Enough About Love

By the celebrated Oulipo writer, this brilliant and witty novel set in Lisbon explores love, relationships, and the strange balance between literature and life.

Journalist, writer, and translator Vincent Balmer moves to Lisbon to escape from a failing affair. During his first assignment there, he teams up with Antonio — a photographer who has just returned to the city after a ten-year absence — to report for a French newspaper on an infamous serial killer’s trial.

While walking around the city together to take notes and photos for the article, they visit the places of Antonio’s childhood, swap stories from their pasts, and confide in each other. But the more they learn about each other, the more their lives become inextricably intertwined.

With a structure that parallels Homer’s recounts their nine days together and the adventures that proliferate to form a constellation of successive ephemeral connections and relationships.

A middle-aged man (our hero) is traveling to the heart of the Scottish Highlands to be with his young mistress (our heroine), who is twenty years his junior. Some people would call this madness, a mistake, as his visit is not entirely welcome — her boyfriend will arrive in a few days’ time. But our hero will not be swayed from his mission to seduce and win over his love. This is after all a physical desire, one he could never fight. His current state presents all the expected symptoms of love: painful impatience, shortness of breath, constricted chest, complete loss of appetite. Their rendezvous has been arranged on a main road, where the A32 crosses the S70, beside a road sign. Despite suspecting an icy reception, our hero hopes for the best.

In , a comedy of mishaps and disappointments reveal, with great energy and a keen sense of derision, the oldest story in the world — one of amorous fantasy and its denial.

The delightful and daring English-language debut of French author Hervé le Tellier is a series of short, intimately interconnected stories making up a lively user’s manual to pleasure, relating the various liaisons of couples from Anna and Ben to Yolande and Zach (taking in Chloe and Xavier along the way, as well as twenty others, as you may have guessed), until the criss-crossing of their lives and partners makes up a pattern as intricate as the fresco on the ceiling of a chapel. .

Harkening back to another playful book on an intimate subject — Harry Mathews’s —Hervé le Tellier’s celebrates the wonderful, often random, often excruciating possibilities of sexual intimacy, with something here for just about everyone — and their wife, husband, lover, or passing fancy.