The story is much better told in Helen Waddell’s deservedly popular 1933 classic Peter Abelard.
One of history’s great loves is reexamined by a former French publishing executive.
Here, the tale of Heloise and Abelard is narrated by the fictional William of Oxford, an itinerant young copyist whose wanderings take him, in 1116, to the abbey of Fontrevault and two life-altering encounters. The first is with eminent scholar-teacher-theologian Peter Abelard, who has by his 40th year become both revered and reviled for the matchless rational powers that take the forms of “his audacity and his blasphemous comparisons.” The second is with the beautiful Heloise, niece and ward of powerful Canon Fulbert—with whom William falls instantly and unrequitedly in love. Over the succeeding years, repressing his yearnings, William becomes Abelard’s devoted disciple and a pained witness to the great teacher’s passionate appropriation of the willing Heloise, herself possessed of an intellect as powerful and hungry as is the romantic desire Abelard stirs in her. As William moves in and out of Abelard’s orbit, the famous story is told: of the lovers’ “secret marriage” and the birth of their son; Canon Fulbert’s violent revenge (the castration of his niece’s seducer); Abelard’s distracted transformation from argumentative rebel into “a man of God who has been punished but purified”; and the years of separation, ending with Abelard’s death and Heloise’s renunciation of the world as she becomes a respected abbess. Audouard has researched his materials impeccably and constructed a sometimes affecting but otherwise middling narrative. The problem is William. Audouard’s emphasis on his emotions distracts attention from his lovers—and William’s arbitrary journeys and meetings never become anything but storytelling strategies. Only at end, when the celebrated exchange of letters from which the world knows of Heloise and Abelard is finally acknowledged, do we understand why Audouard created this really unnecessary character.
The story is much better told in Helen Waddell’s deservedly popular 1933 classic Peter Abelard.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-15286-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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