#4: My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

Just like real love, this book takes work. It’s not easy to get through, and it doesn’t always make you weak in the knees. It does, however, leave you with the realization that although love cannot always be defined, it will undoubtedly leave you changed. Romance is a battlefield, and it’s all we can do to survive. 

The stories presented in My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead show that the love felt between two people often comes at the expense of others or like an apparition somehow hard to prove. Either way, the various authors in this particular anthology are able to capture the wide array of love that is likely to befall us at some point or another. Faulkner proves that death is only a minor detail when looking for a life partner, Moore shows that just about anyone can learn how to be the other woman, and Trevor is able to explain the sad truth that time exists only to betray us all. 

Eugenides does a terrific job of editing these stories, making an introduction that is worthy of a book of all its own. And because I was exhausted by the end of reading book #4, I’ll let him sum up all the things I’ve been trying so desperately to explain:

When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the unrequited love, the desire that never dims - these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stores. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding familys, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

Now, excuse me while I go spend the rest of my evening with a one Mr. Phil Collins.