music, books, love and kindness

I have been thinking about love (and all its different forms) for longer than I should today. Most likely, it's the books in my life right now. Often, for me, they offer something real life rarely can. More than not, they are ridiculously unrealistic and therefore can only set you up for disappointment when you come back to earth.

Sometimes, though, they offer what you need at just the right moment even if the plot has nothing to do with you, the sentiments can.

Taxi To Paris has turned out to be one of the best love stories I've read in a while. It's probably also one of the most unusual ones and definitely, through most of it, the saddest.

In the early stages, the sadness is all about each woman's isolated feelings and the need to eradicate what she feels for someone she can't be with in any kind of way. The main character, in particular suffers:
 

If ever a thought of her entered my mind, I hunted it promptly to extinction.

 

The novel is unique because it takes a premise that is usually one big dangerous cliché ("Pretty Woman") and makes it grim and gritty, far more fragile and not only believable and far from romantic, but somehow necessary to the storyline.

And, as with any two people coming together as a possible couple, there's always conflict:

It seemed that there were never two free minutes in which we could just be together calmly and happily. Every time, something unpredictable happened.

Prostitution would seem to be the elephant in the room, but it's actually love and how foreign and inaccessible it is to a woman who has never really known it and the person who wants to share it with her.

 

“Then I can’t love you either?” I said it for her. “Do you think that my love for you depends on the availability of your body?”

 

 She looked at me mutely. Her eyes were desperate. She was incapable of expressing what she felt, but she would’ve loved to do it. She said more with her silence than I would ever have thought possible

What should I do with all my love if I couldn’t give it to her?

 

She came after me, first hesitantly, then with long, fast steps. She took me in her arms. I stood there, desiring nothing else. "Stay with me," she whispered, choking on her tears.

 

 There is so much here that surprises me with its easy to relate components, but none so much as when the narrator decries the "other fish in the sea" advice people always give those who have just lost in love:

 

I’d remain alone instead. That situation seemed the most desirable to me at the moment. If I couldn’t have her, the difference didn’t seem that great.

 

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much conflict and going back and forth that by the end the reader is almost dizzy...yet it's a pleasant, gentle kind of vertigo.

There's always a risk in romancing the impossible, but here it works, precisely because it isn't romance so much as a very long and very painful journey to love. I guess that sounds so corny, but it's what I get from Taxi To Paris.