Pip: Oslo in March, a taco dinner that does not end with tacos, and a novella that spans Paris, New York, and Warsaw — osoparavos.com is not here to ease you in gently.
Mara: That’s the territory today. Adam Donaldson Powell gives us excerpts from Entre Nous et Eux, a gay erotic novella that moves through desire, identity, grief, and what it costs to love honestly — told across e-mails, encounters, and one very consequential art exhibition. Let’s start with the novella itself and what it’s actually doing.
Excerpts from “Entre Nous et Eux” — Love, Lust, and the Cost of Honesty
Pip: The setup here is deceptively simple: a gay Frenchman named William moves from Paris to Oslo, falls for his friend Rickard, and writes letters home. But the novella uses that frame to ask something harder — what does it mean to live honestly inside a gay life that the world only tolerates on its own sanitized terms?
Mara: Jean-Pierre puts it directly in a conversation with Bertrand. He says, “Society really does not want to know, and they definitely do not wish to see how gays really live. I was raised as a Catholic in Lille. I tried to fit in for years. I pretended to like the girls I dated as a teenager, and secretly had discussion-less sex with boys in alleyways and in parks.” That speech lands as the novella’s thesis, not a throwaway line.
Pip: And the cost of that pretense is right there in the same scene. Jean-Pierre isn’t just ranting — he’s also grieving Carlos Enrique, who contracted HIV not through recklessness but through a single unlucky encounter. The novella refuses to let that be a morality tale.
Mara: Bertrand’s response is blunt: “We know enough about the dangers and the kinds of precautions that are required. There really is no excuse anymore.” Jean-Pierre fires back that rational behavior twenty-four hours a day is a fantasy, and that the real scandal is the absence of a cure, not the presence of desire.
Pip: That argument doesn’t resolve — which is the point. The novella holds both positions without flinching.
Mara: The erotic scenes carry the same weight. William’s opening chapter — the night with Rickard that begins as a sleepover and turns into a relationship — is explicit, but what the prose lingers on is the anxiety the next morning, the relief of breakfast together, the ordinary miracle of Rickard saying he would call.
Pip: William’s New York letters to Bertrand escalate the erotic register considerably, but they also track something quieter: how much William edits himself for Rickard, choosing what to share and what to keep, because the relationship has become worth protecting.
Mara: That tension breaks open in Chapter Five, when William confesses he once slept with Karol — Rickard’s ex — before they met. Rickard’s rage is immediate: “You know how much I hate lies, and you know how hurt I was by that bitch.” What follows is a lovers’ quarrel that ends in reconciliation, and then a weekend in Helsinki where they tell each other they’re in love for the first time.
Pip: Karol — or Mariusz, depending on who’s asking — is the novella’s most complicated figure. He’s a former child actor turned sex worker, serially unable to commit, and yet the chapters in Paris with Bertrand show him genuinely changing.
Mara: Bertrand sees it too, and says so in a letter to William: “Living with Mariusz has shown me how lonely I actually have been the past few years, and how starved I am for romance, tenderness and all of the conventional forms of stability that I previously have eschewed in relationships.”
Pip: Bertrand’s own arc is built around Jean-Pierre’s death — JP overdoses after not getting the publishing job — and the exhibition that becomes a tribute to him. The paintings are titled “Sleaze,” which is either a provocation or a reclamation, probably both.
Mara: The critic Malcolm Friendly writes in his review that Bertrand “has created an almost mystical portrayal of the male rectum, depicting otherwise private and purely functional bodily orifices as adventurous and spiritual portals into the unknown.” The novella treats that framing seriously.
Pip: The London exhibition chapter is where every thread converges — Rickard confronting Karol in the restaurant bathroom, Alain arriving to reclaim Bertrand, and then Alain’s death by car, offstage, while the crowd inside applauds Bertrand and Mariusz as a couple.
Mara: The final chapters pull outward. In New York, Mariusz meets Mischa, a Jesuit priest wrestling with celibacy and desire, and the conversation between them distills everything the novella has been circling: the gap between official identity and private self, and what it takes to close it.
Pip: And then the epilogue reveals the entire story was William’s dream on the day he flies to Oslo — which either undercuts everything or suggests that the imagination is where we rehearse the lives we’re about to live.
Mara: The novella earns that ambiguity. It’s doing a lot at once — erotic fiction, epistolary novel, gay cultural argument — and the excerpt holds together because the emotional stakes stay real throughout.
Pip: What stays with me is Jean-Pierre’s line about not wanting to be normalized into a “nice gay couple” stereotype — and then the novella ending on exactly that image, two men kissing in front of a crowd.
Mara: It doesn’t contradict him. It just shows the full range — the backrooms and the Calla lilies, the grief and the applause. Next time, more from osoparavos.com.
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