From Publishers Weekly:
This minutely detailed record of the author's unrequited love affair is played against accounts of the amatory troubles of Stendhal and Petrarch and extended comments on Rabbi Akiba and the Song of Solomon. A San Francisco poet and writer, Paul ( Catapult ) invites "L," the young woman he adores, on a three-week junket to France, hoping that she will fall in love with him. Eager to renew early memories of the country, L accepts, but she remains indifferent to Paul throughout their travels together from Paris to Provence. Although narrated with style and sensitivity, the painful details of Paul's self-effacements and humiliations in his efforts to please L fail to transcend the strictly personal; the reader readily agrees when L, exasperated, tells him to "Be a man, not a boy." The surprise ending seems tacked on, as do the separate sections on Petrarch, Stendhal and Akiba, which are intriguing in themselves but fail to link up to this account of a sorry ardor.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal:
The names of the innocent are reduced to their initials in this novelized confessional where the struggle of the writing process seeps through as if it were a college exercise. J. takes the mysterious and supple L. to Paris on a travel-writing excursion, hoping to get some help in seducing her from that city's charms. In interwoven chapters of this first novel, J. looks to Proust, Stendahl, and others for perspectives on love (the novel even has a bibliography!). The narrator's musings are endearingly thoughtful and reverential, but the prose runs hot and cold, with evocative passages followed by painful strains that attempt to turn superfluous nothings into literary gold. Not an essential purchase.
- Brian Geary, West Seneca, N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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