As the Roaring Twenties wind down, Jean-Paul Sartre waits in a Paris café for a first date with Simone de Beauvoir, who never shows. Marlene Dietrich slips away from a loveless marriage to cruise the dive bars of Berlin. The fledgling writer Vladimir Nabokov places a freshly netted butterfly at the end of his wife's bed. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Zelda and Scott, Dalí and Gala, Picasso and his many muses, Henry and June and Anaïs Nin, the entire extended family of Thomas Mann, and a host of other fascinating and famous figures make art and love, write and row, bed and wed and betray. They do not yet know that they, along with millions of others, will soon be forced to contemplate flight or fight as the world careens from one global conflict to the next.
Expertly translated ... What could have been a superficial catalogue of salacious gossip, tawdry rumors and grubby encounters turns out to be an enthralling and insightful cultural history — one that shows how, over the course of one pivotal decade, love, freedom and the freedom to love gave way to fear, madness and despair ... Ambitious ... Panoramic and polyphonic, it is a busier book with a teeming cast and a longer time frame, and on this occasion Illies takes his cultural figures into the storm and reveals how they weathered it or were destroyed by it.
Unusual ... The author seems reluctant to reach for ideas or explanations, preferring simply to log each coupling without comment ... Illies can write with gusto and there are odd glimpses of a wit that is frustrated by the self-imposed limits of the enterprise ... The lapses of style are not really the issue, however. After the absence of analysis, the chief problem lies in numbers. The 46 share less than 300 pages of narrative, which, with some space given to lesser figures, allows them only about six pages each. It’s like watching someone whip through the TV channels with a remote control or swipe through the photos on their smartphone. You end up not only feeling dizzy but also knowing slightly less than when you started.
Achieves something that is really rather impressive — turning the great moral dramas of the 20th century into breathless melodrama ... There are occasional glimpses of the funnier, more enjoyable and psychologically acute book that Love in a Time of Hate might have been ... It leaves one wondering who the intended reader of this odd book is. Anyone superficial enough to have their attention sufficiently engaged by the mere fact of so many famous characters being mutually romantically involved with one another will surely lack the patience to see the thing through to the bitter end.
