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Loves That Bind: A Novel
From one of Spain's most distinguished--and daring--writers comes this intensely erotic and shamelessly literary adventure through the streets of London.
Emil, the mysterious narrator, has been abandoned by the woman he loves. Filled with doubt and nostalgia, bent on therapy or distraction or revenge, he wanders the city in search of her. Driven by the anguish of rejection and desire, he writes twenty-six letters to his fugitive lover, each an intricately detailed account of his affairs with twenty-six women who
preceded her. Each of these figures bears an uncanny resemblance to a famous literary heroine, from Proust's Albertine to Fitzgerald's Daisy to Nabokov's Lolita to Queneau's Zazie.
One by one, in alphabetical order, Emil's letters adopt the tone, style, and substance of the great novelists of the twentieth century, while, in recollection, his past love affairs grow increasingly extravagant and hallucinatory. As we follow his physical and creative journey, we try to unravel fact from fantasy, emotion from delusion, while searching for clues to the novel's amorous alphabet, the building blocks of modernist and postmodernist literature.
A seductive puzzle saturated with wordplay, Loves That Bind is a linguistic tour de force of remarkable agility and wit.
From the Hardcover edition.
Emil, the mysterious narrator, has been abandoned by the woman he loves. Filled with doubt and nostalgia, bent on therapy or distraction or revenge, he wanders the city in search of her. Driven by the anguish of rejection and desire, he writes twenty-six letters to his fugitive lover, each an intricately detailed account of his affairs with twenty-six women who
preceded her. Each of these figures bears an uncanny resemblance to a famous literary heroine, from Proust's Albertine to Fitzgerald's Daisy to Nabokov's Lolita to Queneau's Zazie.
One by one, in alphabetical order, Emil's letters adopt the tone, style, and substance of the great novelists of the twentieth century, while, in recollection, his past love affairs grow increasingly extravagant and hallucinatory. As we follow his physical and creative journey, we try to unravel fact from fantasy, emotion from delusion, while searching for clues to the novel's amorous alphabet, the building blocks of modernist and postmodernist literature.
A seductive puzzle saturated with wordplay, Loves That Bind is a linguistic tour de force of remarkable agility and wit.
From the Hardcover edition.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
About the author
Julián Ríos
31 books38 followersJulián Ríos (born Vigo, Galicia, 1941) is a Spanish writer, most frequently classified as a postmodernist, whom Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has called "the most inventive and creative" of Spanish-language writers. His first two books were written à deux with Octavio Paz.
His best known work, experimental and heavily influenced by the verbal inventiveness of James Joyce, was published in 1983 under the title Larva.
Julián Ríos currently lives and works in France, on the outskirts of Paris
His best known work, experimental and heavily influenced by the verbal inventiveness of James Joyce, was published in 1983 under the title Larva.
Julián Ríos currently lives and works in France, on the outskirts of Paris
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 7, 2026
Loves That Bind is a literary masquerade… A man – presumably a madman, whose beloved has left him – is searching for his lost love throughout London… And on the way he tells us about his twenty six love affairs with twenty six fictional female characters from different books… Strictly in alphabetical order…
He starts with Marcel Proust’s Albertine from The Fugitive… Among others there are Daisy from The Great Gatsby, Hermine of Stephenwolf, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita for sure, Molly Bloom of Ulysses, André Breton’s ghostly Nadja, Ursula Brangwen from Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence… The novel is a bookish puzzle one must solve… Many mistresses I couldn’t guess however…
The raconteur’s consciousness keeps deteriorating and the episodes become more and more paranoiac… The conundrum ends with Raymond Queneau’s cocky Zazie…
Women of our lives – they are so different.
The man in the moon. I look at him with curiosity (a tall lanky fellow with black hair and beard, round black glasses like John Lennon’s, a black coat, and a satchel strapped across my chest) as if my sad countenance (the Ugly Knight of Gloom, you laughingly called me) were not the one reflected in the mirror framed in bottles behind the bar. The J-shaped scratch beneath my left eye alters my face somewhat.
He starts with Marcel Proust’s Albertine from The Fugitive… Among others there are Daisy from The Great Gatsby, Hermine of Stephenwolf, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita for sure, Molly Bloom of Ulysses, André Breton’s ghostly Nadja, Ursula Brangwen from Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence… The novel is a bookish puzzle one must solve… Many mistresses I couldn’t guess however…
The raconteur’s consciousness keeps deteriorating and the episodes become more and more paranoiac… The conundrum ends with Raymond Queneau’s cocky Zazie…
She was very much a chauvinist, gastronomically speaking, our little Belgian glutton. With no moules frites to be had, we invited her, at your suggestion – and with my last money – to have fish-and-chips at the Church Street market. No use trying to explain that in this market American vices cost less but lacked a label. It was the label that interested la belle… She gobbled down chips, using both hands, but the poor thing’s brains were fried… She hadn’t slept at all last night on the boat, singing with the other songbirds.
Women of our lives – they are so different.
October 1, 2015
Of all forms of illusion, woman is the most important...You bet.
Loves That Bind is not the gentle embrace that ties one heart to another, rather it's the dark disturbing side of love sending lovers in a bind. I'm putting it simply of course (the title being a rude pun on lovemaking), because Ríos here has taken his narrator Emil on a literary odyssey through the hinterland of hearts showcased across a geographical spectrum each of which would reveal a different shade of black.
A book with an elitist slant taking it for granted that a reader picking up this book is well read. Loves That Bind presupposes a familiarity with twenty-six works of literature. Obsessed with his missing lover, the narrator Emil, writes 26 letters to her recalling the affairs that preceded her. These letters are homages to those twenty-six fictional heroines, from A to Z, often written in the style of those very books.
As an idea this might seem novel/unusual but is it really?
Did I vicariously experience the relations I had not had the courage to establish? Did I judge others for actions that I myself wished to engage in? (56)
Don't readers often live vicariously through books? —the fictional world seemingly more real than the so-called reality around them. Likewise, Emil embeds himself into these famous tales, sometimes as central, other times as peripheral characters.
B. S. Johnson had mocked this very tendency of some readers who like to "imagine" everything for themselves, by giving extremely vague generalised description of his protagonist Christie Malry & finally giving them a kick in the pants (keeping the religious interpretation aside), saying "In the image of yourself, Christie is, remember." (when going by Malry's increasingly demented antics, the reader would be horrified by such an identification!). That was a hoot.
Here though, these bookish fantasies provide mixed results.
Like Emil, puzzling over the whereabouts of his missing ladylove; the reader too would start puzzling over the tantalising hints thrown about these past lovers, itching to remove the veil from that mysterious face. Like Emil, the reader also goes on a quest.
Loves That Bind is as much a tribute to love as it's to literature & my experience was richer & more satisfying where I was familiar with a particular work being recreated as it seemed far more than a pastiche and/or straight parody (though some were that too, I guess it depends on how inspiring the source itself is), and one could marvel at Ríos' selection, pacing, & tone of the original material.
It has a flip side too: those readers who worry about their spoilers would be better off not knowing the source! I'm, therefore, putting the A-Z list within spoiler tags:
Despite having an interesting premise & a highly inventive language; I wonder why it often ends up feeling formulaic?!
The NYT review articulates this problem well but then what could've been the solution to that? How can a writer work within the confines of an idea/formula & still successfully overcome it?
Here, Emil's own narrative takes a backseat to the other 26 narratives being recounted, & in those chapters where the parody/pastiche/homage isn't that effective; the formulaic nature of the book comes strongly to the fore. Perhaps having another voice as a counterweight ( as Molly's in Ulysses) would've fleshed it out better?
My impression is that Ríos intentionally put the framing story in the background & that the other stories became a sort of commentary on it: by evoking those tragic tales; Emil was giving a tragic/mythic quality to his own love story. Come to think of the arrangement—a lover's disappearance brings on the narrative of the famous literary fugitive, Albertine, followed by a gallery of scheming, self-serving, adulterous, & other unsavoury female types in increasing doses of hysteria & violence, which, given the hero's mental state, seems appropriate. What is it with tragic love stories?! Why do they exercise such a strong hold on our imagination?! Maybe in an unfulfilled love there remains a possibility of perfection—our true paradises remain the ones we have lost.
What is Emil trying to tell us? More importantly, what is he trying to hide?
Ríos has been called the Spanish Joyce, and his books such as Larva: A Midsummer Night's Babel, Poundemonium have unnerved even the toughest of readers here. Loves That Bind is a relatively very easy entry into his work.
Read it in small doses & like old love letters, getting musty with times, the pressed flowers leaving their stains on them, these chapters will evoke a smile here, a tear there, a suppressed giggle & an overall happy feeling that you were right to have given it a try.
Loves That Bind is not the gentle embrace that ties one heart to another, rather it's the dark disturbing side of love sending lovers in a bind. I'm putting it simply of course (the title being a rude pun on lovemaking), because Ríos here has taken his narrator Emil on a literary odyssey through the hinterland of hearts showcased across a geographical spectrum each of which would reveal a different shade of black.
A book with an elitist slant taking it for granted that a reader picking up this book is well read. Loves That Bind presupposes a familiarity with twenty-six works of literature. Obsessed with his missing lover, the narrator Emil, writes 26 letters to her recalling the affairs that preceded her. These letters are homages to those twenty-six fictional heroines, from A to Z, often written in the style of those very books.
As an idea this might seem novel/unusual but is it really?
Did I vicariously experience the relations I had not had the courage to establish? Did I judge others for actions that I myself wished to engage in? (56)
Don't readers often live vicariously through books? —the fictional world seemingly more real than the so-called reality around them. Likewise, Emil embeds himself into these famous tales, sometimes as central, other times as peripheral characters.
B. S. Johnson had mocked this very tendency of some readers who like to "imagine" everything for themselves, by giving extremely vague generalised description of his protagonist Christie Malry & finally giving them a kick in the pants (keeping the religious interpretation aside), saying "In the image of yourself, Christie is, remember." (when going by Malry's increasingly demented antics, the reader would be horrified by such an identification!). That was a hoot.
Here though, these bookish fantasies provide mixed results.
Like Emil, puzzling over the whereabouts of his missing ladylove; the reader too would start puzzling over the tantalising hints thrown about these past lovers, itching to remove the veil from that mysterious face. Like Emil, the reader also goes on a quest.
Loves That Bind is as much a tribute to love as it's to literature & my experience was richer & more satisfying where I was familiar with a particular work being recreated as it seemed far more than a pastiche and/or straight parody (though some were that too, I guess it depends on how inspiring the source itself is), and one could marvel at Ríos' selection, pacing, & tone of the original material.
It has a flip side too: those readers who worry about their spoilers would be better off not knowing the source! I'm, therefore, putting the A-Z list within spoiler tags:
Despite having an interesting premise & a highly inventive language; I wonder why it often ends up feeling formulaic?!
The NYT review articulates this problem well but then what could've been the solution to that? How can a writer work within the confines of an idea/formula & still successfully overcome it?
Here, Emil's own narrative takes a backseat to the other 26 narratives being recounted, & in those chapters where the parody/pastiche/homage isn't that effective; the formulaic nature of the book comes strongly to the fore. Perhaps having another voice as a counterweight ( as Molly's in Ulysses) would've fleshed it out better?
My impression is that Ríos intentionally put the framing story in the background & that the other stories became a sort of commentary on it: by evoking those tragic tales; Emil was giving a tragic/mythic quality to his own love story. Come to think of the arrangement—a lover's disappearance brings on the narrative of the famous literary fugitive, Albertine, followed by a gallery of scheming, self-serving, adulterous, & other unsavoury female types in increasing doses of hysteria & violence, which, given the hero's mental state, seems appropriate. What is it with tragic love stories?! Why do they exercise such a strong hold on our imagination?! Maybe in an unfulfilled love there remains a possibility of perfection—our true paradises remain the ones we have lost.
What is Emil trying to tell us? More importantly, what is he trying to hide?
Ríos has been called the Spanish Joyce, and his books such as Larva: A Midsummer Night's Babel, Poundemonium have unnerved even the toughest of readers here. Loves That Bind is a relatively very easy entry into his work.
Read it in small doses & like old love letters, getting musty with times, the pressed flowers leaving their stains on them, these chapters will evoke a smile here, a tear there, a suppressed giggle & an overall happy feeling that you were right to have given it a try.
May 14, 2015
Her fervent lover from Playboylandia baptized Hugh in the holy land of Hibernia though never did he let her hibernate but had to fornicate when it was almost time for the bullfight.
This novel dazzles in places, see chapters L, M and Q, while simmering for most of the rest. Simple synopsis: a jilted lover wanders nocturnal London, and to steady his esteem after being dumped, recalls 26 past lovers -- all of which correspond to literary characters. An added erotic sense is simply bonus content, for those thus inclined.
No one need neither replicate nor resolve Ríos' riddles. Appreciation is afforded to all the early 20C heavyweights: Musil, Proust, Joyce, Nabokov and Faulkner. The effort does otherwise lack a certain rigor, the parodies are self-evident: anything further is the requirement of the reverent reader. My bullshit threashold is taking a weathering as of late.
This novel dazzles in places, see chapters L, M and Q, while simmering for most of the rest. Simple synopsis: a jilted lover wanders nocturnal London, and to steady his esteem after being dumped, recalls 26 past lovers -- all of which correspond to literary characters. An added erotic sense is simply bonus content, for those thus inclined.
No one need neither replicate nor resolve Ríos' riddles. Appreciation is afforded to all the early 20C heavyweights: Musil, Proust, Joyce, Nabokov and Faulkner. The effort does otherwise lack a certain rigor, the parodies are self-evident: anything further is the requirement of the reverent reader. My bullshit threashold is taking a weathering as of late.
November 23, 2016
Ríos’s multilingual platespinning lexical wizardry is at its peak in the masterpiece Larva: A Midsummer Night’s Babel. Despite similar instances of highwire wordage (rendered by Edith Grossman), this sequence of alphabetical pastiches of authors from Proust to Schmidt to Isherwood to Queneau comes across as too indulgent, often repetitive (the pastiche isn’t too particular), and eventually boring (even with a skeleton key, which can be found in My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays), forcing this reader to bail at V on p.174. The pastiches are a series of floridly fictionalised encounters with unnamed heroines from famous and obscure novels, making this a challenge even for the world’s toughest bibliophiles.
March 11, 2012
I really wanted to be blown away by this book, and while I believe it was a valiant effort, it would be difficult for anyone to live up to this premise. I enjoyed isolated chapters a good deal (even some of the ones where I couldn't identify the literary woman in question), but the overall effect was less interesting than I hoped for.
January 6, 2008
I admired it more than I enjoyed it, but it's a fun puzzle with impressive style.
partial-credit
July 23, 2016Leaving off in the midst of F. Which would be a German novel I've not identified. Ríos' trick here isn't tripping my triggers. I've never been one for crosswords. Another time perhaps.
February 9, 2018
A subpar serial encomium wrenched from a terrific idea, for which Rios deserves all praise for finishing. Since I don't always read about the books I'm going to read anyway, it took me until L to pick up on the conceit and was confirmed by M. Sometimes the prose plods, sometimes skips, but in fidelity to each ephemeral-cum-eternal queen of hearts it mimics their (usually male) makers. I do wish there was a roll call--I recognized too few entries from my own polymorphous bibliophilia--but the ambiguity of the mere letter left scrolling in the reader's/writer's mind has its own piquancy. So not the most memorable rendezvous in the annals of book lust, but it's still better to have read and lost than never to have read at all.
May 25, 2026
Probably more of a 3/5, but I enjoyed the last few (Yvonne from Under the Volcano, Zazie in the metro).
October 7, 2008
Me pareció muy pretencioso. Pero aparentemente es como de los mejores del autor... quién sabe. Lo terminé de leer por puro orgullo.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews