Solitaire of Love-PB

The Uruguayan-born author of 20 novels (Dostoevsky's Last Night; A Forbidden Passion) offers a slim but intellectually rigorous meditation on the slippery, often illusory nature of love and the ways in which lovers alienate each other through words, sex and obsession. Peri Rossi shows how desire can at once marginalize, destroy and construct a sense of identity, using the vehicle of an affair between her unnamed male narrator and his beloved, Aida. Consumed by passion, the narrator becomes isolated from society and reality and is facing a self-destruction he seemingly craves. At the same time, it is his relationship with Aida that gives him an identity, as her body becomes the only thing he understands as real, though he projects so many unbalanced fantasies onto this body that he effectively reimagines Aida as an impossibility. He tries to create an inner paradise by imagining himself as Aida's unborn child; other times, he wants to be her husband, her worshiper, her possessor. The story unfolds in a fluid, nonlinear, poetic fashion, and Peri Rossi magnificently combines intense sexual imagery with a lucid and enigmatic philosophy of erotic love. The nature of language, especially the inadequacy of language to express sexuality, is also cleverly examined throughout: words are repeated and meanings explained so often that they lose their effect and intent as surely as the narrator loses his identity. This hyperintelligent language play may alienate readers unfamiliar with the novel's underpinnings of psychoanalytic theory, but those who enjoy the intellectual and sensual pleasures of Duras or Kundera will appreciate this treatment of alienation, sexuality and power. (Aug.)