Synopses & Reviews
"But how many times had we made love for the last time? I don't know, many. Many."
from Making Love
An immediate bestseller in France, Making Love is an original and daring retelling of a classic theme: the end of an affair. As much an exploration of setting and place as it is of the affair that comes apart in them, Making Love follows a couple's final days together in Japan. Toussaint writes with an economy and restraint that evoke the distinct imagery of film while allowing a startling proximity to the feelings of his characters. The result is vertiginous, standing traditional images on their head and transposing the conflict and confusion of lost intimacy onto the labyrinthine ultramodernism of Tokyo and Kyoto. Brilliantly written and strikingly original, this is a stunning work of new fiction from one of Europe's most promising authors.
Review
"[M]oody, often claustrophobic, and viscerally intense....Edgy prose that elegantly distills a disturbing take on love." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Toussaint has gathered all of his gifts. A work of artistry that should assure his fame." Le Monde
Review
"Between freezing and fever, rupture and fusion, beauty and destruction, [Making Love] seduces, haunts, and ensnares. And one is surprised and disturbed to emerge, as if from a night of anxious sleep, a survivor, like the narrator, of an intimate upheaval, an 'infinitesimal disaster.'" Télérama
Review
"Toussaint successfully evokes [Tokyo] as a noirish, alienating city, lonely and tomblike....Toussaint is less successful at sustaining enough...dramatic tension to propel the reader to the story's inevitable conclusion." Library Journal
Synopsis
An immediate bestseller in France, Making Love is an original and daring retelling of a classic theme: the end of an affair. As much an exploration of setting and place as it is of the affair that comes apart in them, Making Love follows a couple's final days together in Japan. Toussaint writes with an economy and restraint that evoke the distinct imagery of film while allowing a startling proximity to the feelings of his characters. The result is vertiginous, standing traditional images on their head and transposing the conflict and confusion of lost intimacy onto the labyrinthine ultramodernism of Tokyo and Kyoto. Brilliantly written and strikingly original, this is a stunning work of new fiction from one of Europe's most promising authors.
About the Author
Jean-Philippe Toussaint was born in 1957 in Brussels. He has written five previous novels, including
Monsieur and
The Bathroom.
Linda Coverdale's most recent translation for the New Press is The Absolute Perfection of Crime. She won the French American Foundation's Translation Prize in 1997. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.