THE END OF LOVE
In this quartet of mesmerizing stories, Marcos Giralt Torrente explores the confounding, double-edged promise of love. Each finds a man carefully churning over his past, trying to fathom how the distance between people can become suddenly unbridgeable.
Two tourists visit a remote island off the coast of Africa and are undone by a disconcerting encounter with another couple. A young man, enchanted by his bohemian cousin and her husband, watches them fall into a state of resentful dependence over the course of decades. A chaste but all-consuming love affair between a troubled boy and a wealthy but equally troubled girl leaves a scar that never heals. The son of divorced parents tries in vain to reunite them before realizing why he is wrong to do so. In The End of Love, Giralt Torrente forges discomfiting and gripping dramas from the small but consequential misunderstandings that shape our lives.
Praise for The End of Love:
“A stellar collection of stories about the mysteries of love as it ebbs and flows, from a well-regarded Spanish novelist.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)
“The stories offer a language of how distance develops—‘both of us were more reluctant to recognize ourselves in the other’— and the usual ‘problems’ of love seem new and alive under the microscope of these deep, delicate studies.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“Torrente propels characters through time, jumping hours, weeks, and years (covering, at one point, decades in a single clause), building tension with Roberto Bolaño-like accumulation of plot, often waiting until the action has ended to divulge a key fact or coincidental non sequitur that unlocks the truth… This is Torrente’s first book to appear in English. With luck, the first of many.”
—Booklist