Story of Love In Solitude by Roger Lewinter (Book Review)

 

Story of Love In Solitude
By Roger Lewinter
Translated by Rachel Careau
Published by New Directions, 2016
Print Price: $10.95

This is a VERY small book, clocking in at 70 pages, with half of its winsome bulk taken up by the original French version tagged on to the English translation by Rachel Careau. There are three "short stories" contained within. The title story, "Story of Love in Solitude", is about a man living in a ramshackle apartment with a broken couch and an adjoining room whose wall has caved in seeing a black spider. He catches and releases it over and over. Then the second pulse pounding story, "Passion" is about what seems the same narrator in the same apartment battling with moths and maggots that seem intent on destroying his precious camellia plant, which is connected with his parent's wedding anniversary. In the third story, "Nameless".....well, I could not take it anymore at that point, I read about the first two pages of it, and gave up on this book, even though it might have taken only about half an hour to read. It was just that awful. 

Roger Lewinter is just the type of intellectual the French would hail as a genius. Simply because he is incomprehensible to most normal readers. "Zis mun moost be ze jenus, bcuz he makes no suns!". I could hardly make heads or tails of his sentence structure, with its CONSTANT interruptions, interjections, and run-ons. They reminded me of Ophelia's annoying talkative dad Polonius in Hamlet who you constantly wanted to scream SHUT UP at. 

When I got to the end of the first story in this book, the one about the black spider, I literally laughed out loud and said to myself "Are you serious? That's it?????!!!". I must admit, I was amused and thought it was funny. I thought I was on some kind of Candid Camera. When I started reading the second story I quickly realized that this wasn't a joke and that this is just how Lewinter writes. If he was an artist, he would be the guy that exhibits a garbage bag in an art gallery and title it "Garbage Revised". A blurb on the back of this book dares to compare him to PROUST!!! 

What an awful waste of 30 minutes of my life trying to slave through this. I had to get my gimp to tie me to my desk just to make it through. 

My Grade: F-