Love in Excess

Love in Excess Analysis

Love in Excess is a great title for this story, because it captures the flavor of the plot. This plot is complicated and full of plot twists. The characters often end up making bad decisions when they're sexually frustrated, and some of the characters end up on the wrong side of marriage, being rejected (Amena), or worse yet, being accepted as a wife, and then being cheated on (Alovisa and Violetta). Violetta even dies.

And yet, in the end of the novel, new couples are established, and new families are formed. So the novelist is not necessarily condemning the indiscretions of the characters, but rather, everyone's passion weaves a complex web of social art and drama. That complicated web of motives, plots, and schemes is the beauty of the story. Taken individually, many of the stories would be horrific and painful to watch, but in the greater context of all the other horror stories, something beautiful emerges, and when three happy couples are formed at the end of the novel, we are left to wonder if perhaps that end justifies the lying, cheating, and stealing that the characters did in the process.

In one way, the answer there seems to be obviously, no, each character should be responsible for their bad behavior, but that is where passion comes in. Passion makes people do crazy, stupid things, and although the passion brings about some unpleasant problems and situations, it is ultimately that passion that makes couples commit to each other, because they were forced by circumstance to desperately want each other.

Even though love is painful and complicated to find, and even though commitment is even more rare and difficult, the novel shows the complicated dance as a thing of beauty, as a kind of animal mating dance. In other words, it looks at romance with a greater perspective.

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