The Thousands

Jeffrey Eugenides knows about love. Dave Eggers, the ‘Bono of lit’, knew that Jeffrey knew about love, and asked him to compile a book of love stories. In 25 parts, MY MISTRESS’S SPARROW IS DEAD charts that many-splendoured thing from its first flush to its final denouement, from ‘voyeuristic longing to disenchanted entanglement’. Protagonists smoke and screw and sneak around. They fall in love with people they should and people they shouldn’t. They polish the hard nut of their discontent against numberless dusks and tend to the smarting fires of their unrequited lust.**William Trevors’ lovers play out their affair in an abandoned hotel bathroom because they have nowhere else to go. Guy de Maupassant’s six-tentacled ménage unfolds in a rowboat on the River Seine. Vladimir Nabokov’s lovely Nina recurs like an idée fixe in the narrator’s life, her body perpetually folded in the shape of a Z, a perpetual cigarette at her lovely mouth. There are tales where love, or the moment of attainment anyway, changes the very fabric of the atmosphere, the elementary particles of the night sky falling into heady new constellations.

The longest stories are like whole lives in reduction; the shortest like precise incisions. This is love in all its lucent, spraddled, finger-sniffing splendour. And it’s wonderful.