The Book of Love
An outsize novel ... In her prose, matter becomes plastic, bodies melt, and the membrane separating reality from fantasy is beaten to airy thinness. This is a novel in which statues come to life and people become statues ... Surreal moments keep flying through this story as hypnotically as starlings at twilight, but such dazzlement proves difficult to maintain. Eventually, the novel’s most magical quality seemed to be that every time I picked it up, it had grown longer.
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Long, but never boring ... Reviewing The Book of Love feels like trying to describe a dream. It’s profoundly beautiful, provokes intense emotion, offers up what feel like rooted, incontrovertible truths — but as soon as one tries to repeat them, all that’s left are shapes and textures, the faint outlines of shifting terrain ... So much of Link’s work steps lightly, a tempering of the commonplace with vivid, delicate surprise ... Its composition, its copiousness, suggests that love, in the end, contains all — that frustration, rage, vulnerability, loss and grief are love’s constituent parts, bound by and into it.
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Delivers plenty of...trademark dream logic while also making full use of the longer form to simmer characters, relationships and setting to the point of profound tenderness ... An intriguing cast of characters who each nurse their own tangles of kinship and loss ... A refreshing celebration of the special alchemies that animate human connection of all kinds.
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