Love Begins in Winter – Simon Van Booy

Love Begins in Winter, the title story of this stunning collection is nothing more than a brilliantly hard-edged chisel. We follow Bruno Bonnet all over the world, he’s an accomplished cellist with a wonderfully vivid imagination about his childhood, and his family. There seems to be a remote sadness to this writing, it’s unusual and vividly reduced, which is to say that Van Booy wastes nothing with Bonnet’s stark observations about the world around him. Bruno meets Hannah along the way in this longish story and she herself is obsessed with birds. There is a strange unseen destiny that these two seem to be trudging towards, they’ve met, and only know each other’s surfaces and don’t seem to care that there is a world out there filled with disappointment and sorrow.

It’s apparent right away that Van Booy can write about a place and the feeling it gives off. When Bonnet ends up in LA for a performance Van Booy takes a half page to tell you what LA is really like. There there is a little two sentence chunk of literary gold waiting for you at the end of page 26. When people -you, me or someone you know – think whimsically about their lives. They might think this:

“Grief is a country where it rains and rains but nothing grows. The dead live somewhere else – wearing clothes we remember them in.”

I’ll bet it was that line that caught his editors attention after Van Booy submitted his manuscript the first time.

Van Booy says that most conversations happen silently, and he speaks a larger truth by showing and telling what Bonnet sees in his new found friend Hannah, it’s magical to watch, and hard to look away. They travel together, they fall in love, they both flashback to times of great sadness. The story itself takes time to get under your skin, it’s a slow boil, but I can’t say that I’ve come across writing that is both filled with passion and to the point. Van Booy doesn’t flower his prose with useless descriptive language, what he does instead is cut to the core of the people he’s writing about. Bonnet is driven by fame, when he performs he knows he’s got everyone’s love and attention, when he is alone the mind tends to wander. Van Booy take Bonnet places that are unexpected, and offers a kind and realistic portrait of the fragile human condition.

We are giving away 5 signed copies of Love Begins in Winter to the first 5 people to send us an email here at the blog. Please include your mailing address, if you don’t…you won’t get a book.

Meanwhile, Simon’s story on Fifty Two Stories is here: http://www.fiftytwostories.com/?p=3

A cool reading guide for Love Begins in Winter here: http://www.harpercollins.com/author/authorExtra.aspx?authorID=34297&isbn13=9780061661471&displayType=readingGuide

And of course, some cool conversations with Simon on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mgdB753gsQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STN1EtJvK3k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXuZmAR6HRQ

More on this book later this week.

-JR