In Lucca, Grondahl moves more closely into a woman's experience of life lived in relationships with men than he does in Silence in October; in Silence, he was mainly concerned with a man's realization that, indeed, he had no idea what he was doing to the women in his life until he lost them. In Lucca, the main relationship is one of tentative friendship, with the erotic tension between the principals understood, and yet endlessly deferred for other satisfactions, or, perhaps more accurately, necessities. There's plenty of erotic connection in the pages, but not between Robert, a Copenhagen doctor, and Lucca, his patient who has lost her sight in an accident that occurs in response to her understanding the depths of her husband's betrayal of her. A feeling of contemplation and of storytelling suffuses this novel; if I were composing a formal critical essay, I'd go find that term (some of you out there know it well)...Scheudenfrade? Anyway, you know, the story of the woman who saves her own life night after night by telling her captor a new story. In Lucca, both Robert and Lucca are saving one another and themselves by telling the other their long love-histories; we understand that to create a new life, to keep on going, whether as lovers or as brief companions, each of them must purge themselves of these pasts by confessing them to one another. The effect is subtle, teasing -- will they become lovers? Or is there something that transcends the erotic bond?As in Silence, Grondahl moves backwards and forwards through time with ease; here, the stories are shuffled a bit more chronologically, since there are two characters' perspectives to keep straight. I must leave this writing time soon, so let me summarize my response to Lucca: I plan to read it again. I have a feeling it will hold up well, with new satisfactions, on a second reading. There aren't many higher compliments I can pay a novelist than that.
