De vez em quando ponho-me à procura de um romance para ler para desenjoar das outras leituras, mas é difícil encontrar encontrar boa literatura. E hoje-em-dia a maioria dos críticos literários abusa dos adjectivos bombásticos e não sabe guiar-nos na procura de um livro nem abrir-nos o apetite. Pois esta aqui é a excepção à regra e aguçou-me o apetite pela pela invulgaridade da estratégia da escritora. Acho que vou comprá-lo para as férias.
-----------------------------------------------------------------22 MINUTES OF UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
By Daphne Merkin
“A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another,” Rebecca Solnit writes of the symbiotic relationship between writers and readers. How, exactly, this transplant works is as mysterious as love itself. But not when the book is Daphne Merkin’s new novel, whose narrator invites us into the operating room to observe the procedure: “So come with me and watch Judith Stone collide with her destiny in the shape of a man named Howard Rose.”
“22 Minutes of Unconditional Love” tracks an unusual episode in the otherwise unremarkable life of Judith Stone, a smart and anxiety-prone young editor in Manhattan. Inexperienced in affairs of the heart, Judith longs to find a good man and start a family. Instead, she chances upon Howard Rose, a charismatic and moody lawyer 13 years her senior, who becomes the object of her desire. Needless to say, Howard is not husband material. If anything, he’s a romantic antihero, skilled in the giving and withholding of sexual pleasure, and able to “turn his interest on and off like a light switch.” Despite initial reluctance, Judith quickly succumbs to Howard’s emotional and sexual manipulations; the details of her erotic compliance are breathtaking. This is not unusual territory for Merkin, a literary critic and novelist known for her revealing personal essays, which have chronicled her sexual fixation on spanking as well as her struggles with depression.
But, dear reader, how do you feel about interruptions? Would it bother you if in the thick of this steamy story of sexual obsession, the narrator butts in to solicit your opinion, discuss a plot decision or opine on some bit of literary trivia? If so, consider yourself forewarned. There are five chapters, each titled “Digression” and numbered one through five, devoted to doing just this, which may challenge your staying power.
“Peekaboo, I see you, out there in the world holding this book,” the narrator calls out cheekily, addressing us for the first time. She drops clues to her identity: “You don’t really believe, do you, that I’m anyone but a writer pretending to invent a character,” adding elsewhere that she “might very well be you.” Seductive one moment (“I stand here … offering you myself in all my guises”) and dismissive the next (“Perhaps you are not the reader I want after all”), our narrator is as skillful an orchestrator of emotion as Howard himself.
If you’re like me, you might not be a fan of metafiction. I follow Hansel and Gretel into the woods because I’m curious about their fate, not to know why the Brothers Grimm chose gingerbread as construction material. Simply put, I read for the transportive magic, not the trick. But here’s the shocker: Thanks to Merkin’s literary legerdemain and stylish prose, her ruminative digressions — about memory, subjectivity and the interplay between reality and fiction — contribute as much to the book’s artistic, emotional and intellectual payoff as her story does. There is delight in each intrusion, of the sort that I experience on a leisurely Sunday morning when I’m able to wake up only to fall back to sleep again, taking pleasure in crossing the boundary of consciousness.
“22 Minutes of Unconditional Love” is an arresting novel that explores the alchemy of contradictions that exist in all great works of literature. Observant and witty, Merkin makes each sentence pack a provocative wallop. So, come for the promise of a compulsively readable novel — “Obsession makes for good copy,” the narrator tells us — and stay for a fascinating lesson on the making of art.
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