The Polyglot Lovers by Lina Wolff

The Polyglot Lovers

Lina Wolff

Three narrators, telling three stories, set in three European cities, are the ingredients for a satire on artistic pretensions and the literary reputations of certain male authors renowned for their misogyny. However, the sadistic treatment of the women in their sexual misadventures is counterbalanced (if not excused) by the women’s masochistic tendencies to fall for the wrong kind of men - so plenty of fertile material for feminist debate.

Extract
'Women you have to watch out for, but there's little more harmless than men's lies. Men lie to protect. They think they're protecting the world around them by keeping the truth of themselves from it. And considering their true nature, you can't blame them. They often have a muddy kind of self-knowledge that occasionally align with their protective instinct. You can't hate them for that. To hate the man for his lies is like me hating a scorpion because it has a stinger or a fish on the bottom of the sea because it's ugly. It's utterly futile, and you're the only one who risks dying from that hatred.'
Parallels
  • The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
  • Permission by Saskia Vogel
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Violence
Explicit sexual content