Love in Lowercase
Ratings2
Average rating3.5
A feel-good novel for fans of A Man Called Ove and The Rosie Project, about an eccentric, language-loving bachelor and the cat that opens his eyes to life’s little pleasures The Silver Linings Playbook author Matthew Quick: “A delightfully absurd, life-affirming celebration. I literally stood up and cheered as I read the last page.” When Samuel, a lonely linguistics lecturer, wakes up on New Year’s Day, he is convinced that the year ahead will bring nothing more than passive verbs and un-italicized moments—until an unexpected visitor slips into his Barcelona apartment and refuses to leave. The appearance of Mishima, a stray, brindle-furred cat, becomes the catalyst that leads Samuel from the comforts of his favorite books, foreign films, and classical music to places he’s never been (next door) and to people he might never have met (a neighbor with whom he’s never exchanged a word). Even better, the Catalan cat leads him back to the mysterious Gabriela, whom he thought he’d lost long before, and shows him, in this international bestseller for fans of The Rosie Project, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, and A Man Called Ove, that sometimes love is hiding in the smallest characters.
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You ever have the feeling that the person you're talking to is either completely insane or weirdly brilliant? This ambiguity is often cleared up when you find out just how high they are (so high right now, dude), but every once in a while there's always that hobo who seems like he has a much better idea of what's actually going on than you do, and he looks perfectly thrilled right where he is.
That's kind of how I feel about the main character. He's constantly running from event to event, plucking with strings that seem to connect them but don't, only to find out later there's a thick web of cable supporting the whole enterprise. The only cogent summary I can offer is “lonely guy starts to meet the world, except the world is full of all the people you've actually met and try to pretend you're not friends (with even though you hang out with that guy all the time).”
Reading this book feels like trying to navigate the stairs when you're drunk. Not like just trying to clamber your way down the concrete steps outside the dance bar in the middle of February, where you feel warm (because liquor) but there's a thick sheet of ice coating the left half of the stairs, and you're seizing the railing like you're onboard the Titanic trying to fight your way past some Irish dudes to the bow before it slips and carries you down into the North Atlantic. More like the first time you ever had alcohol and you managed to put away two Zimas and you were walking down an extremely narrow, steeply sloped staircase and you slipped a little bit and your arm automatically went out to try to stabilize yourself and you wound up putting your elbow through the wall?
Except it's more of a love story.
