The Malady of Death

Synopsis

A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a "she, " a warm, moist body with a beating heart-the enigma of other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn love. It isn't a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to learn to try. This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, "perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe, " and of its absence, "the malady of death.