A Botanical Garden of Desire: ‘Love Today’ by Maxim Biller

A German journalist, novelist, and crafter of short stories, Maxim Biller is a difficult writer in the sense that his works yield up their meaning only with focused, strenuous effort. This is the best possible sense of a term overused in critical praise, and which usually appears as cover for incomprehension in the face of pseudo-profundities and structural Baroquerie. And this species of difficulty — genuine difficulty — must play at least a part in Mr. Biller’s sad lack of reputation here: If anything engages our literary tastemakers, it’s thundering, galloping banality. Ably translated from the German by the eminent Anthea Bell, Mr. Biller’s stories are, by contrast, cruelly brief. They speak almost entirely in obliquities and allusion. The prose is pellucid, and the themes limited.