Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love

I read all these love stories one after the other, on a day when I had mostly stopped believing in love. They skirted around the meaning of love, let you see the effects on a person who believed they were in love, held up the behaviours of the lovesick... the overwhelming motif being the plaintive cry to the beloved of "notice me"
Moving but uncomfortable, 4.5 stars

Kirja on mielenkiintoinen ja hämmentävä kasa novelleja, jotka leikittelevät lukijan käsityksillä rakkaudesta. Teoksen erinomaisuus on se, että sen lopullinen tarkoituksellisuus on sidoksissa lukijan omaan kokemukseen ja tulkintoihin teksteistä. Keskeisenä elementteinä novelleissa on rakkauden tuska ja sen ahdistavuus. Toisinaan tarinat ovat jopa ällyttäviä ja saattavat jopa suututtaa lukijansa. Dan Rhodesin kirjoitustyyli on erikoinen - hän on mestarillinen kuvailija ja verbaalinen maalailija.

This is a very weird book... short stories (which I don't normally go for) about "love"... but extremely weird love, in a way making fun of all the 'normal' love stories that 99% of the 'normal' books use. I strangely liked it :)

I read 'Anthropology', a collection of 101 very short stories each no longer than a paragraph. A collection of vignettes really. That was often brilliantly original & often hilarious. This book was written a few years earlier, and I found it very dissapointing. It is written in the affected & ultramodern sheenish style that is loved by lifestyle magazines (hence the positive reviews from ID & GQ etc). At least it shows an improvement in his work & hopefully if I read his next one it'll be an improvement on Anthology.