A piercing, poignant tale about love, loss and writing
FICTION
Love Unedited
Caro Llewellyn
Picador, $34.99
Caro Llewellyn's Love Unedited is a piercing and poignant story of love, loss and writing that speaks to the magic of working with words, and the humanity too. Llewellyn's novel begins as the main character, Edna, meets her former lover at the Melbourne cafe The European and is transported back in time.
I found myself transported back in time, too, to the kernel of truth that made me a reviewer. I remembered how when I was taking my final exams at school I used to live stream the PEN World Voices festival, and found myself caught up in the glamour and the gravitas as a global grouping of writers engaged in discussions about how writing can give hope, and courage, and takes hope, and courage, to produce too.
This festival was directed by Llewellyn, who had relocated to New York after directing the Sydney Writers' Festival, and would later become chief executive of Australia's hub of literary writing, The Wheeler Centre. When I learnt Llewellyn had written a romantic roman-à-clef about an editor who worked with a literary author, I was ready to be caught up in the whirlwind romance of their work with words.
There is plenty of romance to Love Unedited, and much of it is the romance of independence: work, travel and having the courage of your convictions. Llewellyn's protagonist Edna sees men on scooters in Coney Island and gets on the back of a motorcycle in Paris and the reader is swept up in the adventure of the journey. The romance of the novel is also of the kind more familiar from Shakespearean comedies: star-crossed lovers traversing oceans to be together only to find themselves separated by the tohu bohu of the exigencies of life.
Edna falls in love with a serious writer marked by tragedy. What comes next is a romance that is between the novel and the reader, but Llewellyn shows hope and courage in the way she depicts a story that reads beautifully on the page and, beyond the page, carries a sense of longing and sacrifice familiar to the great love stories of our time.
One of the story's most delightful surprises is the novel-within-the-novel that we realise we are reading when an Australian editor, Molly, living with an Italian chef, encounters Edna's story of love, loss, and what they ate. The story that unfolds between the editor and the writer is reminiscent of confrontations between master and pupil or author and subject that are familiar in coming-of-age stories such as the recent Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore film May December.
As in Ian McEwan's Atonement, the lived experience of the story comes closer to tragedy than romantic comedy and the justice of love is best served when the writer uses her imagination to find the truest and most romantic ending for the story. In this way, Love Unedited is a great tribute to the courage it takes to write, and the hope we invest in books as readers.
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