In Trysting, translated by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis, Emmanuelle Pagano arranges poetic vignettes into an elaborate mosaic about love. Each shard, stretching from a few words to the length of a page or so, captures a penetrating moment. We are given love’s beginnings, endings and the many deeply personal stopping points on the journey. A man sees a high-heeled woman who has stumbled in the snow, “head held high … soaking wet all down the back of her coat”, and offers her his arm. Another tells how he packed his lover’s suitcase when she left him: “I wanted to. It was what I’d always done.” A woman reveals “our bedtime ritual ... for ten years now, every evening” she plucks the hairs from her husband’s back. Many passages are extremely sensuous, brimming with the touch, smell and taste of love – “I moistened her all over with saliva to get to know her off by heart.” The profusion of snippets, with no main protagonist or overarching plot, makes it a difficult book to read cover to cover; instead, Pagano has created a beautiful treasury of amorous moments.
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