“The Whims of Love” by Markus Gasser: Nonfictional Romantic Romance about Literature

Abstract

The article examines the book “The Whims of Love: True Stories of Books and Passions” («Die Launen der Liebe: Wahre Geschichten von Büchern und Leidenschaften», 2019) by Austrian literary critic and writer Markus Gasser (born 1967) in the aspect of the dialogue between fiction and nonfiction. The structure consists of a kind of mini-preface (motto) and eleven parts, divided into fifteen chapters, and demonstrates the nominative nature of the compositional ring. It is emphasized that M. Gasser uses the stylistic principles of the “love story” genre, which enhance the author’s intention to recreate the plot of a nonfictional text in a fascinating way. The clichéd titles of the book’s parts indicate the stages and / or variants of the lovers’ relations, which ultimately ends with a traditional for romantic romances “happy ever after ending”. The spatiotemporal organization of the book shows a fairly broad geography and describes sixteen private stories from the 19th–20th centuries. Given the author’s concept of the whims of love, we found various interpretative constellations of love relationships, based primarily on the experience of heterosexual lovers. There are classifications of autobiographical prototype couples (Bowles, J. Gabrial and M. Lowry), scandalous (George Eliot and J. H. Lewes, E. Barrett and R. Browning), star couples (S. Plath and T. Hughes, Y. Ono and J. Lennon), epistolary (B. von Arnim and J. W. von Goethe) and couples of literary inspiration (E. Brontë and Lord Byron), classical / real love triangles (Galsworthy; I. Guadanini, V. Nabokov and V. Slonim; R. Antelme, D. Mascolo and M. Duras) and nominal love triangles (literary couple and their creator – J. Updike and G. G. Marquez). An example of homoeroticism (E. M. Forster) and the affective search for love (J. Frame) are highlighted.