The Reddest Rose

The deceptively simple through-line for Swedish media personality and activist Liv Strömquist’s The Reddest Rose is the question: Why does Leonardo DiCaprio date an endless string of 20-something models? Her answer — in the form of this collection of well-researched, humorous comics essays — tracks how philosophers and artists, from the Ancient Greeks to Beyoncè, conceptualized romantic love. Strömquist’s signature interlocutor characters, drawn in a zine-y, flat, blocky style, ask each other questions and offer sharp commentary as they guide readers throughout history and the change in societies’ values, from showing love/loving to getting love/being loved. (Poet Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle — who was so love-stricken by a man taking off his glasses that she believed they viewed dolphins together in another dimension — lends the book its title.) Lord Byron, Socrates, Byung-Chul Han, Ezra Pound, Slavoj Žižek, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Ariadne, and many others make cameos. For the first time in English, in The Reddest Rose, Strömquist wonders: in a rationalist, consumerist world, can romantic love survive?