Tim Krohn Irinas Buch der leichtfertigen Liebe (A Book for Irina) Eichborn Berlin, 2000, 170 pp. ISBN 3-8218-0692-3 After a single meeting, the narrator Timka (who might just be Tim Krohn) has fallen in love with the Russian Irina (who could well be the young woman whose photograph is beside his inside the novel's jacket). Since Timka lives in Switzerland and Irina in Germany he decides to seduce her by fax, writing a novel specially for her, a love story of course, one chapter each night, for nineteen days. As she receives each chapter Irina faxes back her comments (more sentiment needed here, a bit more sex there). The wise and witty story that unfolds through these faxes turns out to be a modern comedy of errors, full of misplaced jealousies and misdirected erotic yearnings. Its main character, Dunja, also named Jeanne, daughter of a French diplomat and a Russian architect and brought up partly in Moscow and partly in France, is married to Ira, who works in films and is temporarily in Moscow, while Dunja stays in Paris. A loving fax she sends her husband goes by mistake to a schoolteacher, Eva, in Sweden, with whom Ira once had an unconsummated affair. Intrigued - and seduced by the beauty of the language - Eva visits Dunja in Paris. This releases a torrent of erotic and romantic dramas and switches the novel into a new variation of the theme of the eternal triangle. Are Dunja and Eva going to have a lesbian affair? Will Ira's jealousy rekindle his desire for Eva? Who wants whom? Where's the border between love and lust? Tim Krohn handles his ingenious story with tremendous skill and a charmingly light touch. The result is an exuberant, playful novel, full of insights into the strange peregrinations of desire in contemporary Europe where no one is quite at home anywhere. By the end of the book, Timka has clearly won Irina's heart. Judging from the cult status accorded to Krohn's previous novel Quatemberkinder, his alter ego is likely to win many readers hearts this time too.