Love among the reviews
Easy-going existentialist with passion for Kafka seeks pulchritudinous postmodernist for urgent discussions. Please send photo and a brief critique of The Metamorphosis
From next month literate would-be lovers will have a new outlet when the London Review of Books, that most cerebral of organs, starts a personal column for its readers. For the first time, cheerless Cartesians, lustful Lacanians and soulless Schopenhauerians will have a noticeboard to display their less philosophical thoughts.
According to the LRB’s David Rose, the announcement of the service has already attracted a healthy – and of course highly literate – response. “We expected the ads to be mainly from men,” he said. “They are mostly academics, artists, writers – the general creative types who read the LRB. They make very entertaining reading. One asks to meet a ‘contortionist who plays the trumpet’.”
The aim of including Personals is to expand the classified section by 50%. “I don’t think the ads will be as coded as in magazines like Time Out,” said Rose. “There will be lots of scope for poetry lovers, and we are considering asking people to list their five favourite authors ro make matching easier.”
The LRB’s move should not be seen as dumbing down or crass commercialisation. There is a long tradition linking literature, loneliness and love, the most famous example being the long-distance affair between Helene Hanff and Frank Doel, which was celebrated in her book 84 Charing Cross Road and in a film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.
The fortnightly magazine, which to date has been best known for reviews almost as long as the book being considered, is keen to avoid associations with less salubrious messages of love. “There must be a point at which we say no,” says Rose. “We won’t take anything pornographic, and we won’t be running ads for chat lines or dominatrixes. That would lower the tone of the magazine.”
American literary magazines, where sex and structuralism have always been easy bedfellows, take a rather laxer line. The New York Review of Books has a Personals column (“Looking for lovely, vivacious lady; must be alive to action-oriented political discourse, left side, because organising world revolution is my life”), but a rather wilder Personal Services column, where “Ivy League-educated goddesses” offer all manner of intimate activities that are not on the syllabus at Yale.
← St Ted's
No regrets as Rushdie reappears in public →
