Love, still

Balzac said that love is not just a feeling, it's also an art. Stendhal said that the person who hasn't experienced a great passion is unaware of the more beautiful half of life. Oscar Wilde said we should always be in love. That's why we should never get married.

We will never tire of writing or reading about love. Everyone means their own thing. All the writers in the world have wanted to talk about it, whether to let off steam or to try, for the umpteenth time, to invent a new love story, one that no one had written before.

I have read, one after another, three books that talk about love and only love. They were written by two women and one man at different times, in different languages, with perhaps opposing intentions, and yet they have much in common because, as Emily Dickinson would say, the only thing we know about love is that love is all there is.

The accident, by Madrid-based author Blanca Lacasa, describes the first steps—a little tentative—of falling in love. A man and a woman meet and like each other. He's gay. The account of this "accident" is brief and intentionally sterile, as if it were an entomologist's report on the behavior of insects. Brief, original, and remarkably modern, it was published by Libros del Asteroide.

The novel is also brief. Journey to the past, by Stefan Zweig, which has been published in Vienna in the collection Small Pleasures with translation by Clara Formosa. It also tells a love story interrupted by the outbreak of the Great War. Upon reuniting after nine years, Zweig asks us whether a great love could have withstood the passage of time, distance, and betrayal. Far from the coldness of Blanca Lacasa's narrator, Zweig is swept away by the most passionate words: "My God, how long, how immensity those nine years, four thousand days, four thousand nights until today, until this night!"

The third reading about love has been the singular novel Lisa Cohen, by Ada Klein Fortuny, published by La Otra Editorial. The protagonist writes a long letter to her lover, whom she is about to meet, in which she talks about the men she has loved and who have loved her before him. Like an instruction manual, says Lisa Cohen.

This woman has experienced various loves, all of them intense, and has understood that love makes you vulnerable and wears you down, demands concessions and puts you to the test. "Love is as difficult as making a French omelet," she says, "but it's still worth it."

An assertion that, I dare say, is probably shared by the protagonists ofThe accident, from Lacasa, and from Journey to the past, by Zweig.

It's been a good experience reading these three love stories so close together. And it's a pleasure to know there will be so many more to read, so many that have yet to be written or lived.

I begin Love letters, by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, translated by Mireia Vidal-Conte and published by Ediciones de la Ela Geminada. In the introductory note, the editors avoid trying to label the relationship between these two women. "Lovers are two people who love," they say. I couldn't agree more. Like the protagonists ofThe accident and those of Journey to the past, like Lisa Cohen and her past and present loves. Like Virginia and Vita.