Three books for those who won’t be celebrating Valentine’s Day with flowers and chocs
Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler (1926)
Arthur Schnitzler’s modernist novella scandalised 1920s readers with its brazen depictions of sexuality, and later became the source material for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It concerns a middle-class doctor, Fridolin, who learns that his wife had entertained thoughts of a fling while on holiday. Profoundly destabilised, he loses himself in Vienna’s sexual underbelly. Schnitzler explores the whorling fantasies that underlie a torpid marriage. Perhaps, he suggests, reality isn’t in the material world around us, but the unchartered currents beneath.
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (2022)
This debut novel is an incendiary study of obsessive desire. The narrator is a writer and academic. After her husband, also a professor, faces accusations of sexual misconduct, she begins to develop a longing for a new, younger, member of faculty. Jonas’s protagonist is spiky, acerbic, politically incorrect, often contemptuous of the mores of her time, yet her voice is captured with brio and humour. A deeply subversive take on both the campus novel and #MeToo narratives.
The Lamb by Lucy Rose (2025)
Margot lives in the woods with her cannibalistic mother, who welcomes in strangers and then consumes them. But then a newcomer, Eden, seduces the mother and the family equilibrium is upended. In Lucy Rose’s hypnotic novel, time and place are alluded to vaguely while the dynamics of relationships are sharply rendered. Margot both loathes and worships her narcissistic mother, pines for flesh and is reviled by it, knows herself and is still baffled by every eddy of emotion. As her own sexuality develops, she wonders if love can ever be more than a violent act of consumption.
Sean Gilbert’s novel I’ll Be the Monster is published by Duckworth Books (£18.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17.09. Delivery charges may apply
Edvard Munch’s The Vampire II (1895-1902) by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
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