📔 The Only Story - 연애의 기억

 

 

📕  The  Only Story

by Julian Barnes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's his second novel I've read, I like it better than the first, and I'm looking forward to the third. This novel starts with the sentence. 

 

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more, or love the less, and suffer the less? 

 

Paul meets Susan at a tennis club for the first time. She is different from others. He's against social convention and becomes attracted to her uniqueness and they naturally become lovers. She is a forty-eight-year-old married housewife with two children while he's a nineteen-year-old undergraduate. Their relationship lasts for decades after that. 

 

Of course, it's a story of love, a man's only story that throws one recurring question about the love he believed to be absolute when he met her and fell in love. Back then he was too young to know first love has lifelong consequences.  Love is not so simple when you get to know that the demands placed on your shoulders become much greater than you could possibly have foreseen. Even if you knew, are you sure you'll be able to love less or not at all? As you grow older, what used to be crystal-clear might lose its clarity just like you get stuck on a question with no answer to it. Or even if you knew the answer, it's still out of the question to know which answer is better for you. The author seems to give us that question. Which option would you take, more love with more pain, less love with less pain? Is the option selective or inevitable? 

 

One of the reasons I like Julian Barnes is that his provocative narratives go on giving me some thoughts that I believe I need to but have been put off. And he asks where I am. That's why I read novels and won't stop it as long as there are so many good ones waiting for me to read.  I'm so glad to have found he's one of them.