Learning About Love

During the 1960s Gorda decides to study in Switzerland. She finds her great love - and her utter despair - in a relationship with handsome and intelligent university student Remo. With humor and self-deprecation the author describes the fears and hopes of a young woman on the way to find herself.

Praise for Geertje Suhr's Work

A wonderfully modern novel that offers a unique look at the uncertainties of young love - devastating and funny at the same time. We follow Gorda's attempts to find her place in the world where her main enemy is a foreboding sense of loneliness. She begins her studies at a university but soon changes her major and university (just to change later again). A chance encounter introduces her to Remo, an ambitious Swiss student and her great yet probematic love. 

The novel is multi-layered: fairy-tale motives surface in the secular world of the 1960s; Gorda's observations are razor-sharp, detail-driven, and highly ironic while they are still the observations of an often naive young woman; the narrative oscillates between first-person and third-person points-of-view. Held together through her exploring the ups and downs of love, the novel leaves the reader with a sense of Gorda having become her own person. 

Louise E. Stoehr, Professor

Languages, Cultures, and Communication

Stephen F. Austin State University