Sunday, January 18, 2009

Hornblower

"Hornblower stripped off his wet shirt and trousers and shaved standing naked before the mirror.
...He glanced down his naked body. He was slender and well muscled; quite a prepossessing figure in fact, when he drew himself to his full six feet. ...Hornblower hated the thought of growing fat..; he hated to think of his slender smooth-skinned body being disfigured...."

--I promise you, this is not modern fan-fiction, but an excerpt from the opening pages of Beat to Quarters (1937), a Captain Horatio Hornblower novel, by C. S. Forester.

Hornblower's clothes, by the way, were wet with sweat--he had been exercising.
Seesh. Kirk has nothing on this guy.

Forester also tells us within the first chapter that the captain has "melancholy brown eyes, a good mouth," and "tousled curly brown hair," and then he sends him off for a seawater shower, pumped up from overboard by his steward.

Pretty soon people are getting flogged, eating weevils, and declaring themselves gods.

I didn't expect this to be so, so, ...so cheesecakey!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, who knew Hornblower doesn't even need to be turned into slash?

My word verification for today is "spudsta"...that's slang for a potato who has joined a gang or is a hip-hop star.

Jennifer said...

I've heard the A&E movies are pretty impressive as well, but it's hard to beat the homoeroticism of paragraphs of print dedicated to lovingly describing the main character's body and his obsession with it.

WV: "layflinth," which I assume is either something nautical or a sex toy. Or...both.

Fresca said...

Yep, Hornblower doesn't need the aid of fangirls to turn him into an angsty guy who's awfully concerned with the silk stockings of his gorgeous dress uniform and with appearing to be more bold than he feels to his adoring lieutenant--he's already there!