Love by Hanne Orstavik with Rocamadre Criolla Red

  Recently I found myself on the kind of island you only find out here in the Northwest, or maybe somewhere in the Ireland of my dreams: rocky, perpetually gloomy, but all the more beautiful for it. Because of the impending shift in seasons, I took with me a stack of books that had about them an atmosphere of foreboding: inhabited by monsters, a dark house set in a deep wood, and one little novel with a textured cover that was “pleasant to the touch” and had the audacity to call itself simply, Love. An audacity, like the promise of the changing season—Fall—I was certain I was ready for. But when I got to the island it wasn’t gloomy at all. It was hot, fiercely so, in the sun where I sat doing nothing, surrounded by fields of lavender and buzzing bees. I went swimming. I drove into the small town and bought strawberry ice cream and returned to the house where I was staying—which was round and made of wood logs—to find a woodpecker pounding a melodious tune through the core of the house