Weekend Guide: 07.09.2021

Lovefool — Victoria

What, then, is love?

❤️

I can’t define love. I am pretty sure no one can. We know it when we feel it. It can ruin a man, raise him up again, then brand him anew. Put simply - love has the ability to stop you dead in your tracks. Love can truly fuck you up.

Most novels are love stories. A protagonist intensely in love with himself. An older, married couple trying to navigate an infidelity. Two star crossed fools on the fast track to ruin. Some are ornate and filled with lurid detail. Others are stark. Minimalist. Relying on the power of suggestion.

Victoria by Knut Hamsun (1898) falls into the latter category. Unadorned but complex. In a short 160 pages Hamsun somehow tells a lifelong story of two lovers from different worlds. Victoria is royalty. Johannes is a peasant boy. They meet, fall deep into a forbidden love and spend the rest of their lives toying with their inevitable fate.

Love in fragments. Surely you can guess how Victoria ends. But that’s not the point.

Much like love — it’s the journey, not the destination.

I am famously not tattooed - but if I were, I would be able to open Victoria to any page and find a sentence or two worth scrawling on my chest in permanent ink.

I’ve written your name on the ceiling, I lie there looking up at it; but the girl who looks after my room can’t see it, i’ve written it in tiny letters to keep it to myself. It never fails to give me joy.