Helpful Score: 4
High praise all-around on this one. Yes, the opening part of the novel was a little hard to take and gruesome with the book's narrator describing in detail what happens when flesh is burned. His comparison to putting your hand and then face on a red-hot stove burner definitely makes one want to cringe. As the book progresses we learn that the victim is a drug addict and pornographer and thus seemingly very unsympathetic. Then the narrator meets Marianne Engel, a perhaps psychotic woman who appears at his hospital bedside and starts telling him stories of his previous life as her lover in 14th century Europe and her life as a translator and scribe at a monastery in Germany. Of course the narrator feels that Marianne has serious mental issues, but he is entranced by her stories of their past and other stories of love from different ages including Medieval Japan and Viking-era Iceland. He eventually finds that he was lucky to have had the accident which led to his meeting and loving Marianne. Overall, this is a wonderful and powerful story of love. The reader is ultimately left to decide how much of Marianne's story is real and how much is illusion. This allegorical novel raises many questions about love, morality, and the meaning of life -- one of the best I've read so far this year!
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