What's Called Love: A Real Romance - Tapa dura

It was the perfect ploy, or so he hoped.
Jim Paul, author of the critically acclaimed Catapult, is desperately in love with L - but she isn't sure. So he arranges a trip to France, hoping that the country of romance, the land of the orange tree, will work its magic upon the object of his desire. If all goes well, she too will be in love by the end and he can ask her to marry him and they'll probably live happily ever after.
But from the moment they arrive in Paris it is obvious that L will have none of it. She seems immune to the spell of France. This was not supposed to happen. What can he do? He's determined to win her back. And so the pursuit is on, across Paris and through the countryside of France.
To lend some perspective to his romantic plight, Paul interweaves his own memoir with stories of other men famous for their passion, some with happy endings, some without. From the nineteenth-century French novelist Stendhal, who, despite - or because of - his constant catastrophes in relationships, considered himself an expert on the subject, to the medieval Italian poet Petrarch and his hopeless devotion to the beautiful Laura, all the way back to a lover in ancient times whose dedication won a place for the Song of Songs in the Bible, Paul finds precedents for and parallels, sometimes humorous, sometimes horrible, to his own roller-coaster romance.
With the same dazzling blend of past and present narrative he used so powerfully in Catapult ("a lilting and graceful piece of writing by a man in love with language," said the Los Angeles Times), Jim Paul captures in What's Called Love the magic of France, the bittersweet ache of yearning, and the boundless, often foolish optimism of lovers through the centuries. It is the timeless story of love lost and won again, viewed both in the present moment - in these days of AIDS and doubt about roles and relationships - and in the context of love's history.
And does he win over the woman of his dreams? You'll find out in the irresistibly suspenseful final pages of What's Called Love.