance, if you can say it like that. I loved both of the main characters, they were written beautifully. The book is for everyone who likes history and the gays.

More of a 3.75 maybe? My experience reading this definitely suffered by me pausing it for so long, very sorry about that It was a good read, but I think I enjoyed the last half much more than the first; I think I also struggled with the language of rich teens of 1910s England, but alas I'd still recommend!

So beautifully devastating. I ugly cried and I think this will be one of my all time favorites.