Love

by Paul Kafka-Gibbons

Overview

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780395860014
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/18/1997
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

A winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, PAUL KAFKA-GIBBONS has reviewed books for major papers nationwide including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Dallas Morning News. He is also a professional modern dancer and has performed with companies in Paris, Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston.

Editorial Reviews

"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." Boston Globe

"An epistolary novel that mingles hearts and smarts." [Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best First Fiction, 1993] The Los Angeles Times

"Americans in Paris, in love: a novelist has got to be brave to tread ground this well traveled. 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 New York Times

"LOVE : ENTER is as multilayered as a napoleon, and bittersweet as absinthe. Its complexity is camauflaged 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." The Washington Post

"A stunning accomplishment." Newsday

"Thoroughly charming and romantic...the start of a great literary career." Cosmopolitan —

From the Publisher

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.

Boston Globe

Love. Enter is as multilayered as a napoleon, and bittersweet as absinthe. Its complexity is camauflaged 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.

The Washington Post

Thoroughly charming and romantic...the start of a great literary career.

Cosmopolitan

Americans in Paris, in love: a novelist has got to be brave to tread ground this well traveled. 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 New York Times

A stunning accomplishment.

Newsday

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. Author tour. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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 ( Backstage Passes , Putnam, 1993). Recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/92.-- Rosellen Brewer, Monterey Bay Area Cooperative Lib. System, Cal.

Library Journal