Love Affairs: Tales of Love, Romance, and Sex by Arash Farzaneh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Farzaneh has a very appealing imagination, which directs his hero towards a variety of young women encountered during a year in downtown Vancouver, where “all types of girls can be found on the street”. At the end of the novel, in conversation with a waitress, he confesses “I like insecure, moody, promiscuous ice princesses who like to backstab me”, and reflects to himself, “many faces, one woman.” It’s fair to say that each of them leads him a merry dance, as does he with his reader. We wonder to what extent his adventures are autobiographical. More likely, I suspect, that they are embroidered shamelessly with added poetry and fantasy by a man of a certain age looking back fondly to his days before the bonds of a happy marriage, mortgage and children.
What kept me reading? Our narrator is endearingly baffled by the girls he pursues, or pursue him. He doesn’t always tell us what we want to know. Every page is a cliff-hanger, in fact.
I’d have preferred it if these girls were more distinguishable from one another, each of a different age, ethnicity, body-shape and life-challenges. This must say something about me, of course: what turns our author on is his own business.
Farzaneh’s style is sunny and full of mischief. No heart is seriously harmed, nobody has real problems. There’s a kind of innocence, as on the occasion where he goes on an expedition with a bunch of nudists, one of whom is the woman he’s trying to get back together with. While she’s away for a swim he finds another girl, lodging in the same chalet, in his bed giving him a brazen come-on. Unbelievable luck but he invents a string of excuses for saying no: he’s gay, a Mormon, saving his virginity for marriage etc. How will it all end? Which girl will he choose, or more likely choose him?
Such questions compelled me to turn every page till I reached its satisfying end, which teases us with the dangling promise of a sequel. Which I’m sure will be better, if it sees daylight. I doubt it though, for he’s putting his writing talent to more noble ends, saying recently: “I am currently working on a health / self-help book that should hopefully help others to deal with a variety of health issues and diseases.”
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