Vibrations of Love

In one of the bedrooms in the apartment is a whole collection of books in English by the author Barbara Cartland. Either a previous guest was a rabid fan, or the owners of the house bought this pile of books at a flea market for 50 cents.

Either way, these books have given me no end of delight. I have never read a Danielle Steele, but it seems that Barbara Cartland is her Britich counterpart. In the bio section of the book, it says that she has written over 200 of these books. It also says, in every single book, that Ms. Cartland, in 1978 sang An Album of Love Songs with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. This is clearly very important, because it is mentioned many times.

On the back of some of the books is an author photo; Always in an oval frame, the photo is fuzzy and almost candle-lit, with Barabara looking romantic and ethereal in all her Zsa Zsa Gabor, white-haired splendor.

The titles of these books are enough to keep me happy for days on end: “Magic from the Heart” “A Theatre of Love” “No Disguise for Love” “Never Laugh at Love” “Temptation for a Teacher” and my personal favorite “Vibrations of Love”.

The most puzzling title is “The Prince and the Pekingese” which brings up many questions about what kind of a love story this book will chronicle.

After reading Gorky Park, I decided I needed something completely different and decided to read “The River of Love”. This story centers around a rich duke, called The Dasher. He is, as you can imagine, dashing, and a lover and leaver of many women.

On a whim, he decides to take a trip along the Nile to Egypt. There among the ruins, he meets a woman who, it turns out, he knew and loved many lifetimes ago when she was the wife of Pharoh and he was in the Egyptian military. Luckily, now, in this lifetime, since she is not forced to marry a Pharoh, she is free to have a go with The Dasher himself.

What is so delightful about these books is their earnestness. There is nothing tongue in cheek about them, you really get the feeling that good old Barbara is hopelessly romantic and believes with all her heart that love conquers all and somewhere out there, men like The Dasher are waiting for us all.

The writing, of course, is not good, and she seems to not only be in love with love, but also in love with dashes and ellipses. She uses them—everywhere. Inexplicably, in the first half of the book she used dashes exclusively, and in the second half of the book she suddenly changed to ellipses.

It is the placement of these dashes that is a bit odd. She winds--- up breaking---up sentences in strange----ways. So our Egyptian princess will say things like: “I wouldn’t want—to eat--the---bagel with---out cream---cheese.” Or something romantic like that.. “Now---that we can---love each oth---er I want to make---sure Dash----er is my dash—ing--love foreve----rrrrr.”

Ah well, I can mock all I want but let’s face it, good old Barbara published 6,000 books and probably had more money than God so she was---laughing---all the---way to the--- bank.