Is Love a Place? ‘Wander(lust)’ by Jasmine Mah Brings Us Closer to the Answer
Wander(lust), the debut novella of Canadian author Jasmine Mah, simply put, is a written journey through the soul of every hopeless romantic and hopeless wanderer.
In this reflective first-person narrative, Jasmine Mah manages to capture ephemeral glimpses of love stories that read like an impressionist painting, with simultaneously as much and as little detail, color, sound, and feeling as Monet’s Jardin des Tuileries.
Jasmine Mah allows us to experience the memories and aesthetics of people and places, in a way much like “stumbling upon a faded photograph.” These memories in fact, may as well be our own — at least that’s how she makes us feel, punctuating each sentence with nostalgia, lovesickness, and of course, wanderlust.
Mah’s portraits of relationships hit close to home — literally, because the love stories she shares in Wander(lust) seamlessly intertwine people with places near and far from home. Her words leave us questioning if relationships are defined by places, if love itself is a place, and if coming, leaving, and wandering is driven by the people we encounter in those places.
