Letters to the End of Love
April 2013
Yvette Walker / U.Q.P.
Yvette Walker’s debut novel Letters to the End of Love is a moving tale of love and loss, told through an intimate exchange of love letters between three couples, each separated in space and time, and yet all struggling to comprehend what has happened in their relationship, and what it means when it might be coming to an end. The letters are “not romance, not porn, but letters that talk about love as it is, in all of its strangeness”, and beautifully capture the unique perspectives of each of the characters.
The sole link between the three narratives lies in their different engagements with Paul Klee’s painting Ad Marginem — that he had given as a wedding gift to a fellow Russian painter Dmitri and his wife in the 1930s. Dmitri’s letters describe his brief rejection of colour in his paintings after his wife’s illness, the “horror of no colour” being something that he, like the other characters, must confront now that he is left in an empty “world of cups and tea strainers”. What Walker’s novel celebrates however, is the healing power of art, and the deep and varied meanings it can create for each of its viewers. Even a white painting, like the loss the novel’s letters invoke, is in fact “not blank, not flat, but has the culture of white cut into it”, and it is here that closure and understanding resides.
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