Analyzes the irony which characterizes the point of view in Saul Bellow's TA. Describes how through a mock allegory, on the way to a cemetery, a lonely man reaches towards the concretization of a Platonic attachment to a woman he once lost and found again, the unforgettable icon of first love. Describes its romantic mode, its parody of courteous love, and the bittersweet fable which barely hides its complex and paradoxical undertones. An intellectual bias, astutely hidden under the quotidian, concentrated in the dual phrase "actual affinity," introduces a baroque renewal of the semantics of love, when passionate love, seen through the "geometry" of Spinoza combined with The Elective Affinities of Goethe acquires what we define as a Bellovian touch. In an atmosphere where the ethereal world of the fin amor collides with contemporary prosaism, romanticism, revisited today, descends into the streets of Chicago.