G: A Novel Book

G. is an extravagant postmodernistic rendering of Don Juan myth - the stone guest included - set before and at the beginning of the Great War.
Falling in love at five or six, although rare, is the same as falling in love at fifty. One may interpret one's feelings differently, the outcome may be different, but the state of feeling and of being is the same.
A pre-condition is necessary for a five-year-old boy to fall in love. He must have lost his parents or, at least, lost any close contact with them, and no foster-parents should have taken their place. Similarly, he must have no close friends or brothers or sisters. Then he is eligible.
Being in love is an elaborate state of anticipation for the continual exchanging of certain kinds of gifts. The gifts can range from a glance to the offering of the entire self. But the gifts must be gifts: they cannot be claimed. One has no rights as a lover - except the right to anticipate what the other wishes to give.
The novel is written in the very unusual manner so it had taken quite a while before I began to surmise that the story is a rather subtle black comedy. The further it goes the more grotesque it turns.
The state of being in love was usually short-lived - except in unhappy cases of unrequited love. Far shorter lived than the nineteenth-century romantic emphasis on the condition would lead us to believe. Sexual passion may have varied little throughout recorded history. But the account one renders to oneself about being in love is always informed and modified by the specific culture and social relations of the time.
With every new amorous victory one loses another tiny part of oneself until in the end one's ego sinks in the abysmal emotional vacuum.