The Attraction of Things concerns the entirety of beauty and the
possibility of grace, relayed via obsessions with rare early gramophone
records, the theater, translation, dying parents: all these elements are
relayed in a dizzying strange traffic of cultural artifacts,
friendships, losses, discoveries, and love. Roger Lewinter believes that
in the realm of art, "the distinction between life and death loses its
relevance, the one taking place in the other."
Whereas Story of Love in Solitude is a group of small stories, The
Attraction of Things is a continuous narrative (more or less) of a man
seeking (or stumbling upon) enlightenment.
"The Attraction of Things," states Lewinter, "is the story of a being
who lets himself go toward what attracts him, toward what he
attracts--beings, works, things--and who, through successive encounters,
finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where the bolt of
illumination strikes. This is the story of a letting go toward the
illumination."