She Loves Me

New York Times Book Review

It is one of Esterhazy's many ironic intimations in this erotic encyclopedia that love stories may have nothing in common, that there may be no such thing as a love story. There are just stories about the wayward things couples do together in the name of love.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

With the fastidious delight of a born observer, Esterhzy's narrator describes the idiosyncrasies of an assortment of women (plus several men pretending to be women) and chronicles his own response in this ambivalent panegyric to Hungarian womanhood. In 97 short chapters, the Homeric catalogue of loves demonstrates Esterhzy's talent for creating full-blooded characters in brief: conniving, elegant, bitchy, vulgar, his women are united by their very human contradictoriness. Also, nearly all of them like sexa lot. The characters are voraciously physical, a characteristic that Esterhzy gradually links to Hungary's political upheaval, the country's need for new histories and idioms. Despite its structural limitations (the taxonomic format grows tedious), the novel is by turns irreverent and philosophical, and its nervy energy commands the reader's attention. It is a testament to his wry sensibility that, throughout this agile account of the whimsical visitations of Eros to a mortal man, Esterhzy's prose rarely descends into the banality that so often accompanies writing about love and sex. (Oct.)

Bill Marx

For readers who like their foreplay on the page to combine sexual sauciness and wry political wit, "She Loves Me" is a racy introduction to the fictional house of Esterhazy. -- Bill Marx, The Boston Globe

John Updike

"[A] tour of the craggy, chasmed terrain where the sexes manage to meet." -- The New Yorker

Tom McGonigle

"We have many fine writes in America, but we do not have eve a single one of the stature and exemplary ambitionof Peter Esterhazy....the Italo Calvine of Hungarian literature." -- The Los Angeles Times Book Review