Love Stories We Can’t Stop Thinking About
There’s more to love than red roses on Valentine’s Day – a whole lot more. When the Tonic team recently started discussing the literary love stories that had moved us most, we discovered they were a mixed bag indeed. There were gay love stories and straight love stories and sad love stories. There were stories about love between family members, and even love for particular places. Turns out there are as many different kinds of love in books as there are in the world. So if you’re in the mood to celebrate the many splendours of love, take one of these books down off the shelf.
1. A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
Love between friends in an anxious world is how I would describe Willem and Jude’s relationship in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. The novel is about four college friends – JB, Malcolm, Willem and Jude – who move to New York to pursue their grand ambitions. The love story begins with Willem’s seemingly unconditional love for Jude, a lawyer and mathematician who is tormented by psychological trauma as a result of abuse he suffered as an orphaned child and teenager. As Jude’s closest friend, Willem, an actor, continually shows up for him when others have given up: first as a friend, then as a lover and later, when they live together, as companions. When Willem muses on their relationship, he realises, “They were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognised by history or immortalised in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.” Or more simply, as he tells Jude: “I’m Willem Ragnarsson. And I will never let you go.” Marina
2. 1984
George Orwell
When actor Kristen Stewart – starring in a film called Equals, an adaptation of 1984 – described 1984 as “a love story of epic, epic, epic proportion”, literary types turned red in the face decrying her statement. “No”, wrote one Orwell buff, “the defining emotions of 1984 are fear, sadomasochism and despair. Love cannot survive the unchecked power of the state.” Yet this is a love story of sorts, from the moment Julia hands Winston a note reading “I love you”. Their bond is a means of rebellion against The Party; through their relationship, they challenge the repression of civil liberties in Airstrip One (formerly known as England). The closest the pair gets to tenderness is when they tell each other they will never give each other up to the state (their type of relationship is illegal) but in the end, they do just that. Like most relationships, Julia and Winston’s has limitations – it is a union predicated on sexual gratification rather than the pursuit of happiness – nonetheless its ending is shattering. The authorities discover their clandestine love and bring the full horrors of re-education to bear. Is there a more heartbreaking scene than the one in which Winston, being tormented by rats in Room 101, cries out, “Do it to Julia, do it to Julia – not me”? Patricia
3. The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
There are so many reasons to re-read The Catcher in the Rye. The love between brothers Holden and Allie isn’t an obvious one, and yet it’s so heartfelt. Despite Allie having been dead for about three years, he remains a mystic presence in the novel and is, for me, the glue to the storyline, adhering with true love and devotion. Holden thinks of him often and speaks to him when things are darkest in his life. Allie represents hope and the gifted innocence of childhood, which for Holden is tenuous and short-lived. Megan
4. Crazy Rich Asians
Kevin Kwan
This novel was sold as the kind of fun, rompy page-turner that you pick up in an airport and get halfway through by the time you reach your first international stop. (Ah, those were the days.) Even the title suggests that it’s more about the moneyed Asian jet-set whose houses are paved with riches than a boy-meets-girl tale. And anyway, by the time the book opens, the boy has already met the girl: in this case, it’s Nick, who might as well be the prince of Singapore, so eligible and handsome is he, and Rachel, his smart, beautiful but definitely-from-the-wrong-part-of-the-world (she’s American-Chinese, for starters) girlfriend. Most fictional romances hit an impasse at some point but here, it’s not their love that wavers but rather the question of suitability: can these two who are so culturally and financially mismatched stick through the disapproval of community and family? Yes, they can. Kwan’s writing moves along at a rapid pace, but even cynics have to pause at descriptions such as Nick’s early one of his beloved: “Everything about her – from the dewy just back-from-a-morning-run-on-the-beach complexion to the obsidian-black hair that stopped just short of her collarbone – conveyed a natural, uncomplicated beauty so different from the red-carpet-ready girls he had grown up around.” The movie version of these two will make you swoon further: we’re talking Henry Golding (sigh) and everyone’s girl crush, Constance Wu. Rachelle
5. My Family and Other Animals
Gerald Durrell
It takes a heart of stone to resist the charms of this memoir of Gerald Durrell’s childhood in Corfu, where love spills out of every page. There is love for Corfu, the sun-drenched island his family relocates to, and love for the succession of brightly-painted villas where they live. There is love for his family: Durrell’s long-suffering mother, his diet-obsessed sister Margot, his gun-happy brother Leslie and, most memorably, his oldest brother Larry, who “was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people’s minds, and then curling up with catlike unctuousness and refusing to take any blame for the consequences.” And of course there’s his love for the natural wonders around him, an abiding passion that would lead to his career as a celebrated naturalist. Ute
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