Fabulous Fiction Firsts #248

Wed, 03/09/2011 - 7:49pm by muffy

In the smart and insightful Enough About Love, debut novelist Hervé Le Tellier warns in the prologue that "Any man - or woman - who wants to hear nothing - or no more - about love should put this book down". How fabulously inviting.

And where else would we set such a novel but in Paris?

Successful, elegant Dr. Anna Stein is about to turn 40 and finds herself unsuspectingly struck by an "erotic thunderbolt " when she meets Yves, a writer. Thomas Le Gall, Anna's middle-aged psychoanalyst is equally unprepared when he too, was struck by a similar thunderbolt when meeting Louise Blum, a beguiling married woman at a party.

For the next three months, these two affairs paralleling one another - Louise and Thomas, Anna and Yves as they weather the turmoil and passion of clandestine trysts, deception and guilt that threatens the stability of their families.

"Le Tellier examines the possibilities of love after 40, and he deals with this issue with patience, understanding and bemusement". "Middle-aged romance has rarely seemed so intriguing".

Francophiles, and anyone eager for a Paris fix without the price of a cross-Atlantic flight, could try A Garden in Paris by Stephanie Grace Whitson , and Foreign Tongue:: A Novel of Life and Love in Paris by Vanina Marsot.

Reading Enough makes me long to revisit my favorite romantic French cinema classics such as The Lovers: Les Amants (1958), and A Man and a Woman: Un homme et une femme - the 1966 Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film, and immediately brings to mind that lovely soundtrack.