🫂
I have been on a Sollers kick the last few months. His novels are varied, difficult, and a riot. But best of all is the book he and his wife Julia Kristeva co-wrote: Marriage as a Fine Art. On the one hand, it’s one huge flex on all other theory couples, just a relatively incoherent rambling braggart’s song about how great they are. Kristeva outright deems Sarte and Beauvoir “liberarian terrorists.” “To carry out their work of liberatarian terrorism, they turned themselves into a shock commando unit. . . [reliant] on their shared history as two wounded people.” But it is also very sweet. You can find them going around and around on such topics as the nature of passion (PS: “As if passion necessarily [has] to be punished, as if love could only end in disaster. I object to that notion, quite violently. That’s not my idea of love.” JK: “Passion is enthusiasm and the proximity of death. It is joy and it is death. It is annihilation and jubilation.”) As a Sollers fan and a Kristeva agnostic, it has evened out my opinion of the pair. Somehow, the book, dense as it is, tickles the same part of my brain that is satisfied by a 2000s romcom.