‘What excites you?’ a girl asks the hero at a party. ‘Art’, he replies. Speaking of the heroine, the girl continues: ‘And Marietta, what excites her?’. ‘Risk’, he says. The girl interprets this to mean ‘sex’. And she is not mistaken. Indeed, Mara, Marietta is a love story told primarily through art and sex. In a heady cocktail of music, dance, cinema, sex, painting and poetry, the story moves from Princeton to Paris, and from there radiates out around the world.

She is a theoretical physicist and a musician, he a poet and rock song lyricist. They meet in New Jersey, say goodbye, then meet by chance three years later in Paris. In a midnight bar he tells her he’s having trouble with the novel he’s writing. She says, ‘Tell the truth. That often makes the best fiction’. He asks her how. She says, ‘Have you ever had your heart broken? I mean really broken, so that you had nothing left but your eyes to cry with? That would strip you down to your truth’. He says he hasn’t, then asks her, ‘Will you do it for me?’. ‘Do what?’ ‘Break my heart.’ Softly, but distinctly, she says, ‘Yes, I will’. Between two beats of his heart he hears himself say, ‘Thank you’.

After seven years together she leaves him, in a way rarely, if ever, seen in fiction. From then on he begins writing her a ‘very long love letter’, one which moves from magical realism to a cinematic depiction of all they have lived together. (By the way, if you haven’t guessed, the letter is the novel itself.)

From the archaeology of childhood to the founding of an ethics, from the investigation of desire to the affirmation of life as creation, the lovers discover through each other at once their own buried history and the deepest intimacy of the other.

Mara, Marietta: A Love Story in 77 Bedrooms is neither for cheap-thrill seekers nor for readers who only seek new twists on stale conventions. Rather, it is a tale for adults who are unafraid to open their hearts and minds to the intelligence of the body and the soul.

Richard Jonathan's profile page

Born in South Africa (in an estuary town where he’d watch the boats go by), schooled in Canada (at a Queen’s Park college where Ulysses blew his mind), trained in London (where he spent days in an editing room, transforming chance into destiny) and now a translator in France (in a southwestern town where belugas in the sky echo the boats he used to watch go by), Richard Jonathan has but one accomplishment to his name: Mara, Marietta: A Love Story in 77 Bedrooms. Some say he has fought the good fight, he has finished his course; other say this book is but the beginning. As for the author himself, all he has to say is: ‘I don’t have to speak, Marietta speaks for me’.

“From the opening childhood sequence to the ending with the hero as an old man, ‘Mara, Marietta’ is, on every page, a love story. We learn of walking in high heels and driving a stick-shift, of inflections of the voice and dark matter, and all the while we are learning of love. The book is entertaining, engaging, instructive. It’s long but it reads fast. Yes, it is a love story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. But not necessarily in that order. Indeed, it’s as simple as love. And as complicated. In a word, it is a terrific read.

So why do I give it only four stars? Because, as for all great novels, it is the quality of the reader’s imagination that brings the fifth star. You see, ‘Mara, Marietta’ is an open book, but not one for closed minds. Yes, I’m talking about that three-letter word. Read the book, if you dare.”

amazon.fr customer review

“‘Mara, Marietta’ is a multidimensional novel that doesn’t look, doesn’t sound, doesn’t feel, doesn’t read like anything else, maybe because that’s what a real love story is, to those who live it: unique, ineffable. However numerous the echoes of paintings we have prized, songs we have hummed and books we have loved, however numerous the rooms the obliging author ushers us into (77, really?!), the book is also an echo chamber in its own right, a camera obscura revealing a unique double, a prism ricocheting sensations around the body and around the world. Microcosm, Macrocosm. ‘Mara, Marietta’ is this multidimensional world. An incomparable read: Both comic and cosmic!”

amazon.com customer review