She Loves Me

How does world-renowned Hungarian novelist Peter Esterhazy encounter love? In She Loves Me, you can count the ways. Although each of the 97 vignette-style chapters begins with "There's this woman," the playful waters of these narratives run deeper than the mere variations of love. Under the surface are the politics of obsessions, the body, power struggles, and the fragmented viewpoints of self that most individuals either try to piece together or try to pretend are intact and whole. The fragments praise ("I'm as important to her as new potatoes with parsley."), they promise ("She loves me. She just doesn't know it yet."), and they prod ("...she talked me into becoming what she called 'vegetarians'... because she was thinking how much better off we'd be without the pitiful wailing and whining of our bodies"). Sometimes the fragments look suspiciously familiar ("She ... uh ... loves me. My mother's memory lives on mainly as an adjunct of her goulash"), but each is a contemporary delight.