Composed with the simplicity of cleverness, Novel Love may be Camille Laurens’s most disillusioned book. Tragedy has lost
its humour in this nostalgic waltz with the present. The long and wide sentences mould the outlines of a paradise that is really lost, and that will only be found again with the help of the love for language. An extract from this work of art does inform on what real love is, real love for words, eternal love. Camille Laurens wonders: “Where does love come from within ourselves? How does this unique and particular form build itself, while it is so different for each of us that we often don’t understand it in other people: love? Past creates it little by little, distorted stories weaved together, invented fables, personal myths, family affairs: we are heir to love as we are to furniture. And the books, what they have taught us about
passion, suffering and pleasure- pages building feelings, sensations, a world, eternal novel of the heart hung between illusion and truth, body and soul. Love is words.” She goes on: “Through hope and despair, the only possible definition: love is the other.” Born in 1957 in Dijon (France), she lived in Normandy and Morocco before she reached the South of France. She was awarded the Femina Prize for her book In Those Arms in 2000, which was also selected for the Goncourt des Lycéens: a momentous distinction for the French teacher she is. Camille Laurens loves words: she handles them with a contagious passion. She grants them with a value that makes her prefer short writings. Her novels are shaped with brief and incisive chapters, and express what is
essential in few sentences. Her prose is rich and sensual, in which there is no room for the unnecessary. The writer also loves men. She sings the desire they inspire her with, but also the blemishes that make them humane. In Novel Love and In Those Arms, Camille Laurens leads an investigation on the art and difficulty of enjoying difference. Her explorations, which starting point is the essential, intuitive experience of being in love, draw a map of tenderness in the XXIst century, in a blunt and poetic style.