Happy Valentine's Day!

[bookblather]

Happy Valentine's Day, beloved readers! I am going to have dinner with friends, and then watch zombie movies and eat candy and marshmallows and chocolate icing with my Best Beloved Friend. I hope you have plans that are similarly awesome

Comments

[chris_smith_atr]

Why thank you. I'm not very good at describing books so bear with me. It's why I don't review them -- can't say much other than "this worked" or "complete dissection of book".

The Gargoyle is a story about an extremely jaded porn star who is in a car crash and gets set on fire. Just before the car goes over the hillside (and the bottle of booze lands in his lap removing his nethers) he believes sees a flight of flaming arrows, which people insist were not there, until he meets a mental-ward patient called Marianne. Marianne believes that they met each other in a previous life, in the german monastery of Engethal, and wants to save him as he once saved her. But time is running out for marrianne -- she is a sculptor and believes that she is running down to the last number of "hearts" she can put in her gargoyles. (Interspersed with this are some of the most beautiful short-story parables I've ever read. I know it sounds confusing, but it is a beautiful and perfectly structured book. I read it twice on the bounce, just to enjoy reading it again, which is rare for me. I usually let a week or two go by before I read books again)

London Fields is probably the diametric opposite. Being by Amis, it has the most beautiful -- if at times self-consciously pretentious -- language. It is a horrible story of modern-day greed, narrated in the first person by an author, and about his relationship with a horrible piece of work called Nicola Six -- the murderee as she is fondly known from page 1 -- and Keith, a local dart's player. What makes me think of this very very strange little book as one of the best love stories ever is that it ends with the purest form of love that wipes the slate clean of all the modern-day dreck that Amis has just pushed up into your face -- an act of amazing sacrifice to save Keith's daughter. It is extremely post-modern, and a lot of the time you want to whack Amis with a stick for being so very perceptive -- but it leaves me each time I read it with an amazing sense of hope for people, and a feeling of the power of completely innocent love.

[bookblather]

Ooh. Yes, I think you might have weird taste in love stories, but they sound like fascinating books! I'll be sure to pick them up.