Love Birds Unite in My Mistress' Sparrow Is Dead

The title of the anthology My Mistress’ Sparrow is Dead may be mystifying, but author Jeffrey Eugenides, in his introduction, reminds us that the most famous dead sparrow in literature belonged to Clodia—a.k.a Lesbia—the lover of Catullus. Eugenides believes that Catullus was the first author to write extensively about a single love affair, encapsulating his feelings and experience into a body of poetry. Explaining its link to the anthology he collected and edited himself, Eugenides charmingly quips, “Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.”

At best, the stories are bittersweet rather than mockingly bitter or sappily sweet, running across full spectrums of emotions belonging to a diverse pool of tortured, earnest lovers. Eugenides professes, much as Boccaccio did, that because the anthology offers vicarious experiences of love, it is “a cure for lovesickness and an antidote for adultery.” This is a hefty promise, and it would be a miracle if the book could truly accomplish such a thing.

There are, among the 27 works in the anthology, great stories of great love as well as more low-key stories. What they all have in common is that, save for George Saunders’ standout submission, they’re fairly conventional. Certainly, Eugenides must be given credit for choosing some pretty literature: the anthology includes renowned stories like James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Eileen Chang’s passionate “Red Rose, White Rose,” and Vladimir Nabokov’s elegant “Spring in Fialta,” all of which artistically employ prose, with passages in which one can get lost. Other stories are much more crudely written and they involve fittingly cruder manifestations of love. One might doubt that some stories are love stories at all, but the lack of uniformity is because the anthology’s leaves “love” open to definition. All the actions and musings in each story are contained within 50 pages at the most, giving us impressions without getting too involved, so that the book works as a vast dialogue. Not all of the participants hit the notes that seem right to everyone, so the theme of “love” that unites the stories necessarily becomes a composite concept.

Eugenides appears to have put great effort into varying the types of love included—there is Platonic, erotic, painful, and playful love among others. The anthology works best if it is read in order, as each individual story is placed alongside another that perfectly complements or completely contrasts it. The sexually explicit story is followed by the utterly chaste: Harold Brodkey’s “Innocence,” about a sexual act between two college seniors, precedes Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” about a professor and his wife afflicted with Alzheimer’s. The anthology offers protagonists from all age groups, but the stories written from the perspective of mature people are stronger than those that concern adolescents, whose love naturally has less scope. There are also two stories of homosexual love, one about a gay man and the other about a lesbian. The former is quite wonderful but the latter, by Miranda July, is possibly the weakest in the anthology.

Perhaps in poetry there can be completely positive odes to love, but Eugenides believes that in good stories, the love between two people must be flawed. These are stories of unrequited or partially-requited love. Love blossoms and then it festers. Though there is a relationship, the lover is quite alone and isolated. And even if Eugenides selects stories that gain momentum via trouble in the love affair, they never conclude with triumph.

The cover is graced with a diagram of the heart, which is not the organ responsible for love and which doesn’t resemble the heart symbol associated with sentimental love and Valentine’s day. Rather, it calls to mind frailty and mortality, which are qualities of the love featured in these stories. Still, it’s not enough to let all these fictional characters suffer and rest content with the story as a reward for suffering. After reading My Mistress’ Sparrow is Dead, we are—much like the lovers in the stories­­—a little wiser but still wistfully pining for the real thing.