Synopsis
1- Remember what it was like to fall in love - wildly,
hopelessly in love - for the first time? Paul Kafka's gloriously romantic debut
novel recaptures love's first days in a sparkling, bittersweet tale of
awakening and longing. Paris
sets the scene for the emotional entanglements of four young Americans. Dan and
Beck, just out of college, share a ramshackle garret and the friendship of
Margot and Bou, two women who happen to be in love
with each other. For a brief, enchanted time, the foursome revel
in the bohemian splendor of the City of Light. But when
loyalties shift, as they inevitably do, the friends discover the heartbreaking
boundaries of intimacy. Five years later, Dan is finishing medical school in New Orleans and
delivering babies at a local hospital. But memories of Paris haunt him. Where are they now -
outrageous Beck, wise, steadfast Margot, impulsive, irresistible Bou? Do they think of him, and of each other? In the
midnight minutes between births, Dan uses the maternity ward's computer to
write long letters to his faraway friends, conjuring up the rapture of their
early days together, when they were just entering the realm of love. Stylish,
fresh, filled with charmingly offbeat characters and saturated with Parisian
sunlight LOVE Enter is an epistolary romance for the modern age.
From: http://books.google.es/books?id=0IUyLvFlSKgC
2- A
romantic, computer-age love story set in Paris
and New Orleans.
Young Dan Shoenfeld, spending a year abroad after
college, falls in love with Bou and Margot, two women
who happen to be in love with each other. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize for First Fiction, Paul Kafka's brilliant first novel is now available in
paperback. Patricia Hampl writes, "Paul Kafka's
enchanting novel brings a new dimension to the epistolary romance and a fresh
face to the American in Paris.
The city gleams and winks, seduces and betrays as if for the first time in this
deftly written love story. It's a beauty-a crazy, unexpected, entirely winning
tale: Paris love remembered by a young doctor on
the milky computer screen of a New
Orleans maternity ward at night. When Paul Kafka hits
the Enter key to "save to memory," the story gets sent straight to the
heart."
From:http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/product-description/0395604788/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=916520&s=books
3- 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 and presents us with that rarest
of fictional creations, a good man.
"Love
Enter" chronicles the Paris
interlude of 23-year-old Dan Shoenfeld, who is
spending the summer abroad, dancing with a French troupe, before enrolling in
medical school. His roommate, friend and fellow aspiring doctor, the brilliant
Beck, introduces him to two American college students, Bou,
an actress, and Margot, a saxophone-blowing psych major. Dan falls in love with
both of them on sight.
That the women are
lovers themselves doesn't deter Dan -- although Beck warns him sternly:
"You mess with that pristine relationship of theirs, you try to turn it
into a New Age, Parisian love threesome, and you'll find out quick that you've
been living in Never-Never Land."
It's easy to see what
draws the women to Dan. This nice young man can dance, diagnose maladies, fix the plumbing. He's sensitive and witty. Sweetly
neurotic, he frets that he's never the best -- as a thinker, dancer, doctor or
lover.
Four years later,
working as a subintern in the maternity ward of a New Orleans hospital, Dan
is still haunted by the demise of that summer's passions. The novel is
structured as a series of letters -- "one to a woman I was in love with
for a long time, one to my best friend who I hated for a few years, and one to
a woman who was my other best friend, who I was kind of in love with, and who
was the lover of the woman I was very in love with." Dan enters the
missives into a hospital computer between births.
Computer lingo allows
Mr. Kafka some clever updates to the epistolary form (one segment is sent by
modem to Beck's hospital in Boston).
Dan knows the easy diagnosis of his entanglements: "I'm the troubled guy
whose mother died when he was 11 and who even now can't sustain a loving
relationship."
Indeed, his
long-distance engagement to another young doctor languishes as he struggles to
exorcise his attachment to Bou and reports on a
dizzying array of characters: not just the four principals but his mystical
French landlady, his buddy from dance class, his cohorts and enemies at the
maternity ward and a host of other relatives, ex-lovers, dancers and doctors.
The novel's
chattiness is sometimes charming, sometimes grating. We get more detail than we
need about Dan's menus and routines ("I wrote to Dad for instructions about
track lighting, did my lunch dishes, screwed the
covers on the electric outlets I'd bought").
Mr. Kafka (a student
of modern dance and ballet who is the author of the novella "Home
Again") writes inspired dialogue that sharply captures the cadences of the
young, smart, hip and mildly emotionally tortured. Unfortunately, he seldom
just lets his characters talk, instead punctuating
their exchanges with play-by-plays about their card games or meal preparations.
The glut of detail is especially awkward in the epistolary form, since Dan is
often relating the events so painstakingly to people who were, after all, present
themselves.
The scenes in the
delivery room are by far the novel's most original and moving. There Mr. Kafka
deftly establishes the link between the often hair-raising moments of birth
that Dan witnesses and his other bonds. "We only fall in love one
time," Dan maintains. "All the way in love, with no
holding back, no pretending. Then we lose the gift. We love again, but
never with the same terror and wonder as we did that first time, before we knew
how."
A
supervisor at the hospital promises Dan that once he learns the drill, he'll
stop crying at deliveries. Readers may find themselves hoping that
she's wrong.
From: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/17/nnp/28124.html
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Thalia Mar Asensio Cuevasanta
tacue@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press
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