You might know of Richard Adams as the author of Watership Down, the classic tale "about bunnies." Well, this is as far away as you can get from that novel. A blurb in the front cover from the New York Times Book Review calls it a story of "beautiful, haunting erotic love and an absolutely terrifying ghost story." It's not erotica--I'd call it more sensuous than erotic and the sex is rarely in any way explicit and certainly never in a pornographic way. What strikes me most is the gorgeousness of the prose, the lyricism. The first hundred pages or so is particularly slow-paced. The protagonist and first person narrator paints a picture of himself as prosaic, undersexed and unattractive in those first hundred pages, and only the beauty of the prose keeps the story from dullness. Alan Desland is an English ceramics dealer, whose passion is reserved for porcelain and pottery--until he meets Kathe in Copenhagen. She's an exquisitely beautiful woman--her almost supernatural beauty is often stressed in the tale, as a gift and a burden--and a sign and perhaps the reason for an intense and pitiless quality in her--like those of the greek goddesses she's compared to in the first pages--Demeter or Hera. Or even more appropriately, as she's compared to in the end, the Hindu goddess Kali. Almost to the end this reads as a romance, except for foreshadowing and periods punctuated by eerie happenings--the inexplicable sobbing of a child, the sound of water. This would have made the perfect Hitchcock film really. This is a haunting and underrated novel worth seeking out.
