So This Is Love: Lollipop and Other Stories

Linda M. Bayley is a freelance writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. She is
the author of Estrangement: Poems.

One of the problems with writing about a particular period in history is
that unless the writer provides the proper context, a reader who came
after that time may not have the knowledge, and certainly not the
experience, required to understand the story. This is my main complaint
about Gilbert Reid’s writing in So This is Love. Reid mentions in his
author’s note that many of the stories reflect “the experiences of
an expatriate in Europe immediately following the sexual revolution of
the 1960s and 1970s.” The sexual revolution is also mentioned in the
book’s back copy. However, having missed those decades due to the
timing of my own birth, I was not able to infer what are obviously key
themes in these stories. I wish that Reid had scattered a little more
background information throughout his work so that I and other readers
of my generation could appreciate his message, rather than just puzzling
through his words.

There was one paragraph, though, that resonated deeply with me, and
that I believe would strike anyone of any generation as beautiful,
profound, and insightful. It comes at the end of “Bevete del Vino.”
A man is revisiting an Italian church some time after the end of a
relationship, and he looks up to see the Christ on the crucifix. At
first he thinks it is just wood and paint, but then: “No, for an
instant it was not merely the Christ carved in wood. It was the flesh
laid bare: skinless, exposed to the level of raw bone, the rib cage, the
pelvis, the knobby knees. It was the knowledge of the impossibility of
love; that’s what it was.”

This is a book that teeters between beauty and depravity, a scale on
which Reid makes some interesting comments on the nature of love. Some
of his insights can be gleaned without the proper context and
background; overall, though, I think this book is best left to those who
have been there, done that.