The Stupidity of Love

The attempt to understand love can only end badly. Wilhelm Genazino's new novel tells the story of a man who can live with two women, but not one. And tries, nevertheless, to leave one of them.

Would anyone ask me to love just one of my parents? So why can't I love two women, Judith and Sandra? This is what the desperate narrator asks himself although, as a lecturer specializing in end-of-the-world scenarios, he should be able to answer his own question. For a long time he has lived in a ménage à trois whose two female protagonists were happily unaware of each other's existence. But now mid-life crisis looms, varicose veins are torturing him and it is getting harder and harder to keep Sandra and Judith apart and his life in some semblance of order. And while he outlines the familiar spectre of modern society's destruction and ruin for rapt audiences in the Swiss mountains, his thoughts revolve constantly around the same momentous decision: He must leave either Judith or Sandra. But which one? The decision intended to lighten his load only makes it heavier. With irony and black humour, Wilhelm Genazino tells of the utter confusion that ensues when a man tries to bring order to what is, by its very nature, the most confusing thing of all: love.

"Most likely the best book of springtime 2005." (Deutschlandfunk)