{"product_id":"9781564780300","title":"The Fear of Losing Eurydice","description":"This lyrical novel by one of Mexico's leading women writers explores both desire and the desire to tell a love story. In an idle moment between grading assignments, a French teacher sitting in a cafe in a Caribbean seaport town sketches an island on his white napkin. Like Proust's petite madeleine, the island opens up a host of images: \"Island: the sum of all improbabilities; intoxicating improbability of fiction. Island: image of desire...All the islands formulated by human beings and all islands appearing on the maps comprise a single imaginary archipelago - the archipelago of desire.\" Monsieur N.'s original plan to use a Jules Verne novel about shipwrecked schoolboys as a translation exercise for his pupils becomes an obsession to collect every reference to islands he can find and to meditate on them in a diary of his imaginary travels - his Islandiary. Parallel to this quest is an archetypal love story that he begins writing in his notebook, printed in a narrow column with islands of quotations surrounding it. Voyaging and the quest for islands become a metaphor for the search for paradise, for the island as an imagined place where love achieves perfection. It also becomes a metaphor for writing: \"Every text is an island.\"","brand":"Dalkey Archive Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47055598682352,"sku":"9781564780300","price":8.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781564780300_p0.jpg?v=1763788150","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781564780300","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}