raluca comanelea's Reviews > Love Stories for Hectic People

Love Stories for Hectic People: 33 flash pieces which celebrate and demonize love in all its variants: purity, carnal knowledge, passionate lust, philosophical quest, unquenched thirst of the other. In them, a family man wonders what to do with his fainted mistress as his day is lined up already. Another desires the inappropriate type. Yet another attempts to reinvent the cinematic female persona into a random Letizia. In them, a woman feels the pangs of separation in her blood. Another writes a book about her lover’s death, while the audience grows thirsty for more. Yet another leaves residue of her body on his bedcovers, residue that would pass in the promises of his thoughts. In them, both man and woman forget and are forgotten at a party in Moscow. When body becomes a tool for pleasure, she is unaware of the face attached above, and he, he looks at her golden locks and sees a goddess. With the passage of years, she grows increasingly superb while he, he grows plum with a crushed, worried face. A last hike together, in mutual understanding of a life’s ending as they both knew it. In them, breakups are easy when both attempt to crawl into each other’s dreams and recreate trips to Corfu with misplaced monetary sums. In them, lovers live on different continents and time zones and contrasting seasons: she knows his wife’s hair color and he knows her daughters’ names. In them, lovers wonder whether their shared love can be contained in a bulky, cul-de-sac home with a peculiar history. These 33 flash stories take you on a pilgrimage to find love, a love that sometimes turns to lust, and that is all right. They show you brutal endings and disgusting pleasures, scraps of love at times, or the icy slopes in return for a misplaced love. But when love is love, and it is simple, both man and woman live it as such.