Love Doesn't Work: Seven Dualist Tales

by Henning Koch

Enduring her jet-set life in Sardinia, a woman has learnt to sublimate her erotic longings caused by her husband's impotence, until a visitor offers a more immediate solution. A claustrophobic banker fears the destruction of his relationship when he discovers a yawning hole beneath the streets of Stockholm. The arrival of a gorgeous Russian piano prodigy inspires a screenwriter to look beyond his treadmill London existence. And while fixing a leaking toilet in the wilds of Sweden, Ingmar Bergman explains the predicament of lovers in a hostile world. "Love Doesn't Work" offers classic storytelling with profound, startling insights into human desire and its shortfalls. Inspired by the ancient Cathars, these seven tales present a vision of life as an inevitable struggle against ignorance, darkness, and sexual confusion. Devilish and playful in tone, they leave the reader with a sense of outraged satisfaction and delight.

62 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Henning Koch is a translator from Swedish, and a fiction writer. His first book was a short story collection, "Love Doesn't Work", 2011, and he followed this up with a novel "The Maggot People", 2014, both published by Dzanc Books.

Koch's translations include works by Hannes Råstam, Artur Lundkvist, Fredrik Backman, Birgitta Stenberg, Martin Shibbye, Tom Malmquist, and Anders Rydell.

One of his Fredrik Backman translations was a 2015 nomination for the Goodreads Choice Awards Best Fiction.

Reviews

[Marcus Speh · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are story tellers and then there are story tellers. And if you're like me then you'll find it harder and harder every time you go to a book store to sift through all the junk (more and more seems to be written and published and so it's not revolutionary to say that there's more and more junk in the book shops) and find the ONE book that you might like to have next to your bed perhaps or on your favorite little reading table across from the soft leather chair. The chair that smells like you and that has witnessed you reading some of the very best writing. The writing that was so good that it became a part of you. “Love doesn’t work” is by one of those storytellers, who produce real stories, stories you will remember & stories you want to remember. The opening story, "In Memoriam, Ingmar Bergman" already has some of the absurd comical originality that marks every story in this book and gives it character. I liked this story a lot, but my favorite I think is the last one, "Little Rabbit", which features Belsize Park, Tim Burton and Helena Bonham-Carter among many other characters and ends “like a long summer’s day”. If you follow Henning Koch down his personal rabbit-hole, you'll find out more, but not all, because he manages to conceal just enough. In fact, this isn't only "not junk", it is simply some of the best, clearest, most honest writing I've come across in a long time. And it's honest in the Heming-way, as it were, giving the necessary detail and then some to get your own dream going. If it proves anything then it proves that Love Does Work at least when short stories are the love object.

[Tomoceuszkakatiti · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning was pretentious but okay. The eponymous story is cringeworthy and gives you physical pain while reading. That moment when you read something so shallow that you start to think it may have some hidden depth that you can't possess (it doesn't). Possibly my expectations were too high.

[Chris Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

A recklessly uninteresting writer, this short storyist lacks equal parts deft hand and driving sledge hammer. Talented writers are to be expounded on, not here, not to chore onto the next page, this book is bereft of intellectual and cultural value.

Chris Roberts

[CBSD Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

Check out a free preview of a the short story “In Memoriam, Ingmar Bergman” from Love Doesn't Work in our Bookslinger app!