Hugh's Reviews > Written On The Body

An interesting, sometimes funny, moving meditation on love and loss. The narrator, a translator of Russian fiction, is never named and his/her gender is deliberately ambiguous - he/she describes relationships with a number of lovers, mostly female but some male. The first half is fairly light in tone, as he/she describes the various affairs leading up to and including the dominant one which forms the main theme of the story, with a married woman called Louise, whose husband Elgin is a cancer specialist. Louise eventually decides to leave her husband.

The tone shifts abrubtly about halfway through, as Elgin tells the narrator that Louise is suffering from a form of leukemia that gives her an expected 100 months to live, and maybe less if she does not agree to the treatment he prescribes, so the narrator breaks off their relationship to allow the treatment, moving away to a cottage in rural Yorkshire. The second half begins rather oddly, as the narrator writes tributes to her which largely consist of a litany of possible symptoms. The narrator starts to suspect that Elgin is not telling all he knows, and eventually discovers that he has been deceiving them, setting off on a fruitless search for Louise. So if the first part is mostly about love, lust, obsession and betrayal, the second is more dominated by loss and morbidity, though never without the occasional touch of humour. The whole has a quiet power that gradually accumulates, particularly towards the end.

Thanks to the Reading the 20th Century group for choosing this one as a group read.