Time remaining
By: James McCourt.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Knopf; Distributed by Random House
Published: 1993
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 273
Subjects: Gay men -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
Description: From the author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz ... and Kaye Wayfaring in "Avenged" ... - two wildly brilliant, moving, electric stories of gay life in New York during the last twenty-five years.

The first story introduces Delancey, performance artist and, in his words, "one of the sole survivors" of a band known as the Eleven against Heaven. Delancey's recollections of four decades in the flamboyant New York wilds - spirited, defiant, festive, bright as paint (or acid) - are filled with the force of longing and the melodrama of remembering.

Delancey's prologue sets the stage for the title story, "Time Remaining," in which the formidable Odette O'Doyle - semi-retired transvestite ballerina, veteran of foreign wars, and polymath recorder of the stories of valiant lives - assumes the spotlight. On a midnight train to Long Island's South Fork, Odette reports on his just-completed mission: he has deposited the ashes of eight of the former "Eleven" in various rivers, canals, fjords, and harbors of Europe.

Through the ceremonies of time, travel, ritual re-enactment, and eternal return, this renegade celebrant officiates at something very like an Irish Catholic wake. He recalls a glittering chain of outrageous adventures and a terrible history of decimating disease and death while conducting a private service of reconciliation and renewal. Time Remaining is a moving, defiantly hilarious solemnization of life and love in the age of AIDS.