The Secret Lives of People in Love [Paperback]

Simon Van Booy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2007

“Simon Van Booy’s stories have the power and resonance of poems. They stay with you like a significant memory.”—Roger Rosenblatt

“Van Booy is a remarkable young writer. Taste, touch, smell, sight and sound, in spite of their evanescence, are frozen for a moment in these stories and celebrated, along with their subtle interconnection, in all the aspects of love.”—Fred Volkmer

The Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion. Love, loss, frailty, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy’s themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.

Born in London, Simon Van Booy grew up in Wales. A keen rugby player, he was recruited to play football for Campbellsville University in Kentucky. He eventually returned to England, where he graduated from Dartington College of Arts. Now a New Yorker, he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and in the Bard College Clemente Course. As a freelance journalist, he writes for several New York newspapers. He has won a first-place award for in-depth reporting from the New York Press Association.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A breadth of experience and setting distinguishes this somber first collection of 18 very short stories by New York-based Van Booy. "Little Birds" is narrated by a teenage boy of uncertain parentage who sketches his life with his devoted foster father, Michel, in working-class Paris: "It is the afternoon of my birthday, but still the morning of my life. I am walking on the Pont des Arts." In "Some Bloom in Darkness," an aging railroad station clerk's witness of a violent scene between a man and woman translates in his mind into an infatuation with a store mannequin. Other tales are set in Rome ("I live in Rome where people sit by fountains and kiss"), small villages in Cornwall or Wales, and in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Van Booy's characters are shipwrecked by fate and memory but tarry on, like the narrator of "Distant Ships," a lifelong Royal Mail loader who stopped speaking after the death of his son 20 years earlier, or the homeless man chased by ghosts in "The Shepherd on the Rock," who aims to "live out the last of my life" at John F. Kennedy International Airport. These tales have at once the solemnity of myth and the offhandedness of happenstance. (May)
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From Booklist

In the 18 very short stories included in Van Booy's first collection, the resilient characters often emerge from bleak circumstances with an unexpected and completely engaging optimism. In "Little Birds," the Parisian son of a dead prostitute has found unconditional love from his adoptive father, Michel, who spares the teenager the gruesome details surrounding his mother's violent death, telling him she was an "elegant Asian princess" and encouraging him in his plans to attend the Sorbonne. In "As Much Below as Up Above," a former Russian navy man spends the afternoon at a Brooklyn beach trying to work up the courage to enter the water. He's held back by the memory of a submarine accident that claimed the lives of his seven comrades. He wants to surf the waves so that the sea can carry his "unceasing love to their still bodies." Although some of Van Booy's stories are too slight, in the strongest ones he shows an uncanny ability to create intense moods and emotions within the space of a few poetic paragraphs. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Turtle Point Press; First edition. edition (May 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933527056
• ISBN-13: 978-1933527055
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #349,346 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. After playing football in Kentucky for two years, he lived in Paris and Athens. In 2002 he was awarded an M.F.A. and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Award. His journalism has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and the New York Post. Van Booy now lives in New York City where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and Long Island University. He is also involved in the Bard College Access Program for at-risk young adults.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Unique Voice, July 7, 2008

By 

Angela Medwid (Toronto, Montreal, Costa Rica) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Secret Lives of People in Love (Paperback)

Familiar with Van Booy's lyrical prose, I cannot help but experience the same kind of luxurious language while reading this collection. In the story, The Still But Falling World, set in a small village south of Rome, the lives of the inhabitants achieve a balance between the world of lies and a world of acceptance. Nuggets of truth are found too: "My entire family and her husband and children are living the most beautiful lie." The ability to do this, Van Booy writes, stems from love. "In Morano, if you're loved, everything else falls away." There is a wisdom and vulnerability to such writing. I am reminded of Fernando Pessoa's recognition that we make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth alone could never accomplish. (Paraphrased from The Book of Disquiet, Penguin Classics.)

Reading Van Booy is like loving a melting snowflake in your palm. The transitory nature of life lies beneath the surface of each piece. Its stories are very much like fables you want to carry around with you. In Everything is a Beautiful Trick the story of Magda, an adopted sister from Krakow, whose left arm is missing at her elbow, the reader is taken into the memories of her brother, reminiscing about her death he only imagines. "Memories spill out through a cracked window, melt into the ground between tall grass, and are pushed back up as wildflowers." This idea that we each have our own versions of the truth makes for a very colorful world, as one experience can lead to a myriad of flowers pushing up later. This collection is full of such gems. I feel a quality of Taoist flow and Buddhist acceptance from this voice, but a voice qualified to move beyond mere acquiescence. Simon VanBooy writes like a master, there are not many others creating works like these today whereby reality is redefined to include imagination. It is the eye/ear/heart of a poet at work here.

There are 18 stories included in this collection, several of which were previously published by Bookman Press in 2002 in a limited run called Love and the Five Senses.
Every piece is distinct from the next, but present is a voice the reader will not forget. There is a thread connecting this author to the above mentioned Passoa, and when I read Some Bloom in Darkness, I return to Colette and am reminded "...we can catch and hold--with words..." as VanBooy does so brilliantly for us. In The World Laughs in Flowers, and The Reappearance of Strawberries, both two very beautiful titles so well selected, the theme of memory underlies. "My memories are arranged like puddles--they are littered throughout the present moment. It seems arbitrary, that which the mind remembers, but I know it is not." This line appears early in the first story, long before the character arrives in Greece to hopefully re-ignite a love before it is too late. In The Reappearance..." a story full of longing and human endurance, we read "without memory...man would be invincible." This polarization of elation and suffering is what makes the stories believable; it is what makes this collection profound. There is nothing formulaic or too full of itself. It is balanced and quiet sometimes, and at others, it can be over the top pure poetry, lyrical and enlightened.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant., April 15, 2007

By 

Lucas Hunt - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secret Lives of People in Love (Paperback)

Van Booy is a poet whose rich and lyrical prose tells of having found something truly beautiful. His stories are tributes to the brevity of experience and the endurance of emotions. They are mysteries in broad daylight that make us weep with the bittersweet joy of having been born at all. While reading this book, I am gratefully reminded of how fragile and miraculous life is. Van Booy subtly forces an appreciation of a shared world and especially each other in it; by giving us elegant and understated contact with the tangible functions of love and loss. I recommend his book to anyone who likes clean and simple language that can transpose a sentiment into an insight with humor and grace. The Secret Lives of People in Love follows in the tradition of timeless literature; Flaubert, Neruda, Chekov, Camus, Lorca, and Kafka. It is smart, humane and above all, reminiscent of perfect moments in time.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing professor, amazing author, April 22, 2007

By 

Joan (CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secret Lives of People in Love (Paperback)

I had Simon as an english professor at my university and his love and knowledge of literature has transpired onto the pages of this beautiful book. It was such a quick read, and his writing made me read the book in one sitting! If you want more info about him, check out his myspace page by typing in his full name.