Reasons of Love, by Alexandru Papilian

I found the book „Reasons of Love” by mistake in one of my friend’s library. Even though the name of the author, Alexandru Papilian, didn’t sound familiar to me, after I skimmed it a little while, I decided out of curiosity to read it. It looked like the kind of book you find in a second hand book store and take it without even thinking about, because the price allows that.

The book contains four stories, and its main subject is love. However, the stories are not consider to be love stories, but philosophical essays in which the author tries to express feelings and emotions. He doesn’t want to offer a classical, love novel, with a pre-established action and evolutional characters. He wants to offer love a definition by presenting different situations.

The first story is entitled, suggestively, “The Son” and it starts with the author statement, that he wants to offer more than an everyday love story: “What I will recount now is a love story. Or maybe it isn’t.” The hero of the story is a young student who skips over this phase and gets married before graduation. In his second year of college he proposes to Stefania, and after two years he becomes a father. The action in this story is not as important as the emotions of the character. He passes through a series of powerful feelings, from love, to indifference, then frustration and hate. He feels trapped in his marriage, falls in love with another woman, but he’s abandoned after a few months. He resigns to the idea and gets back to his family life. However, he remains obsessed by the feeling that he has a lot of love inside him, but no one to offer it to. Maybe the most powerful story of all, “The son” still remains a literary cliché, the typical tale of the unfortunate lover. The characters are poorly build-up, the feelings and emotions are simple clichés, maybe a few action elements could have made the story better.

The second story, “Bitter Loves”, speaks about the experiences of a masculine hero, who is in love with two women. His incertitude and indecision, and also the desire of the two women to get out of ruck, causes a drama inside the hero’s heart. He gives up both and get’s married with Manuela, a woman with no dreams and expectations. To obtain more than a typical story, the author uses a special writing technique: he uses periods after almost all the words, or he uses very short phrases, mostly without verbs. This method makes the reading more difficult and even gets annoying. The action is boring; the thoughts of the character and the way he reacts creates a static, numb hero who doesn’t draw the reader’s attention.

The third story wants to be a drama, more precisely, the drama of a dying man who has to tell his wife that he is dying. Called “Notes from the road” the story has the appearance of a letter and it tells the last thoughts of a man who knows he’s dying and notices the changes in people, when they find out that his time is ending. If at the beginning he doesn’t accept the idea of death, then suffers for his wife and child, who will remain orphan, at the end he has a remarkable epiphany and puts up with the idea of dying. Besides the hero portrait the other characters are very poor described, most of them at all.  The story is not as tragically as the author wanted it to be and from the epiphany scene the whole story becomes pathetic.

The last story, “Narcis or the gap between mirrors” is a story very difficult to read and understand, because it tells nothing, it doesn’t have a story line; it is just a philosophical cogitation about human behavior. So we have the quiet one, the humanitarian, the fighter, the loser, the loner, the angry one, the scared one, the outlaw, the happy and the loved one. These ten images are the reflections of a single man who is trapped in a mirror labyrinth, and fights to gain his identity. He fights but he feels like he loses, he’s furious but he remains silent, he loves but his lonely, he wants to do good but his scared of the world, he’s an outlaw but he’s happy. The author wanted the tale to be a philosophical story with a huge impact over the reader, but the speech and all those philosophical theories bores the reader because it doesn’t tell him something concrete.  A series of philosophical matters are specified but there is no connection between them, so the reader understands nothing.

It’s hard for me to say that this book deserves to be read. But I can say it has to be read because it is the only way we can observe the mistakes of the authors who try to break the rules of literature. These mistakes, are usually the using of a difficult, professional speech, who for an average reader it’s hard to understand, or, on the other side, the presence of multiple clichés which bores the reader. This book has both of them. However, it has to be read to avoid these mistakes, and maybe to extract a few ideas for a possible book, article or story.