Solitaire of Love

this is stunning. words cannot express.

Detailing an intense love affair down to its minute parts, "Solitaire Of Love" is a gorgeous portrait of how loving someone so intensely is as glorious as it is painful. The male narrator loves Aida, but knows that one day she may leave him as she did her husband and her other lovers. She becomes his oxygen, his reason, his erotic muse, which all ultimately proves his undoing. Because to love someone is a personal, private thing, like a game of solitaire, that only the one can enjoy fully. Reminiscent of Violette Leduc's "Thérèse And Isabelle", Slavenka Drakulic's "The Taste Of A Man", and Kate Millett's "Sita", Peri Rossi's magnificent story is a seductive look at the realities of sexual passion.

To simply call Solitaire of Love a novel would not be doing it justice, both intencely passionate, and bitingly analytical, Cristina Peri Rossi delivers her cynical philosophy of love to the reader desguised as a love letter. Solitaire of love (the fourth book of Peri Rossi's translated into English) follows the obsessive relationship of an unnamed narrator and Aida, the woman he loves to the point of addiction and destruction. The entire book reads like a dream, containing surreal and meaningful details of life, along with the foggy illusions of sleep. Peri Rossi, like a good psychoanalyst, breaks the book down to its most elemental meaning, decoding what is often encoded during simple day to day interactions. Perri Rossi deals with relationships, sex, and desire with an uncompromising certainty, revealing even the most mysterious of human emotions without ever loosing their beauty and mystery. Although Solitaire of Love is one of the most unabashedly lyrical of Peri Rossi's books, it never stoops to being sentimental or cliched. It is certain to delight the reader who is in love as much as the reader who is out of love.