Enough About Love Paperback - 2011

Excerpt

Sammy lives in a one-bedroom apartment on the rue de Grenelle, just where the Seventh Arrondissement likes to think it is already part of the Latin Quarter: high ceilings, bourgeois furnishings, views onto a massive paved courtyard. It would be improbably luxurious for an employee of the National Center for Scientific Research if the researcher’s father were not involved in banking in Lausanne. The guests, about thirty of them, seem to be regulars, but their conversations only rarely roam in the direction of their private lives. Thomas circulates discreetly from one group to another: someone else might have fun diagnosing a case of hysteria here, a breakdown pending there, the odd depression. Thomas knows how social posturing can mislead with its pretences, appearances, and control. He forbids himself any opinions.
   He quickly notices a young woman with short blond hair, pale eyes, and a lot of people around her. She is leaning against the wall in the huge hallway, holding an orange-colored cocktail glass, its surface quivering from her voluble conversation. Thomas moves closer, listens. He grasps that she is a lawyer…
   With a pretty flick of her hand she pushes back a drooping lock of hair, suddenly notices him, and smiles at him: Thomas knows instantly that he is caught, and is happy to be.

Media reviews

“Enough About Love is awfully cute. It is also absorbing and witty, and the more impressive for its formal constraints.” —Lorin Stein, Harper’s Magazine
 
 “What could be more romantic than falling in love in Paris? Unless you are already married, in which case it’s a little more complicated, as in Hervé Le Tellier’s Enough About Love …Le Tellier writes about middle-aged desire and its consequences with empathy and humor.” —Washington Post

“It is a complicated novel, artfully told and translated and eerily familiar, the way love stories so often are.” —Los Angeles Times

“At least as intriguing as how the French make their bread taste so good is how they manage all those extramarital love affairs they’re said to have.” —The New York Times

“It’s a French intellectual sex romp, an updated Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice if they had Lacan, Queneau, and Barthes on their analysts’ shelves…Fluidly translated by Adrianna Hunter, Enough About Love graphs love’s disruptive geometries in a playful manner.” —Bomb Magazine

“The prologue warns, ‘Any man — or woman — who wants to hear nothing — or no more — about love should put this book down.’ We’ll be surprised if it leaves your hands.” —Daily Candy

“This is a book about love, certainly, but it is also a book about love stories, and the way in which those stories play out according to their own logic. Watching Hervé Le Tellier conduct that process as he leads his characters in and out of love, one is reminded that literature, too, is an affair of the heart.” —World Literature Today
 
“A wise and witty writer, [Tellier] brings Parisian flair to this tale of romantic entanglement.” —BookPage

“A touching and thought-provoking study of attraction, responsibility, and love.” —Publishers Weekly

“Two love triangles (equal one love hexagon?) that reveal much—or at least enough—about love… Le Tellier examines the possibilities of love after 40, and he deals with this issue with patience, understanding and bemusement.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Both thoroughly complex and utterly simple...Middle-aged romance has rarely seemed so intriguing.” —Booklist

“Elegantly constructed, and with humor, wit, and touching honesty, Hervé Le Tellier tells a classic love story tweaked with a modern sensibility. I loved this intelligent and beguiling French novel, infused with that ‘Je ne sais quoi’ and a pleasure to read from the first page to the last.” —Katharine Davis, author of Capturing Paris

“A grab bag of luminous angles and viewpoints of the kaleidoscope of love.” —Marie Claire (France)

“If there was to be only one quintessential 'French novel' this fall, it should be this one.” —Elle (France)

“A novel that's full of surprises and strikes out against banality, cliches, and platitudes.” —Lire 

Citations

• Booklist, 02/01/2011, Page 27
• Kirkus Reviews, 12/15/2010, Page 1235
• Publishers Weekly, 12/20/2010, Page 0
• Shelf Awareness, 01/01/0001, Page 0