So This Is Love
Lollipop and Other Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Adroitly capturing love and all its nuances, So This Is Love pulsates with underlying currents of violence, sex, passion, and the politics of desire. Tracing the globe, individuals find themselves caught in the entanglements of memory, forgetting, and the imminent future.
In an overcrowded hospital in war-torn Bosnia, a Muslim soldier and a young Serbian woman---one crippled, the other blind---find solace in each other. In small-town Ontario, a father and daughter relive the summer when an ethereal girl entered their lives and a brutal assault changed everything. In an apartment peopled with an eclectic mix of bohemian expatriates, a man pursues a young suicidal waif at the height of the sexual revolution in 1970s Paris. So this is love.
In sparkling, insightful prose, Gilbert Reid's provocative debut collection of short stories takes the reader on a journey through war zones, bohemian apartments, idyllic rural farms, and the dark streets of Rome. Madly romantic, subtly subversive, and utterly accomplished, So This Is Love is at times morose, at times perverse, at times beautiful, but always honest.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This debut collection (first released in Canada in 2004) examines love's many intricacies and, given the stories that follow, begins fittingly with pain an amputation performed sans anesthetic. Reid is at his best when his subject matter is dire: two abandoned hospital patients in war-shattered Bosnia one a vengeful Muslim soldier, the other a blind Serbian woman come to depend on each other in "Pavilion 24"; a young woman confronts a terrible memory in the tender, sweet and ominous "Soon We Will Be Blind"; a war photographer saves a life in the face of nearly a million deaths in "Hey, Mister!" Throughout, Reid evokes an assortment of settings ("Somewhere the rhythmic crescendo of artillery overtook the roar of the motor. It was subliminal the distant sound of killing") and shifts easily among a wide array of characters. However, Reid misfires a few times, notably with the half-baked title story and "After the Rain," which reads like an exercise in Hemingway mimicry. But the best of these stories are excellent and illuminate the tortured relationship between love and loss.
