A book that invites you to drink love by the bucketful

When I was young, there were two love stories I loved. The first was a story by Paul Morand. The writer attends a 24-hour cycling race and seduces the wife of one of the participants. But he gets so excited by the events of the race that he ultimately decides not to go to bed with the woman, who was very willing. The other is from a song by Georges Brassens: L'orage . A woman knocks on the singer's door in the middle of a storm because her husband, a lightning rod salesman, is out selling his wares. The neighbor comforts her, and with every storm they experience a great passion. Until, from selling lightning rods so much, the guy becomes rich, and they move to a stupid country where it never rains. In the final verses, Brassens asks the rain to speak with the beat of a bass drum, " auxquels on a t'nu tête ensemble ." That is, those who have lived through storms together. I, a youngster, imagined heads butting heads on the pillow in eternal love. And not just the head of the lightning rod salesman's wife: all the women the narrator had butted heads with on a cot. I believe in love, I like the sweet and delicate way Morand and Brassens approach it, and I hate the tendency to speak ill of it and experience it as a drama.

This is one of the reasons why I find Lisa Cohen , Ada Klein Fortuny's first novel (1975), so good. From a stylistic perspective and the interest of specific episodes, it could perhaps be improved, but from a tonal perspective, it's unsurpassed. One of the few things we know about Klein, always jealous of her privacy, is that she's a doctor. In the year of the pandemic, she published The White Plague , a journey through the cultural history of tuberculosis, which was enthusiastically received. This short novel also deserves applause. A woman who was once a beauty, no longer a child, has found a mature love and experiences it with " a joy of being unballested ." Taking a train to meet her lover, lying in bed tracing patterns with her finger on his torso, conveys a feeling of fulfillment. It is from this fullness, and not from resentment and bad feelings, that the protagonist reconstructs, for her own conscience and for the complicity and affection of readers, her sentimental and sexual life since adolescence.

⁄ No cultural nonsense, no depressive Rodorean copies: a breath of fresh air in the face

Lisa Cohen celebrates all the good things about love, and there are quite a few. She naturally recounts how, when she's with one man, she feels attracted to another; that he plays hard to get and the more people chase her, the more she says no; that every time she breaks up with a man she's loved, she looks for men to cover the wound (what a scene); that sex is talked about a lot but hardly said at all; that we all have a rigid, masculine idea of ​​it (even though Lisa's partners tend to be sensitive and tender); that relationships aren't linear, that they move through emotional and sexual cycles; that great lovers are like tomato plants that die because they suck so much that they exhaust the soil they grow in; that she falls in love with men who dare to take the plunge. The narrator says she drinks love in abundance ( in buckets , we could translate into Spanish). And from her hand, we too drink in abundance.

It also deals with dramatic subjects: the death of unloving parents in a car accident, an abortion, but everything is handled with the same simplicity as when it deals with love. No stupid erotic scenes, no tearful confessions, no cultural nonsense, no depressive Rodorean reproductions: a breath of fresh air.

Ada Klein, Fortuny, Lisa Cohen, L'Altra Editorial. 192 pages. 18.90 euros