An epistolary novel traces the growing passion a young woman harbors for a middle-aged painter she has never met through a series of erotically charged letters. "Somewhere under my skin, where the flesh turns to fluid, I see your picture Sans titre 2.22 X 2, hanging in the Gallerie Y in Paris," announces a young woman named Delphine in a postcard she sends to famed painter Jean-Luc Foreur. Foreur replies, and thus begins a correspondence that, as these opening lines suggest, grows more sensual even as the correspondents probe (lightly) various intellectual issues. This sprightly little confection can be read in a sitting, and while it is not exactly profound, it does afford some mind-tweaking pleasure for its duration. And there's a satisfying twist at the end. This first novel by Hermann, editor of an art book publisher, has evidently done well abroad. For larger collections.DBarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Delphine Hav is a young, intelligent, and lonely woman who writes a fan letter to Jean-Luc Foreur after seeing one of his paintings hanging in a gallery. Touched by her eloquence and thoughtfulness, he writes back to her and so begins 18 months of correspondence that gradually increases in emotional intensity, bares heart and soul, and reveals some of their deepest thoughts and feelings. Written as a romantic love story--two people falling in love, miles apart and never having met--the novel at times falls short. Delphine's need to meet Jean-Luc face-to-face borders on obsessive, and some passages reveal not two people passionately in love but two lonely, desperate people confusing love with the desire to connect to another person. The entire story is told through their letters, and Herman is good at keeping the letters honest and interesting and her characters real and vulnerable. There is an element of tragedy to the plot, but the unexpected twist at the end makes reading the novel very worthwhile. Carolyn Kubisz Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Hermann debuts with a slighter-than-air story about unfulfilled love—told in letters—that's said to be a literary sensation abroad. Could be.In Denmark, a woman named Delphine Hav writes a letter to a well-known French painter named Jean-Luc Foreur, telling him that a painting of his she saw in Paris so impressed her that it has stayed with her, remaining “Somewhere under my skin, where the flesh turns to fluid . . . .” Jean-Luc writes back saying he knows exactly how she feels, since the same thing happens to him with Beethoven and Walt Whitman—and thus is born a love-by-mail affair that all told will flame on for a year and a half. Inexplicably, not until well after things get quite considerably heated (“Cells are tingling in me. They are all tingling: the cells in my skin, in the mucus membranes and in my brain. I am taking leave of my senses, as they say. I am itching all over”) is there any mention whatsoever-from either party-of the desirability of, well, getting together sometime. When the yearned-for proposal does come up, from Delphine, it either gets shelved in the most preposterous of ways (“But I lead a busy life. I've got exhibitions in Basle, in Paris, and next month from April 14th to May 5th I am exhibiting in a large New York gallery”) or, still more absurdly, gives way to long passages of schoolish art-talk (“Perhaps . . . what enchants me is the paradox; all this sensuality, this eroticism, and in a Catholic church! I'm talking of course about Bernini's Saint Theresa”). What'll ever happen? Let it be said that once all is explained, lovers of O. Henry will be more pleased than those who find the old American storyteller to be at best a giant among the very miniature indeed. A tale of unhappy love that's young, breathy, far-fetched—and very, very slight.. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.