This is a well titled book. The nine stories in this collection all deal with different aspects of love, often but not always with a sexual element. And yes, it is brutal. Not usually in a physical sense but emotionally.
These stories are about relationships. They highlight the dreadful everyday things that people do to each other. More depressingly they show what we do to ourselves. The fact that all the protaganists are women doesn't make the stories any less universal.
The first lines of the first story give a good flavour of the book as a whole:
"Beatrice told Shipley she would sleep with him, and then she passed out. When she awoke the next morning, he said he'd gone ahead without her."It's both funny and pathetic at the same time.
That sums up most of the characters in the book: funny and pathetic. Erian's people are usually losers, often self-destructive. She mixes comedy and pathos so well that I really can't decide whether the book cheered me up or brought my down. The writing is classy and the characters completely believable. I have no idea how old Erian is, however the stories indicate a strong degree of life experience perhaps even world-weariness.
One area where Erian does seem to lack strength is endings. Don't worry, these aren't pointless slice of life snippets, they really are stories. It's just that the endings could do with being a little better defined. Fortunately there is enough narrative drive to carry you through in most cases.
Erian's real strength is in painting a whole canvass with a few carefully chosen brush strokes. This is also her downfall.
Why is it that so many short story writers don't seem to know when to stop? A short story is by definition short, it doesn't need to be padded out as if it were striving to be a novella.
The initial stories in "The Brutal Language of Love" were fairly short and excellent. Then as the book progresses the stories get generally longer - and less interesting. At sixteen pages the first story is exactly the right length. At twenty-five pages the title story drags.
The result is a book that grabbed me immediately but ended up leaving me disappointed.
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