JEAN DUTOURD – The Horrors of Love. Doubleday, hardcover, 1967. First published in France in as Les Horreurs de l’amour (Gallimard, 1963)

   I spent most of this week making a voodoo hoodoo out of some stuff I had lying around the house: Some books, an old shelf, top hat, playing cards, manacles, a skull… that sort of thing. Hung it in my basement to attract nightmares.

   Anyway, when I was putting this thing together, I had an enjoyable time digging out just the right books, and one of them was the book discussed below. And though I doubt I’ll ever revisit that book, I felt a glow of remembered pleasure when I revisited the review:

   Back in the 60s when I worked as a page at the local library, I found myself strangely drawn to a thickish book that was never checked out, one that squatted stolidly in its allotted space, motionless and impassive, on the Fiction Shelf all the years I was there. I was intrigued by the title The Horrors of Love  (Doubleday, 1967) and I’d seen the author’s name, Jean Dutourd, in seedy used bookstores, so I was tempted to read it — but in those days I had no time or patience for six-hundred-and-sixty-odd pages of densely — and I mean densely — written prose with no spies in it. Only now, when I’m approaching early pre-middle age and have more time and patience, I thought to give it a try.

   Reading The Horrors of Love  is like going through Boot Camp: tough work and not always much fun, but when it’s over you feel you’ve accomplished something. The story is set in Paris in the late 50s and concerns two men who stroll through the city discussing a mutual acquaintance.

   And that’s what it’s about.

   Two guys.

   Walking and talking.

   And talking. And talking.

   For more than six hundred close-packed pages.

   Well, Harry Stephen Keeler constructed some fine books that were nothing more than conversation, so why not Jean Dutourd? And in fact, I found Horrors compelling, if a bit obscure at times, because the lengthy discussion is developed with a novelist’s imagination and a philosopher‘s intellect: it seems the subject of all this conversation is a mutual acquaintance. a successful middle-aged man — shallow, untalented, lacking any insight — and how this man is destroyed by love.

   It’s a sobering tale, and to Dutourd’s credit, the reader never loses sight of the point, even as the narrators digress about art, philosophy, literature, the sexes, politics, Parisian geography, history, women, writing, food, men, Algeria…. well let’s just say they fill over six hundred pages to just shy of bursting.

   Which may be a problem: Good Writing is like any other commodity; when you get too much of it in one place it becomes devalued, and Horrors of Love  is an awful lot of writing, mostly good, I think, but still a damnlot of writing. Some of the writers and philosophers discussed here are just names to me, and some not even that. Withal, even in the densest passages, I never felt like putting this thing down, and I turned the last page, as I said, feeling the few weeks of my time had not been wasted.