She Loves Me (Signed First U.S. Edition)

She Loves Me is Peter Esterhazy's paean to women: beautiful and ugly, kind and nasty, fat and bony, monogamous and promiscuous, seductive, negative, rebellious, and voracious.
In ninety-seven short chapters this seductive novel contemplates love and desire and sex and hate, all from the point of view of a manly narrator who considers himself a great and successful lover, a womanizer, a man who may - or may not - be in love with all of the women of the world.
Intelligent and funny, this book is a great declaration of love and of contempt, and a philosophical exploration of the many postures and pretenses of eros. With his characteristic verbal pyrotechnics, the serenely jaded Esterhazy proves that there will always be another romance, and that love and hate spring from the same inexhaustible font.

There's this narrator. He loves and/or hates women who love and/or hate him. And this narrator loves to describe these women, to recount their strengths and weaknesses, to paint the glory of their bodies, to explore the nature of their volatile relationship with him. Hungarian novelist Esterhazy chronicles one romance after another in the course of 97 short chapters that entertain and tantalize, drawing on his skill as a master wordsmith to depict the varieties of male-female connection through vivid, graphic description and humorous reflection. Although some of his earlier works (e.g., The Book of Hrabal, LJ 10/1/94) may have challenged readers with labyrinthine language, the present work is delightfully accessible, commendably translated, and graced with an earthy humor that should win the author a greater following among English-language readers. Essential for academic libraries as well as larger public libraries.?Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Esterhazy's prose is jumpy, allusive, and slangy; we feel that something is being lost in translation, though Sollosy gamely comes up with a lot of tricksome English.... Still, there is vividness, an electric crackle. The sentences are active and concrete. Physical details leap from the murk of emotional ambivalence.