Book Review: "¡Existe el amor solamente para matarme! or Love and Me Have No Business Doing Business"

¡Existe el amor solamente para matarme! or Love and Me Have No Business Doing Business by Stuart González


197 pages


Self Published, 2006


Though he'll call it a novel, González's exhausting, tongue twistingly titled tome (alliteration!) isn't so much a novel as it is a novella, and it's not really a novella inasmuch as it is a collection of loosely connected vignettes, all written between the summer of '05 and winter '06.


Within its pages lie stories about a brother and sister living together who are actually one person; about a man who falls in love with his empty bedroom wall; about a young woman who travels to Europe and is unimpressed with the supposed sexual virility of the men she encounters; about a tattoo of a girl's name that gets soused one night and wakes up on a man's hairy ass; about Spanglish becoming the official language of the southwestern US; about a painter who manages to accurately depict god; Ronald Reagan and Ayn Rand were secret lovers... etc.


Easily the best of these is "The Manhood of Europe" about a college grad named Sarah Leigh who backpacks across Europe with the sole intent of having sex with one man in each country.

Sarah got her man. She got him in every country. In Albania and Poland. In Italy and Germany. In France and Spain. In Denmark. She had them all. Men typical of their nations. Stereotypical. Some were greasy. Some pale. Some dirty. Too dirty. Some clean. Too clean. Some hirsute. Some androgynous. ... And most...

[...] her epiphany came as she ground her hips into a Scottish guy's hips in Glasgow. A room solely consisting of shadows and blue light. It was simple. She felt no joy. It was too easy. She could conquer, oh yes, and easily at that, but one cannot rape the willing. She wasn't doing anything new, even for a woman. And despite the much touted and spoken of romanticism that supposedly gripped Europe, she felt she must be in the wrong place (78).

González points out here that perhaps lust isn't all it's cracked up to be. Of course he's wrong, but he must be given points for trying. After all, it's not like from there it descends into piety, highlighting the finer points of celibacy. In fact, he's very good about doing the exact opposite of preaching: moral indifference.

On a bus in London, Sarah sat next to an older man. She was traveling from Greenwich to Westminster and she was reading "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." When she took her eyes from the pages to look out the window, she noticed the man shifting his eyes from her face to the book in her hand.

"Raymond Carver is no Hemingway," said he, chuckling.

"And Italians don't fuck nearly as good as Chicanos," Sarah responded.

"Yes... yes. Very well," he said, and eased himself out of the seat with the aid of a cane. He tipped his hat to her (83).

This kind of humor, prevalent in the book, seems sharpest in this story. González likes absurdity. He likes shock. He hates Raymond Carver. A lot. In fact, every story has a line about how Carver sucks. Good one, Stu.

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