Daan Borrel – Sometimes Love Is This
Daan Borrel – Sometimes Love Is This
Read our sample translation of Sometimes Love Is This
About the Book
After kissing a man who is not her partner, Daan Borrel sits in a room in Berlin and writes a letter to her boyfriend. The letter ends up becoming an introspective meditation on desire, intimacy and sexuality. Should we be allowed to explore and indulge every desire? And how do we combine that with our need for intimacy? Women are free to pursue their own desires nowadays, but what if they have never learnt to deal with such freedom? Or are men just as bad in that respect? And what actually creates desires, the mind or the body? To what extent are they shaped by stories?
In Sometimes Love is This Daan Borrel goes in search of answers. She focuses on enlightened thinkers, literature, eastern philosophy, female pop singers and films, and indeed on her own body and the women who raised it. The book offers an intimate glimpse inside the head and abdomen of a person trying to understand every nuance of her own sexuality.
It felt like a real triumph, during those first few days, I remember. As if I had been able to segregate physical and mental conjunction. As if I had gained another life experience, had been able to fly home a more complete human being. Fly home to you. That you would get something from this as well, indirectly. I was under the honest impression that I had the right to find out what else, besides your lover, I was as a sexual, longing individual. A lover who had just moved in with her one and only, and to whom it was becoming oppressively clear which scenario was being charted in the process. Even though I don’t believe I saw this so clearly at the time. All I felt was the right to greater experience, something women of the world can allow themselves on holiday once or twice, only to pick up their quiet lives once back home again. In myself I saw someone who had taken the liberty to have another go at seducing someone. Testing whether I still had the knack, something like that. With hindsight, incredibly self-centred.
Author
Daan Borrel (b. 1990) studied literature at the University of Amsterdam and then became a freelance journalist. She writes about culture and sexuality for dailies including NRC Handelsblad, De Corres-pondent and Het Parool. In 2017, along with family doctor and sexologist Peter Leusink, she compiled the collection This Is Not About Sex. Sometimes Love is This is her debut.
Additional book information
- Novel
- ISBN 9789403105802
- Number of pages: 208
- World rights: De Bezige Bij
- Price: € 19,99
- English sample translation available