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Authors Cara Hoffman, Andre Aciman and Elif Batuman talk about love at the Brooklyn Book Festival

September 17, 2017 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Cara Hoffman reads an excerpt from her novel “Running” at the Brooklyn Book Festival. At left, that's novelist Andre Aciman; novelist Elif Batuman and panel moderator Parul Sehgal are at right. Eagle photo by Lore Croghan
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Sooo many love stories are about a woman being saved by a man or a woman saving a man.

Neither of these story lines appeals to novelist Cara Hoffman.  

“I’m more interested in writing against the idea of heteronormativity,” Hoffman said at the Brooklyn Book Festival Sunday.

Her recently published novel, “Running,” is about love shared by two gay British men and a young American woman who are down and out in 1980s Athens.

“They have their own ethic and deeply held love for one another — for three people,” Hoffman said.

For many people, “things aren’t just a dyad,” she said.
She spoke at a panel called “Broken Pieces: Finding and Losing Love in a Troubled World.”

The other novelists on the panel were Andre Aciman (who wrote “Enigma Variations”) and Elif Batuman (who wrote “The Idiot”).

Aciman said there are two kinds of love stories: Tales of “impossible love” or of wondrous mutual attraction full of “electrical confessions” that turns into “domesticity,” when you do your laundry and fold towels together.

“Writing about domesticity is fundamentally boring,” Aciman said.

Batuman said many readers disapprove of the fact that the young woman who’s the main character of “The Idiot” never gets together with the man she corresponds with via email.

A woman phoned Batuman from Norway and said, “We’re very angry they don’t have sex,” the author recounted.      

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