Adroitly capturing love and all its nuances, Gilbert Reid’s provocative collection of short stories, 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.
Beginning on a startlingly poignant note, readers find themselves on Pavilion 24, where amid the ruins of war-torn Bosnia and religious conflict, a crippled Muslim soldier harbors an urge to kill a blind yet beautiful Serbian woman and yet manages to find solace in her. With distilled emotional intensity, Reid incites one to believe in the unexpected nature of love.
In a perverse almost comic telling of the complications that occur when love and sex collide, Irony is …, depicts an intellectual liaison gone askew when a man becomes enamored of a sophisticated critic, whose enticing literary analysis leaves him susceptible to further allurements - i.e. he becomes a performer in a twisted show involving him, her, and Darwinian-esque dirty talk for her husband.
A childhood fixation, long forgotten, colors the memory of a man as he returns home in The Road Out of Town and finds he has left part of himself behind. Haunting images of his unrequited love, an innocent beauty that was marked by an abusive history, walking out of town plague him while he remembers her and is left wondering, Why?
These are but three affecting stories in a brilliantly diverse collection full of charming witticisms and dark curiosities, the tangle of fascination, perversity, ambivalence, and power at the heart of intimacy. From France to Italy to Bosnia to rural Canada, these nine stories question and alter the way readers may see love. So This is Love is at times hauntingly morose, at times whimsically beautiful, but always honest.
