My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead (Paperback)
- Category: Short Stores / Essays
- Publisher: Harper (Jan 1, 2008)
Our Shelf Talker
I love this book because it's about the complexity of love: betrayal, lost love, lost opportunities, heartbreak, as well as the more joyful aspects that we celebrate on Valentine's Day. Looking back on forty years of marriage I know I'm lucky to see a preponderance of happiness marking those years, but if I drew them as a bar graph I'd have to include the ups and downs that we also experienced. I think that's true with most couples, and it's why I don't favor love stories about boys and girls (or men and women) who fall in love and live happily ever after. This book really delivers.- Roxanne
Description
"When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name . . . .
"It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer."
--Jeffrey Eugenides, from the introduction to My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead
"It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer."
--Jeffrey Eugenides, from the introduction to My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead