A tale of love, loss and the yearning to reconnect

MOST contemporary novelists tend to treat love, if they treat it at all, with a degree of wary irony. This is not because there is something innately shifty about contemporary novelists but rather because sex, love, marriage and divorce are, in many ways, no longer the solemn, consequential, life-shattering matters they were to Anna Karenina or Jane Eyre. Hence, a certain self-mockery tends to seep in: Indeed, without it, many a modern love story would seem either hopelessly naive or ridiculously self-important.

Danish writer Jens Christian Grondahl proves an intriguing exception to the general trend. Here is a highly intelligent and accomplished writer -- an essayist, playwright and author of 12 novels -- who probes the perplexities of romantic love with a gravitas seldom found in this frenetic age. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that the milieu he portrays in his novel “Lucca” is emphatically modern (or, if you will, postmodern): today’s Europe, a world in which sex is casual, relationships transitory and divorce commonplace. Yet the power of love, the significance with which people invest it, the joy of possessing it and the pain of losing it are shown to be as real and momentous as ever.

“Lucca” begins when a 32-year-old woman, severely injured in a car crash, is brought into the emergency room of a small-town hospital not far from Copenhagen. Lucca Montale (Danish, despite her Italian name) is an actress, wife and mother. Her husband, Andreas Bark, is a promising playwright.

In many ways, they once seemed to be -- and for a long time felt they were -- an ideal couple: talented, attractive and beginning to enjoy a heartening degree of success in their careers.

But it also seems likely that the reason Lucca drove her car the wrong way up an entrance ramp straight into a truck was that Andreas had just told her he was leaving her and their young son. As if this were not sad enough, the accident has left her blind.

Robert, the doctor in attendance, finds himself drawn into Lucca and Andreas’ lives. He too has suffered the breakup of what he once believed was a good marriage: “Monica [his ex-wife] was a stranger again. She was friendly ... and her new husband was equally friendly. That was how it turned out. As simply as that. She had stopped loving him and started to love someone else....”

It would also have been simple for Robert to find consolation in the form of an attractive librarian: “ ... she looked at him out of her large, appealing eyes as they sipped their brandy. It was all so obvious, everything arranged without a single word, and he lost the urge to have anything to do with her.” But love, although easy, isn’t simple.

Unintentionally, the emotionally benumbed Robert finds himself in the uncomfortable role of confidant to Andreas, who tells him how he has fallen in love with a Swedish production designer -- and out of love with his wife: “He felt he could not share his innermost self with Lucca. She didn’t understand him, so she didn’t know how to bring out those depths that he could hardly explain.... Andreas did not know how to describe what it was [the production designer] did to him.... It was as if she touched something inside him, deep inside. As if she made some string vibrate, a string he didn’t know he possessed.”

At the hospital, Lucca (who refuses to let Andreas visit her) begins to forge a special relationship with Robert, who visits her daily. The form that this new relationship takes is, in effect, the form -- and substance -- of this novel: alternating third-person narratives of Robert’s and Lucca’s separate love lives, which Grondahl portrays with subtlety and keen insight.

In Lucca’s case, the quest for love has involved her in a series of affairs, each of which seemed at first to be the real thing: “It happened every time, while everything was still only circling movement and significant glances. A disconnected second where it became so strange, so hazardous, this game that was always played blindly, with bodies as pawns. But then she closed her eyes and kissed [her lovers], amazed at her own haste. She always hastened to kiss them before she began to doubt too much.... There had to be more beginnings if something was to come of it one day....”

What is this “something”? The special vibration that Andreas has sensed with his Swedish paramour? A connection between “innermost” beings? What does this innermost self consist of and how can one know if it -- or the connection -- is real?

As an actress, Lucca has sometimes felt that “the innermost core of her personality was a hollow space in which she could be anything at all ... the feeling sometimes terrified her and at other times overwhelmed her with its freedom.” Robert, for his part, once thought he knew his wife, Monica: “He knew more about her than anyone else, but it still wasn’t her, he thought now.... Only the outward echo of her being, the reflections in her tone of voice and her manner, all the little quirks and traits of behavior.”

Although it may no longer be fashionable to talk of existentialism, for the characters in this novel, love is an existential matter, deeply entwined with questions of individual consciousness, being and nothingness and how to live one’s life.

As Robert and Lucca retrace the personal histories that have led them to this crucial juncture, one thing becomes crystal clear: Despite outward changes in society and culture, the need to connect, perchance to love, remains as constant as the sense that one has an inner self.