Paris, In a Way

A writer has written a novel about the love of his life during his youth. After a reading, a woman he doesn’t recognise approaches him. But nevertheless – it is her. What happens to a true love thirty years after it has ended?

Of course she’s no longer a young girl like she was back then. But the narrator is also no longer the passionate, rather naïve young man who used to be head over heels in love with her. Now he’s a writer and she has become a character in one of his novels. She’s also clearly an interesting, attractive, but also married woman. The situation takes a strange
turn: they sit and drink wine, talk about French love novels, ask each other what they expect from love now that they are older – and all the while, Jutta’s husband sits in the room next door. Where is this leading?

Navid Kermani has written a highly unique love story: profound, surprising and witty.His story describes people who think they know themselves inside out, only suddenly to find out that they don’t know themselves at all. Is passion an elixir or a poison?