Stories that start with loss often begin to bloom only when we understand what was found—and so it is in Jan Wolkers’ Turkish Delight, a modern erotic classic for its graphic yet emotional resonance and exposure of passion’s underside. Sam Garrett’s excellent new translation preserves the raw eloquence of a haunted man reflecting on his great love, the initial rants of the artist-narrator—screwing anyone in an attempt to forget the past—softening in their savageries to become a reminiscence on animalistic desire. An abandoned fur jacket, marked with semen, leads to being found by ‘Venetian blonde’ Olga when she picks him up by the side of a road, their immediate attraction escalating to a frenzied fuck, nearly resulting in the loss of their lives in a car crash. What follows, a seemingly idyllic relationship between the new artist-husband and muse-wife, is gradually eroded by the sense that Olga’s sexual power and familial damage is so devouring that it will end up destroying both of them—as it does. The eroticism here is vital but precarious, the buoyant feeling of having everything in another person under constant threat—La petite mort cries out from a place that is both light and dark. When the beginning of the undeniable end comes in the form of Olga’s brazen adultery at a business dinner and the narrator’s response in punching her, we see only two strangers. But with this unravelling there is also a tragic insight: in these situations, we are just beasts pretending to be people, overwhelmed by beauty, sensation, and lust—each weaving a narrative that is unrecognised by the other person. Wolkers considers truth just as elusive in happiness as it is in loss, the complexity of humans best forgotten—remembering instead only what it is like to be animals, content in each other’s glow.