What's Called Love: A Real Romance - Hardcover

Paul, Jim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679409718 ISBN 13: 9780679409717

Publisher: Villard, 1993

Synopsis

It was the perfect ploy, or so he hoped.
Jim Paul, author of the critically acclaimed Catapult, is desperately in love with L - but she isn't sure. So he arranges a trip to France, hoping that the country of romance, the land of the orange tree, will work its magic upon the object of his desire. If all goes well, she too will be in love by the end and he can ask her to marry him and they'll probably live happily ever after.
But from the moment they arrive in Paris it is obvious that L will have none of it. She seems immune to the spell of France. This was not supposed to happen. What can he do? He's determined to win her back. And so the pursuit is on, across Paris and through the countryside of France.
To lend some perspective to his romantic plight, Paul interweaves his own memoir with stories of other men famous for their passion, some with happy endings, some without. From the nineteenth-century French novelist Stendhal, who, despite - or because of - his constant catastrophes in relationships, considered himself an expert on the subject, to the medieval Italian poet Petrarch and his hopeless devotion to the beautiful Laura, all the way back to a lover in ancient times whose dedication won a place for the Song of Songs in the Bible, Paul finds precedents for and parallels, sometimes humorous, sometimes horrible, to his own roller-coaster romance.
With the same dazzling blend of past and present narrative he used so powerfully in Catapult ("a lilting and graceful piece of writing by a man in love with language," said the Los Angeles Times), Jim Paul captures in What's Called Love the magic of France, the bittersweet ache of yearning, and the boundless, often foolish optimism of lovers through the centuries. It is the timeless story of love lost and won again, viewed both in the present moment - in these days of AIDS and doubt about roles and relationships - and in the context of love's history.
And does he win over the woman of his dreams? You'll find out in the irresistibly suspenseful final pages of What's Called Love.

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Villard
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0679409718
• ISBN 13: 9780679409717
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 275