Simon Van Booy indulges all the worst excesses of creative-writing program-style prose.

Everything is profound.

Everything is a metaphor.

Everything has to be described in turgid detail that is ornamental but meaningless.

I can't stand this kind of writing. It is like a bimbo: pretty but empty. ( )

I began to love this book, even though winter is far away... Ironically, Bombay (Mumbai), the city I reside in, doesn't actually have an elaborate winter season. Winter here is similar to European summer. But love somehow manages to visit and leave me from time to time. Let me focus on the object of my literary love at the moment.


Love begins in Winter

In the book ‘Love begins in winter’, the season is a metaphor for the state of mind of its protagonists. Love finds two strangers in the midst of their blues.

Rarely has text induced goose bumps on my rigid skin... 'Love begins in winter' managed to do just that. A short simple story where the moody poetic writing style makes the story special. At the very start of the book, the protagonist is playing his cello to the audience. Simon Van Booy elaborates that single line in such a way that the reader can actually feel every emotion the protagonist feels while playing his music. Nothing much happens in the book in terms of a plot and yet so much keeps playing on minds of the characters that it doesn't matter whether there is a plot or not. This is one of the rare love stories that touch the reader with it's raw emotional power without being melodramatic.

Love begins in Winter is one of the five books in this series of stories by Simon Van Booy


Some of the gems from the book:

Grief is a country where it rains and rains but nothing grows.

Music is what language once aspired to be.

The only authentic memories find us—like letters addressed to someone we used to be.

Music, paintings, sculptures, and books of the world are mirrors in which people see versions of themselves.

Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us.
( )

Easy to read and entertaining collection of short stories. ( )

Dedication: If you are not here, then why are you everywhere? ( )

Much too twee and precious. The author describes himself as a "decadent flâneur," which I think is part of the problem. ( )