Pure love is like a bad fever: it defies definition, yet still leaves you completely drained. The plot of the novel is simple enough — a fiery, passionate woman barges into an ordinary man’s life, and they fall in love. One day the woman discovers a manuscript the man wrote long ago, and becomes obsessed with getting it published, only to be rejected again and again. Stubborn, volatile, extreme by nature, she keeps stirring up trouble around herself. In the end she goes mad, gouges out one of her own eyes, and the man ends her life, then returns alone to his old existence — writing, running his shop… Philippe Djian’s prose is as plain as a baptism, leaving you unable to grasp the danger hidden within it. The man and woman love each other with total abandon, careless of life, death, or reputation. A line the man says right before he kills her has stuck with me: like two fingers on the same hand, no matter what happens, this will never change. In truth, they’re more like two solitary islands connected beneath a vast ocean — too scorched by the sun to ever really be looked at directly. Thirty-seven point two degrees is said to be the temperature of passionate love, and that temperature never wavers even after the woman dies — and yet you can never quite explain why, just like a fever, with an entire cluster of clinical symptoms that defy any clean definition. While reading, I kept thinking of scenes from the film version interspersed in my mind — the little house in the desert, the woman’s breasts and her moaning, the carousel, the white cat… Too bad the author himself disliked that film adaptation; I haven’t bothered looking into the interviews and reasons behind that either.

Funny enough, today as I was nearly finished with the book, I was on my way to driving school, and the girl sitting next to me mentioned she’d read it too, and kept talking to me about it. She said that the feeling toward someone you don’t know well is just like a book: you want to read it for a long time, it’s fascinating while you’re reading it, but you finish it quickly, and then maybe you toss it aside or sell it to someone else. Embarrassed, all I could say was — you really do have too many books on your Douban list…