After a week in which there’s been too much hatred in the world, a review of two love stories, although these are not books designed to give a reader the warm fuzzies. Instead, Lidije Hilje’s 2025 novel and Eileen Chang’s 1944 novella are concerned with the sentimental education of their protagonists, characters we come to know through their love relationships and the way these relationships shape and change them. I expected the two books – a fairly chunky novel about a millennial woman in Croatia and a slim novella about a young socially aspiring Chinese business man – to be wildly different, and was surprised instead by the extent of their similarities. Suffering in love seems to transcend cultural and historical boundaries.
Slanting Towards the Sea is the story of Ivona and Vlaho, adolescent sweethearts who live an intense, passionate relationship intended to salve the wounds of their dysfunctional childhoods. Ivona comes from a joyless background: a father who has explosive rages and a pessimistic, careworn mother who prefers her brother. Vlaho’s mother is also emotionally unavailable, after the tragedy of his younger sister dying from appendicitis during the bombing of Dubrovnic. So, Vlaho has his problems, but it’s Ivona’s head we inhabit, in a first person narrative that reveals an emotional world permanently on the brink of overwhelm. ‘I’m an uncovered nerve and everything touches me,’ Ivona tells us, in something of an understatement. But the misery of her childhood means that she does know exactly what she wants from adult love: ‘Someone who sees inside me in a way that makes me translucent; who lets me see inside them too, all the way down to their deepest, most intimate core.’ This fantasy of perfect transparency is almost achieved in the early days with Vlaho, and yet, despite feeling loved in a way that is new and thrilling to her, it isn’t long before her insecurities start creeping in: “‘You will leave me,’ I would cry to him at night. ‘You will grow tired of me.” There was never a person in my life who hadn’t.’
Ivona’s longed-for love is a version of symbiosis – a world without separation from the other – and so it’s inevitably ruined by any difference between herself and Vlaho. Her first depressive episode, provoked by not being able to find employment that uses her degree, is a kind of warm-up for a far more serious disappointment when she discovers she can’t have children. This news plunges Ivona into a terrible, dark place and she can’t help but take it out on Vlaho: ‘even though the source of my pain was within me, it had his face.’ Then her mother dies, and Vlaho’s mother chooses the funeral as the perfect opportunity to beg Ivona to release her son from their marriage, so he can have children with someone else. Ivona decides that the relationship is doomed and so hardens her heart, eventually forcing Vlaho away: ‘there was also a spiteful part of me that almost rejoiced in his pain. He should suffer too, I thought. But no amount of his suffering ever felt enough, he would never suffer as much as I did.’
Ivona moves back in with her ailing father and cares for him while holding down a dead end retail job, and Vlaho does indeed marry again and have children. Ivona, though jealous and heartbroken, remains a close friend of the family. Then she meets someone new. Asier is a business man willing to buy the heritage hotel her father has been trying to create on a plot of family land. The project is mired in debt and the bank will no longer support them, and so a sale seems inevitable – though Ivona feels (of course she does) that this is all her fault. Asier is an unexpected fresh chance, but introducing him to Vlaho triggers unprocessed emotions their break-up had buried. ‘I gave it my all,’ Vlaho tells her. ‘I loved you through all those dark moments. The unemployment, the infertility, the grief. And still you left me. Still it wasn’t enough.’ Vlaho has never stopped loving her, and so Ivona must figure out how to move forward.
Ivona embodies the problem with profound insecurity – she turns the people who love her into the thoughtless abandoners she is so afraid they will become. Her desire for transparency in love is quite impossible when she views both Vlaho and Asier through a veil of projected doubts, anxieties and self-fulfilling prophecies. Feeling herself without agency, she exerts an excessive control over these relationships, deciding in advance what her partners want, think, feel, unconsciously convinced that the pattern of her childhood must be repeated. But all of this quite ordinary human stuff is magnified by her hypersensitivity, which is portrayed in the novel with great sympathy. For all that Ivona might wallow in her emotions, there is a quiet pride in this intensity, notable when she describes how she has ‘impossibly big feelings, so enormous they scare me, so enormous they’re all I want.’ It’s these little nuggets of honesty that rescue Ivona from becoming completely unbearable in her self-pity. She does at least recognize that her problems are all of her own making, even if she isn’t exactly apologetic about that. “‘You really got to see me at my worst,'” she says to Asier near the end of the story. ‘First with the ghosting, now with sleeping with Vlaho behind his back. “This is not who I am.” But even as I’m saying it, I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if, given the chance, I wouldn’t have done it all over again.’
Eileen Chang’s Red Rose, White Rose is the story of Zhenbao, a young man from a poor Chinese family who gets the chance to study and make something of himself. He sets out with a vision of what makes a good man, just as Ivona knew what made a satisfying love: ‘Zhenbao was determined to create a world that was “right” and to carry it with him wherever he went. In that little pocket-sized world of his, he was the absolute master.’ As a student in Scotland, Zhendao meets a young woman, Rose, who falls in love and throws herself at him. Zhenbao extricates himself from the situation without taking advantage of it, a decision whose rightness sits uncomfortably with his dreams of mastery: ‘His behavior that evening filled him with astonishment and admiration, and yet in his heart he felt regret. Without admitting it, he felt quite a lot of regret.’
Returning to China, he stays with a former classmate, Wang Shihong, who promptly goes on an extended business trip, leaving Zhenbao alone with his provocative, teasing wife, Jiaorui. Temptation opens up. Jiaorui is lazy and messy; she behaves like a child and invites him to drop his standards. ‘It was tiresome, no doubt, but when he saw her, he had to flirt. Some women are like that.’ They begin an affair that plunges Zhenbao into the delights of paradoxical feeling: ‘How could it not be shameful? …But feeling that he shouldn’t be doing this only made his happiness more perfect.’ This lasts until Jiaorui declares herself genuinely in love with him, a misstep that she compounds by writing to her husband to confess to the affair and ask for a divorce. Zhenbao is horrified, going so far as to check himself into a hospital, such is his angst and revulsion. He extricates himself from the household and drops Jiaorui entirely.
Zhenbao now allows his mother to arrange a marriage for him, and she chooses Meng Yanli, a young, unformed woman who corresponds to the cultural ideal of submission and obedience. Is Zhenbao happy yet? What do you think? ‘Zhenbao was very disappointed in his wife: having married her for her tractability, he felt cheated.’ Yanli is not an erotic proposition and so Zhenbao frequents prostitutes. Both he and his mother badmouth Yanli, complaining of her dullness and the fact she only gave birth to a daughter. It’s in this new morass of unhappiness that Zhenbao bumps into his old love, Jiaorui on the bus. She’s there with her son, and in the subsequent conversation, she tells Zhenbao that their relationship showed her she had the capacity for real love, and she’s taken this into her new marriage. The encounter affects him deeply, bringing him to poorly understood tears: ‘Shouldn’t she have been the one to weep? It was all wrong, and yet he couldn’t stop. She should be weeping, he should be comforting her. But Jiaorui didn’t comfort him. She sat silently for a long time. Then she asked, ‘Is this your stop?’ After this, it dawns on Zhenbao that Yanli has begun an affair with his tailor and he enters into a decline. ‘He couldn’t smash up the home he’d made, or his wife, or his daughter, but he could smash himself up.’ He takes to drink, neglects his work, and becomes the very opposite of that ‘good man’ he had once envisaged.
So, much like Ivona, Zhenbao enters into his love relationships with fantasies firmly intact and a lot of emotion he fails to understand. Neither the passionate woman nor the virtuous one satisfies him because he can’t live inside his fantasies in a way that stops time. Reality insists on coming to claim him. Like Ivona, Zhenbao welcomes the violence of his emotions without taking ethical responsibility for them: ‘Was it his fault that he always reacted the way he did? Surely that couldn’t be.’ But in a way, what this novella reminded me of most forcefully was Andre Gide’s 1902 novella, L’Immoraliste, in which Michel throws himself into a search for authenticity that he can only find in ugly transgressions, abandoning his wife, Marceline, to fade away from consumption in his absence. You can tell who a man really is, Gide seemed to be saying, by the state of the woman in his life. Zhenbao has a similar taste for transgression. Smashing things up seems to appease the demons he’s carrying around far more than inhabiting the ego-ideal of the good man he sets out for himself, which requires a kind of deadening restraint.
Both Ivona and Zhenbao live their love relationships in an ego-driven way. They need things really badly from their partners, and they can only love them when they are getting what they want. They project their own assumptions and prejudices onto their partners, yet fail to see the other’s desires and fears. Neither loves with freedom and generosity; instead they fall back into dysfunction and consider themselves victims of circumstances beyond their control. And so, by denying their agency, they abuse their personal power, buried as it is under a ton of obscuring emotion. The most critical difference I see between these two stories, is that Eileen Chang wrote her novella with one ironic eyebrow raised, inviting the reader to view Zhenbao’s hot head with cool judgment. Lidije Hilje writes Ivona with no filter, offering up her self-oriented emotional overwhelm, punctuated with therapy-based insights she can’t quite use, as just the way things are.
Reflecting on these two books made me think of Rilke’s vision of ideal love. For Rilke, love is a direction; it is Zeno’s arrow, shot with intent but never quite reaching its target. For when that arrow finally lands, it might easily kill its prey. Towards the end of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, when he recounts his own version of the Prodigal Son, he writes that:
‘Not until long afterwards is he to realize how firmly he had then resolved never to love, in order not to put anyone in the terrible position of being loved. Years later he remembers this and, like other projects, this too became impossible. For he had loved and loved again in his solitude, each time with wasteful expenditure of his whole nature and with unspeakable fear for the liberty of the other. Slowly he learned to penetrate the beloved object with the rays of his passion, instead of consuming it in them.’
Is this the only choice we have in love? That we either want to save people from our idealistic fantasies and our emotional neediness but can’t, so we have to hold ourselves apart in an act of saintly purity? For me, both these options reveal a state which we might term the nightmare of romance. Romance is sustained by not-knowing, by clinging onto fantasies and hopes long after their natural expiry date, and by trying to live a story rather than an inchoate reality. ‘Falling in love,’ writes psychotherapist Adam Phillips, ‘is not a good way of getting to know someone.’ Instead he offers ‘the romance of disillusionment,’ in which those fantasies are just a ‘prelude to a better but diminished – better because diminished – thing; a more realistic appreciation of oneself and the other person.’ We might learn, in other words, through the love of another person, to love reality a little better.
Here’s what I think, which is a kind of version of what Phillips thinks. Where love is concerned, when we hit the rocks, when things get rough, a person must stand and deal. However confusing the outcomes of our actions, however strange and unexpected the responses of loved ones may be, the most important part of love is ethics. For me, if love is worthwhile, it is incorruptible, or perhaps it’s better to say that real love is simply the opposite of corruption. It is a power that refuses to use its strength over the other in a manipulative or self-justificatory way. The power of love, if it is to mean anything at all, is a power exercised over ourselves, holding us to account. Slanting Towards the Sea and Red Rose, White Rose both ably demonstrate what happens when we don’t.
