Editorial reviews

The New York Times

Americans in Paris, in love: a novelist has got to be brave to tread ground this well travelled. Paul Kafka, a distant descendant of Franz himself, may have daring in his blood. His tender novel gives the familiar material a fresh spin.

The Washington Post

Love Enter is as multilayered as a napoleon, and bittersweet as absinthe. Its complexity is camouflaged by the directness of the narrative, and the writing flows with a virtuosic ease... The structure of the book is both dazzling and surprising. Dan's complicated Paris story is interwoven with detailed reports of the delivery-room dramas that are happening in his present Louisiana life.

Boston Globe

Love Enter debuts with passion, promise... Kafka has led us to explore that mysterious area where love and technology intersect, in unexpected, almost poetic ways.

Publishers Weekly

Delineating a love quadrangle, Kafka (Home Again ) dazzlingly evokes young passion, with all its attendant histrionics and extravagant proclamations. Intern Dan Schoenfeld, on the obstetrics rotation in a Louisiana hospital, seizes the moments between deliveries to use a hospital computer (password: LOVE) to compose ardent missives to each of three once-close friends. He reminisces on events five years past, when he was a 22-year-old dancer in Paris and shared an apartment with Beck, a Yale med student. Beck had introduced Dan to two more Americans--bisexual Bou and her lover, Margot--whom Dan fell for as a single entity. Dan's first letter, to Bou, confesses his continued desire for her; his next, to Beck, attempts to show that an impetuous affair with Bou was destiny, not selfishness; his third, to Margot, details the clique's deterioration and implicates Beck, until then a voice of reason. Through luxuriant language and an aphrodisiacal Parisian backdrop, Kafka keenly conveys Dan's nostalgia, offsetting his feverish memories of the past with the everyday miracles and tragedies surrounding him on the maternity ward.

From Kirkus Reviews

Young Americans in contemporary Paris, walking a fine line between friendship and love: the idea sounds irresistible, yet for all the care Kafka has taken with his second fiction (following the novella Home Again--not reviewed), it stubbornly refuses to fly. Meet Dan and Beck (straight males, roommates) and Margot and Bou (gay women, lovers). The four of them are on an expatriate high, digging Paris, mixing their medical studies with jazz (Beck and Margot have regular gigs) and modern dance (Dan has joined a company). (Their story is being told by Dan four years later, when they have all dispersed and Dan is helping deliver babies in New Orleans; hospital scenes are awkwardly juxtaposed with memories of Paris.) When Dan meets the two women, he falls in love with them both, “not indistinguishably but inseparably, and always,” cherishing their relationship. Things don't stay that high-flown, and Dan doesn't stay that starry-eyed, for all along he has been more attracted to Bou, the tall exotic New Englander, than to the more familiar Margot, like Dan a middle-class Jewish only child. Dan and Bou sleep together; Margot is predictably upset, calling Dan “a first-class shit,” while acknowledging that Bou always wanted “a guy on the side.” Then Dan discovers that Beck, too, has been sleeping with Bou, and the four-way friendship collapses like a house of cards. A busy surface (Kafka sets his scenes meticulously) but a hollow center: this aseptic love story gives off no erotic heat at all. And the characters are fuzzy: Margot is conspicuously short- changed, almost disappearing, and it's not clear whether Bou is an “innocent menace” or simply a tramp.

Library Journal

Ever since Hemingway and his fellow ex-patriots wrote about it, the name Paris has conjured up powerfully romantic and bohemian images. This novel carries on the tradition but adds a fresh “twentysomething” flavor. Dan Schoenfeld is a medical intern at a New Orleans hospital's maternity ward. While on night duty awaiting births, he “enters” his memories of Paris from four years ago, when he studied ballet and fell in love with two women who loved each other, by writing letters to them and to his former best friend, Beck. He does this to understand why it all turned out as it did and why he is still haunted by that time. The juxtaposition of hospital life against the Paris ballet world is interesting, as is the literary device of interspersing Dan's memories with the hustle and bustle of the hospital. Though the details of the births become tedious, this is well-done romance reminiscent of Angel Bowie's memories of European youth in the 1960s.

From: http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/product-description/0395604788/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=916520&s=books

Academic year 2008/2009 
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López 
© Thalia Mar Asensio Cuevasanta
tacue@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press

HOME