A more pleasing title could hardly be found: "Love Marriage" sounds like a tearjerker, like the Romeo and Juliet story of an unconditional love, which happily overcomes all obstacles that stand in its way and, unlike Shakespeare, then ends with the ringing of bells .
But with Monica Ali you have to read this title twice to gradually understand the abyss lurking in it: Her novel fearlessly explores whether and how the two halves of the word that the compound noun forces together will ever find each other and what love has to do with marriage at all Has.
To this end, he begins at that point in the plot where stories usually end: with the planning of a wedding.
Yasmin is 26, a resident, daughter of a Bengali immigrant family in contemporary London and engaged to Joe, her college friend and hospital colleague.
The family background of the two could not be more different: Joe, thirty years old, comes from the well-off, left-liberal north London, where he lives with his single mother, a feminist activist and expert on liberated sex (the latter is anathema to Yasmin's parents; even French kissing changes them the TV off).
But he is a doctor, just like Yasmin's father, and therefore still acceptable for her traditional family as a son-in-law,
An irreconcilable couple
The first major scene of the novel plays the opposites with pleasure.
Joe's mom hosts dinner so the would-be in-laws can finally get to know each other casually.
Yasmin's mother insists on bringing stacks of Tupperware to present her home-made Bengali specialities, which are also suitable for the big wedding feast.
This in turn gives Joe's mother the appropriate idea of preserving the supposed family tradition by celebrating the marriage with the imam according to Islamic custom - not at all in the interests of those involved.
But what begins here like a conventional multicultural clash comedy soon takes quite unexpected turns.
Near the end of the novel, all the certainties it started with are shattered.
Yasmin is faced with the question of whether love ever means anything other than a mere hormonal reaction.
And there has been no talk of marriage for a long time.
It is thanks to Ali's art of storytelling that she is able to convey the drastic story of disintegration that her novel unfolds in an equally relentless and entertaining manner as a definite gain: gain not only in self-knowledge for its protagonists, but also in knowledge of the world for the readership, if they don't enough that everything conforms to the beautiful pattern of a love affair that ends with a wedding ring.
At best, this may be good for fiction.
Like the novel, one of the earlier chapters bears the title “Love Marriage”.
In it we read that Yasmin once wrote a short story when she was young about how her parents met in Calcutta: her father was a poor street boy from the village who, with discipline and ambition, worked his way up to become a chauffeur and dreams of studying medicine,
the mother from a wealthy family, the two are nevertheless a couple in love.
That was how the encounter itself had always been told to her.
But when she reads the story, highly praised by the teacher at school, to her father, he brusquely rejects her – “You wrote about things you have no idea about.
Which you can have absolutely no idea about” – and flatly declares all creative writing to be a lie.