Erotomania: Una historia de amor

This is the cover of the Spanish edition of Erotomania from Tusquets Editores.

Erotomania: the Flunken

Monica soon realized that wedding preparations were not easy in that they brought up many of the same issues that had caused divisiveness in the past. One night, for example, Monica had been watching a Yiddish cook-book author on the Food Channel and she had become captivated with a form of Jewish pot roast called flunken. The flunken was sometimes served alone, but often it was mixed in with a carrot stew called tsimmos. When James tried to explain that these specialties would be appropriate for a Jewish wedding, Monica began to wail about James's insensitivity to her feelings, ending up by accusing him of being anti-Semitic, racist, and sexist for trying to dominate her. James tried to explain that weddings were elegant affairs whose purpose was to express the historic identities of the couple who were taking their vows, Monica started to let out biblical-level utterances of grief. Her hands flew into the air, she made fists and cried out Jesus’ words, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” James didn’t dare yell out the joke he had heard about self pity at one of his recent AA meetings: “Get off the cross, we need the wood.”

Erotomania: The Prequel (The Dark Matter)

In the beginning there were the heavens and the earth. But I was yet to be born, I was yet to exist, as even a glimmer in the eyes of my parents, Lothgren and Rotvahl. I didn’t know what it was to experience that form of pleasure whose ending is a form of dying, and I was immune from my own mind. If desire is but the beginning of suffering, I had yet to bite the apple from the tree of knowledge, and so it was still true that what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. I’d been placed in a basket and sent down the river like Moses and Romulus and Remus after him, by the same seer who had been responsible for the abandonment of Oedipus on the mountain top, the same seer who had then caused Oedipus to murder his father and marry his mother. If nothing else, it was an early lesson: don’t put your faith in soothsayers. No one can foretell the truth, existence precedes as essence, as Sartre pointed out in Being and Nothingness. There was no plan or meaning to anything. Action created the world and action was the result of conscious decisions that man was free to make. As I grew from the monozygotic to dizygotic existence, conforming to the usual definitions of life by virtue of being composed of oxygen and carbon, I began to understand my place in the universe. Man was not the center.