Customer Reviews

The Secret Lives of People in Love

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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.

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.

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.

This is a well-written, thoughtful book, full of engaging characters who triumph over life's adversities and share their wisdom with the reader. Van Booy is a master of metaphor--you will find yourself backtracking just to re-experience his images! Few new writers these days create beautiful, literary prose, so this is an author (and book) to cherish and share with others! BUY THIS BOOK and your faith in the publishing industry shall be renewed!

i really enjoyed this book for a number of reasons.
1) its a quick read, but you just keep reading the same lines over and over sometimes. (I keep this one close so I can grab it often.)
van booy just has a way with words, and especially metaphors.
ex: "It was possible to be alive and not exist at the very same moment".
2) so beautiful in its ability to capture the whole spectrum of human emotions - sad, happy, humored, angry, confused, overwhlemed, attracted, sympathetic, everything! and even though every chapter is a completly new story, you feel so drawn in that you feel all of it, too. i cried, laughed, and got mad - the people on the subways in new york would have thought i was crazy if not for their immunity to bizare circumstances.
3) He has a very unique way of viewing the world, and your completly sucked into that.
4) I'm a literature and philosophy junkie (and student) and I found so many interesting links and alluions to other texts/ideas. so if you're like me, this is a very rich and dynamic novel. however, you don't have to see these things in it to enjoy it. in fact, i think its siplicity is perhaps the best part.

please read, you won't regret!

With such a provocative title, you know this book won't disappoint, even though the absolutely accurate name refers to different scenarios than you might imagine. There are so many ways to love and grieve and live completely wrapped in isolation, even in the bustling city. Van Booy thinks of just about all of them and then some in these short stories. He spins sad, hopeful tales in gossamer threads that wind themselves around you until one or two well-placed words in the final sentence bring the whole piece crashing down in brilliant, unexpected ways. These stories mean the most when you feel a bit sad or isolated yourself, perhaps because they shine the light of hope where it needs to go, reminding us that we are all connected by love and our interpretations of living through it. Not to be missed.

How's this for an opening? "My wife is deaf. Once she asked me if snow made a sound when it fell and I lied. We have been married twelve years today, and I am leaving her." This is the first paragraph of a wonderful story by Simon Van Booy. Although short, it contains a world of music and loss, history and hope. Before it is over, every thought in that first paragraph will have been transformed into its near-opposite, replacing apparent callousness with enduring love.

I first got to know this British-American author from his earlier collection LOVE BEGINS IN WINTER, five stories of almost novella length. He struck me immediately for his extraordinary sense of place and emotional immediacy, but I found his short sentence structure somewhat too dry for stories of that length. This latest collection, however, consists of nineteen pieces ranging from three to twenty pages, and the brief images lie side by side in a glittering lapful of trinkets and souvenirs, a poem in prose. As when a man looks through the closet of his dying wife and comes upon her favorite coat: "His fingers crawled into the pocket and swam around between coins, slips of paper, and mints. The secrets of a hand." Or sudden insights of grace to be found even in dismal surroundings, such as the dilapidated horse-track in a London suburb: "When small drops began to fall and darken the world in penny-shaped circles, no one around him scurried for cover. For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched."

All these stories are about love, but seldom about first romance; no Moon in June here. So parents and children, brothers and sisters, village neighbors, a lapsed priest and his God, even a lonely man and a shop-window mannequin. But most often husbands and wives after many years of marriage, perhaps after the death of one of the parties. For one of Van Booy's major themes is the power of love to survive loss. He tackles this in so many different ways: through fable (a boy grieving his mother meets a mysterious Indian guru in Central Park), through sensory association (a rejected lover buries his face in a hillside of flowers where they had first met), or through the accumulated details of everyday living (a man coping with his wife's prolonged coma). The settings include Paris, Rome, New York, the Greek islands, and the author's native Wales, none of them obtrusive, but each making a perfect container for the lives it enfolds.

There is sadness here, yes, but there are also surprising flashes of joy and and an abiding feeling of connection, like coming to harbor after a long voyage. As another of Van Booy's characters says, "All seas are one sea; every ocean holds hands with another."

It's been a very long time since I've stumbled across a book as lovely as this one. I'm usually not one for short stories but I read an excellent review of Secret Lives elsewhere and I decided to take a chance.

The stories are easily manageable, some as short as a few pages. As I was reading them, I was struck by how perfect they each were in length; sometimes collections of short stories leave a reader dangling or the story drags out too long, but Simon Van Booy gives us extremely polished clips of lives in just exactly the right amount of writing. He's succint without being stingy and the stories flow very well.

The stories peeled away the husks from the characters' souls or their private lives, exposing them to the reader in such a poignant way that I was touched by every individual story in one way or another. The writing catches those beautiful and universal glimmers of truth and beauty--be they sad, painful, or ultimately hopeful--and wraps them up in the pages of this book.

I'm planning on giving this out as gifts to friends and family. I enjoyed this book immensely and I highly recommend you give this collection a try--it is a wonderful read you'll come back to over and over through the years.

It's devastating in its empathy and tenderness. Aching tolerance like Tenessee Williams. Picked it up out of the blue (for the title, of course) and just started reading. Soon, I'm turning the book (a paperback that's an astonishingly cheap ugly production of which Harper Perennials should be mighty ashamed)over and over in my hands amazed...wondering who IS THIS Van Booy? Oh, he has a daughter. Oh, he lives in hotels. Looks like kid, himself, but writes like a 400 year old person who's learned to forgive everything. Even death.

The language is so beautiful it made me tear up. Very few books in my lifetime have had a similar effect on me. Reading such gorgeous work makes one simply happy to be alive.