Acts of Infidelity
A Novel
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Like diving into the mind of a brilliant, infuriating friend, this novel dissects the experience of "the other woman" with tremendous wit and insight.
When Ester Nilsson meets the actor Olof Sten, she falls madly in love. Olof makes no secret of being married, but he and Ester nevertheless start to meet regularly and begin a strange dance of courtship. Olof insists he doesn't plan to leave his wife, but he doesn't object to this new situation either...it's far too much fun.
Ester, on the other hand, is convinced that things might change. But as their relationship continues over repeated summers apart, and winters full of heated meetings in bars, she is forced to realize the truth: Ester Nilsson has become a mistress.
Ester's and Olof's entanglements and arguments are the stuff of relationship nightmares. Cutting, often cruel, and written with piercing humor, Acts of Infidelity is clever, painful, maddening, but most of all perfectly, precisely true.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exhaustive and engrossing anatomy of a romance, Andersson revisits Ester Nilsson (the protagonist of Andersson's only other novel published in English, Willful Disregard), a clear-eyed philosopher-poet with a tendency to dive blindly into relationships. During rehearsals for a play Ester has written on "the agonies of love," she meets Olof Sten, an older, married actor with whom she feels an instant connection. Before their romantic relationship has properly begun, she tells him she wants to share her life with him; he demurs, saying he will not leave his wife. The two carry on an intermittent affair over the next several years, giving Ester the opportunity to bring her philosophical training to bear on Olof's smallest actions to convince herself that he will leave his wife. Olof, though, is a creature of "almost pathological ambivalence," who intuitively senses just how much of himself to give, and withhold, to maintain the status quo. The novel is as much about love as about two competing philosophies of language about love. Ester, for whom "a phenomenon didn't really exist until it was articulated," is continually frustrated by the more reticent Olof, for whom "nothing had happened if it was unnamed, uncategorized and unformulated." The affair, like the novel, has its numbing repetitions, and making readers inhabit this relationship purgatory is part of the point of Andersson's involving analysis of love's absurd syntax. This is a cogent, astute novel that will be appreciated by patient readers.
