Solitaire of Love

By Cristina Peri Rossi

Book Overview

Solitaire of Love, an achingly lyrical novel by internationally acclaimed Latin American writer Cristina Peri Rossi, explores the sense of emotional exile that sexual passion can evoke. Only the fourth book of Peri Rossi's to be translated into English-the others are The Ship of Fools, A Forbidden Passion, and Dostoevsky's Last Night-Solitaire of Love showcases the mesmerizingly rhythmic language that has become the trademark of this award-winning and prolific author of novels, essay collections, poetry, and short stories.
Tracing the course of a relationship as it evolves into uncompromising self-destruction, the narrator of Solitaire of Love becomes addicted to his own passion and to the body of his beloved. Erotic, romantic love becomes bewitchment, producing a heightened state where time is measured in the rhythms of a chosen body and pride becomes subservient to obsession. The specifics of this other body trump any claim to ordinary existence for the narrator, as sex becomes a kind of idolatrous slavery and love becomes a mechanism for self-immolation. As in Peri Rossi's other works, an ambiguous sense of gender and sexuality arise from her uniquely experimental prose and mystically erotic logic. Language is subsumed into this process as a way to bear witness, to transfix and capture the love object. The limbo of obsession, as described by Peri Rossi, creates an infantilizing brand of loneliness, broken by flashes of joy, insight, fury, and fear.
This novel was originally published in Spanish in 1988.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822325403
• ISBN13: 9780822325406
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

i devoured it in shortly two hrs, maybe less.

this is stunning. words cannot express.

A tasty treat

Detailing an intense love affair down to its minute parts, "Solitaire Of Love" is a gorgeous portrait of how loving someone so intensely is as glorious as it is painful. The male narrator loves Aida, but knows that one day she may leave him as she did her husband and her other lovers. She becomes his oxygen, his reason, his erotic muse, which all ultimately proves his undoing. Because to love someone is a personal, private thing, like a game of solitaire, that only the one can enjoy fully. Reminiscent of Violette Leduc's "Thérèse And Isabelle", Slavenka Drakulic's "The Taste Of A Man", and Kate Millett's "Sita", Peri Rossi's magnificent story is a seductive look at the realities of sexual passion.

a passionate and analytical book about love

To simply call Solitaire of Love a novel would not be doing it justice, both intencely passionate, and bitingly analytical, Cristina Peri Rossi delivers her cynical philosophy of love to the reader desguised as a love letter. Solitaire of love (the fourth book of Peri Rossi's translated into English) follows the obsessive relationship of an unnamed narrator and Aida, the woman he loves to the point of addiction and destruction. The entire book reads like a dream, containing surreal and meaningful details of life, along with the foggy illusions of sleep. Peri Rossi, like a good psychoanalyst, breaks the book down to its most elemental meaning, decoding what is often encoded during simple day to day interactions. Perri Rossi deals with relationships, sex, and desire with an uncompromising certainty, revealing even the most mysterious of human emotions without ever loosing their beauty and mystery. Although Solitaire of Love is one of the most unabashedly lyrical of Peri Rossi's books, it never stoops to being sentimental or cliched. It is certain to delight the reader who is in love as much as the reader who is out of love.