Amores que Atam

Literary love letters or love letters to literature? Each of the 26 missives in Julián Ríos's Loves That Bind stands for one love affair, one letter of the alphabet, one famous literary heroine. As the narrator Emil moons around London mourning the disappearance of his latest lady friend, he embarks on a most unusual way of getting her back: an alphabetical catalogue of his past passions, all of whom look oddly familiar. Witness this homage to a fellow linguistic magician: "Lo! Lovely! No, how terrible: she has returned. The living image. In her majorette or is it minorette pink miniskirt, closing and opening-closing-opening her knees." Or this irreverent reworking of one of the most famous passages in 20th-century literature: "...she roundly refused to rehearse the original scene of the chamber pot when she spoke in streams, the streams of gold of Erin, that coursing current, and had to say in her Irish accent L'odore, L'eau d'or, je suis ravie, content in the shower of gold, the waters of Lahore pouring now, those of the Orinoco rushing now, go to hell! And she said no I won't No." Translator Edith Grossman reproduces the quicksilver turnings of R&iacoute;os's prose with wondrous skill--no small task, given his predilection for wordplay and puns. There's a fine line between the pleasures of seduction and the pleasures of language, and Ríos straddles it with infectious delight. Part satire, part inspired postmodern pastiche, Loves That Bind woos the reader with both sensuality and wit. --Mary Park