Having abandoned his wife, life, family, and homeland, the narrator of
My Year of Love flees to Paris to begin his life over again, and finds himself having to rescue himself from the freedom he believed he desired: ‘I would never have believed that freedom could be a form of captivity, freedom can be like a primeval forest or like the ocean, you can drown in it or disappear and never, never ever find your way out again . . .’ With a combination of confession, complaint, and sensual detail, a break is made with the narrator’s past, and through writing this very novel the days of his year of love find an order and expression.