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Guest
Guest
I know most of these authors and their favourite love stories, perhaps they'll inspire further reading here. Myself, I just couldn't 'get' Duras' book though I like Cisneros. Nor do I get Hornby though I loved Love in the Time of Cholera. Byatt is too academic for me but I'm intrigued by her choice. I guess without thinking too much I'd choose Turgenev's First Love and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as fave stories of love. What about you? - Perdita
Lovestruck - 10 authors choose their favorite love stories of all time Wash. Post, February 13, 2005
Sandra Cisneros
I was 30 the summer I met Marguerite Duras's The Lover. This was in Mexico City, 1985. I was supposed to be finishing a book of poetry. The truth is, I was fleeing the man who had created and then destroyed me. In a few months Mexico City would be destroyed too, by earthquake. In a few years, Emiliano Zapata would rise from the dead in Chiapas. But this was before.
Without knowing what lay ahead, I boarded a bus south to San Cristobal and disappeared into the fury of jungle and the fury of story that is Duras's novel.
The story begins in a second-class bus just like the one I was riding that day, but in colonial French Vietnam. A young girl crosses a river and then crosses color and class lines in love. I had done much the same in my disastrous affair.
I read through several states, and finally, on the perilous mountain road beyond Tuxtla Gutierrez, I found myself at the book's finale, when the lover, unlike my lover, declares his love for her. After all and everything. After their lives were almost over. He still loved her, he would always love her, he said.
Then it was as if I'd been poured back into the shell of my body. And I became aware of the heat of the bus seat sticking to my back and thighs, and the hoarse grinding of the bus gears as it lurched us forward, and the snoring of my bus companions and the drowsy jungle scent.
To say I was overwhelmed wouldn't be precise. With events quivering before and after me, and me in that nowhere and everywhere called my life, I was, as one would say in Spanish, "emotioned."
I had read the novel in Spanish, the language of my lover. And now the last sentence, in Spanish, reverberated inside me like a live thing. I wanted to slide the dusty bus windows down and shout in that language to all the savage beauty of the world -- "He said he would love her until death, did you hear? ¡Hasta la muerte!"
Sandra Cisneros is the author of "The House on Mango Street"; her most recent novel is "Caramelo."
Jonathan Franzen
I read Scott Spencer's Endless Love exactly once, 10 years ago, and it stays with me like the most vivid dream I ever had. Even now, just picking up the book and holding it in my hands gives me a racing heart and a queasy feeling, as if I'm the protagonist, David Axelrod, and I'm about to see my teenage love, Jade Butterfield, for the first time since I burned down her house and was put in a mental hospital as a condition of my parole. David's obsession with Jade is overwhelming in the way of a black hole's gravitational field, deforming the very geometry of space in its vicinity, forcing every life around it (even my own life, as a reader) to converge in a dreamlike nexus wherein the worst thing that could happen is also the best thing that could happen. David will be released from the hospital, and he will find his way back to the very well-hidden Jade, and she will love him again the way she used to. The yoked squalor and infinity of adolescent love: No writer ever nailed it better than Spencer did here.
Jonathan Franzen is the author of the National Book Award-winning "The Corrections."
A.S. Byatt
I first read E. Arnot Robertson's Four Frightened People when I was a young girl, and desperate to know about love. Of all the books I read, this gave me the most powerful, exciting and satisfying idea both of sex and of love. It is the story of a woman doctor on a nightmare journey across the Malayan jungle. She is fleeing a ship with bubonic plague, in the company of her handsome cousin Stewart, a dry, ironic linguist named Arnold Ainger and an excessively talkative silly older woman. The danger and strain bring Judy and Ainger together. It's almost the best description I know of reciprocated desire and real intelligent respect of two people for each other. It's all the better for using much less explicit sexual description than would be inevitable now. The imagination is set to work, and works. (The novel was published in 1931 and became a bestseller.) It also has one of the best and most unexpected endings to a drama that I've read -- this takes place in Simpson's in the Strand, that most English and restrained of restaurants.
A.S. Byatt is the author of "Possession" and "The Matisse Stories."
Ned Rorem
How long does love last? people ask, meaning the Romantic Love of passion and heartbreak. Answer: three years. Of the classical Great Loves -- Romeo and Juliet, Pelléas and Mélisande, Tristan and Isolde (the love potion this last pair inadvertently shared was meant to wear off after three years) -- the protagonists all die young. One can't imagine them as middle-aged folks putting their kids through school.
Yet all love is eternal, for love exists outside of time and is obsessive and selfish. The French call it égoisme à deux. One person over the decades can declare "I will love you forever" to 30 different people and mean it every time.
My own literary concern with love began in adolescence when I read the modern classics of Europe: Gide's Counterfeiters and Mann's Death in Venice, both about the unrequited love of an older man for a boy; Pierre Louÿs's Aphrodite, about an Alexandrian courtesan; Cocteau's Enfants terribles, about a brother and sister. I memorized these books and, in a way, relived them.
My longest "affair" was with Jim Holmes. We lived together for 33 years until his death in 1999. The physical lust faded after the first 36 months. Then our rapport bloomed into shared concerns -- musical, political, educational -- which were surely broader than "mere" friendship. Indeed, we signed our occasional notes to each other: "With more than love."
Ned Rorem is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and the author of "The Paris Diary," "The New York Diary" and "Knowing When to Stop."
Susan Isaacs
Edward Rochester is my kind of guy: intelligent, complex, sardonic and bored by rich, beautiful women. But what makes Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre my favorite love story is not only her couple's mutual passion but Jane Eyre's character. Here is a female protagonist who does not lose her moral compass, whose brain does not turn to fondant the moment she becomes enraptured.
From childhood on, Jane stands up to injustice. Once she discovers that Rochester is irrevocably married (albeit to a madwoman living in the attic), she leaves him at the altar. Rather than do wrong, she is willing to turn her back on the man she loves, on civilization, and face the wild.
Jane Eyre's life often seems like a long road comprising mostly rough patches. Yet she doesn't view herself as a victim. Instead, she does the best with what she has, and has room not just for herself, but for others. What a brave dame! Ernest Hemingway famously said courage is grace under pressure. He must have been reading Charlotte Brontë.
Susan Isaacs is the author of "Close Relations"; her most recent novel is "Any Place I Hang My Hat."
James Hynes
John Crowley's magnificent fantasy novel Little, Big is also an epic family saga, the sort with a family tree in the front, and the bright red line that runs through that tree is the happy marriage of Smoky Barnable and Daily Alice Drinkwater. Their youthful courtship in the first chapter captures better than any other account I know the giddy mixture of joy and incredulity of a young man in love, that lucky-bastard feeling of disbelief that this stunning, ethereal and even wise creature could possibly fall in love with a toad like me. And even more miraculously, this love survives through children, infidelity, aging and the end of the world as we know it. In the saddest and most beautiful ending I've ever read, one of them dies and the other (because this is a fantasy) becomes royalty among the fairies, and the survivor preserves the memory of their anniversary as a summer's day "of such brilliance, a morning so new, an afternoon so endless, that the whole world would remember it ever after."
James Hynes is the author of "The Lecturer's Tale" and "Kings of Infinite Space."
Paul Theroux
When I read recently that Arthur Miller, nearly 90, was engaged in a dalliance with an artistic woman in her mid-thirties ("I had thought he was dead!" she confided to an interviewer), my mind raced back with pleasure to one of the last short stories V.S. Pritchett ever wrote, "On the Edge of the Cliff."
Set on the Cornish cliffs, this unexpected love story about a man in his seventies and a woman of 25 is only glancingly sexual, yet it is vividly physical. The man's young lover sees him in the morning: "His glasses were off and he had finished shaving and he turned a face savaged to the point of saintliness by age, but with a heavy underlip that made him look helplessly brutal. She laughed at the soap in his ears."
Later, the old man bumps into a former mistress: She too has a young lover. Noticing the old man's reveries, his young lover asks him what he's thinking about.
"He was going to say, 'At my age one is always thinking about death,' but he said, 'You.' "
Paul Theroux is the author of "The Mosquito Coast" and "Dark Safari"; his most recent book is "The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro and Other Stories."
Gail Godwin
Anton Chekhov wrote "The Lady with the Little Dog" in 1899, when his tuberculosis forced him to live out his winters in "the hot Siberia" of Yalta while his future wife, the young actress Olga Knipper, stayed in Moscow to star in his plays. The point of view throughout this extraordinary and unforgettable story is that of Dmitri Gurov, a cynical, married philanderer, as he seduces a young married woman he has seen walking with her little Pomeranian by the sea at Yalta. ("And only now when his head was grey he had fallen properly, really in love -- for the first time in his life.") In the process, Gurov minutely observes his whole life, and yet to the end he remains a mystery to himself. More than any other love story I know, "Lady" illustrates how no love affair is ever generic: It is as peculiar and irreplaceable as its set of lovers.
Gail Godwin is the author of "The Finishing School" and "The Good Husband"; her next novel, "Queen of the Underworld," and her memoir, "The Making of a Writer," will be published simultaneously next year.
Nick Hornby
I know it's everybody's favorite book of all time, but reading Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude nearly killed me; it certainly did a good job of convincing me that magical realism wasn't ever going to be my thing. ("Hold on . . . people can just do what they want? Whenever they want to do it?") So I have no idea why I read Love in the Time of Cholera shortly afterward. I was in my twenties, and I dimly recall that it seemed to me at the time that I was going to be in love with the same unattainable woman for all eternity, and then I found a novel dealing explicitly and perfectly with this unhappy state. My own misery lasted just long enough to enable me to finish the novel and weep; if you find yourself in a similar place, pop a copy in the post to the relevant party today. It can't do any harm -- unless a little old man or lady knocks on your door in 50 years' time, expecting long-deferred and rapturous sexual union.
Nick Hornby is the author of "High Fidelity" and "How to Be Good."
Kay Redfield Jamison
In the months following my husband's death, I reread three of my favorite love stories: Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam. All deal with love, death and the struggle to find that which endures. All grapple with doubt and faith. Of the three, Tennyson's beautiful and complex elegy affected me the most deeply, perhaps because his pain was so raw and his description of loss so real: the mourning, and then the dreadful missing; the "wild unrest that lives in woe"; the nights and seasons that pass unshared. Yet hope prevails -- despair cannot indefinitely "live with April days, / Or sadness in the summer moons" -- and love, however altered by time and circumstance, remains: "[The years] they went and came, / Remade the blood and changed the frame,/ And yet is love not less, but more."
Kay Redfield Jamison is a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author of "An Unquiet Mind"; her most recent book is "Exuberance."
Lovestruck - 10 authors choose their favorite love stories of all time Wash. Post, February 13, 2005
Sandra Cisneros
I was 30 the summer I met Marguerite Duras's The Lover. This was in Mexico City, 1985. I was supposed to be finishing a book of poetry. The truth is, I was fleeing the man who had created and then destroyed me. In a few months Mexico City would be destroyed too, by earthquake. In a few years, Emiliano Zapata would rise from the dead in Chiapas. But this was before.
Without knowing what lay ahead, I boarded a bus south to San Cristobal and disappeared into the fury of jungle and the fury of story that is Duras's novel.
The story begins in a second-class bus just like the one I was riding that day, but in colonial French Vietnam. A young girl crosses a river and then crosses color and class lines in love. I had done much the same in my disastrous affair.
I read through several states, and finally, on the perilous mountain road beyond Tuxtla Gutierrez, I found myself at the book's finale, when the lover, unlike my lover, declares his love for her. After all and everything. After their lives were almost over. He still loved her, he would always love her, he said.
Then it was as if I'd been poured back into the shell of my body. And I became aware of the heat of the bus seat sticking to my back and thighs, and the hoarse grinding of the bus gears as it lurched us forward, and the snoring of my bus companions and the drowsy jungle scent.
To say I was overwhelmed wouldn't be precise. With events quivering before and after me, and me in that nowhere and everywhere called my life, I was, as one would say in Spanish, "emotioned."
I had read the novel in Spanish, the language of my lover. And now the last sentence, in Spanish, reverberated inside me like a live thing. I wanted to slide the dusty bus windows down and shout in that language to all the savage beauty of the world -- "He said he would love her until death, did you hear? ¡Hasta la muerte!"
Sandra Cisneros is the author of "The House on Mango Street"; her most recent novel is "Caramelo."
Jonathan Franzen
I read Scott Spencer's Endless Love exactly once, 10 years ago, and it stays with me like the most vivid dream I ever had. Even now, just picking up the book and holding it in my hands gives me a racing heart and a queasy feeling, as if I'm the protagonist, David Axelrod, and I'm about to see my teenage love, Jade Butterfield, for the first time since I burned down her house and was put in a mental hospital as a condition of my parole. David's obsession with Jade is overwhelming in the way of a black hole's gravitational field, deforming the very geometry of space in its vicinity, forcing every life around it (even my own life, as a reader) to converge in a dreamlike nexus wherein the worst thing that could happen is also the best thing that could happen. David will be released from the hospital, and he will find his way back to the very well-hidden Jade, and she will love him again the way she used to. The yoked squalor and infinity of adolescent love: No writer ever nailed it better than Spencer did here.
Jonathan Franzen is the author of the National Book Award-winning "The Corrections."
A.S. Byatt
I first read E. Arnot Robertson's Four Frightened People when I was a young girl, and desperate to know about love. Of all the books I read, this gave me the most powerful, exciting and satisfying idea both of sex and of love. It is the story of a woman doctor on a nightmare journey across the Malayan jungle. She is fleeing a ship with bubonic plague, in the company of her handsome cousin Stewart, a dry, ironic linguist named Arnold Ainger and an excessively talkative silly older woman. The danger and strain bring Judy and Ainger together. It's almost the best description I know of reciprocated desire and real intelligent respect of two people for each other. It's all the better for using much less explicit sexual description than would be inevitable now. The imagination is set to work, and works. (The novel was published in 1931 and became a bestseller.) It also has one of the best and most unexpected endings to a drama that I've read -- this takes place in Simpson's in the Strand, that most English and restrained of restaurants.
A.S. Byatt is the author of "Possession" and "The Matisse Stories."
Ned Rorem
How long does love last? people ask, meaning the Romantic Love of passion and heartbreak. Answer: three years. Of the classical Great Loves -- Romeo and Juliet, Pelléas and Mélisande, Tristan and Isolde (the love potion this last pair inadvertently shared was meant to wear off after three years) -- the protagonists all die young. One can't imagine them as middle-aged folks putting their kids through school.
Yet all love is eternal, for love exists outside of time and is obsessive and selfish. The French call it égoisme à deux. One person over the decades can declare "I will love you forever" to 30 different people and mean it every time.
My own literary concern with love began in adolescence when I read the modern classics of Europe: Gide's Counterfeiters and Mann's Death in Venice, both about the unrequited love of an older man for a boy; Pierre Louÿs's Aphrodite, about an Alexandrian courtesan; Cocteau's Enfants terribles, about a brother and sister. I memorized these books and, in a way, relived them.
My longest "affair" was with Jim Holmes. We lived together for 33 years until his death in 1999. The physical lust faded after the first 36 months. Then our rapport bloomed into shared concerns -- musical, political, educational -- which were surely broader than "mere" friendship. Indeed, we signed our occasional notes to each other: "With more than love."
Ned Rorem is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and the author of "The Paris Diary," "The New York Diary" and "Knowing When to Stop."
Susan Isaacs
Edward Rochester is my kind of guy: intelligent, complex, sardonic and bored by rich, beautiful women. But what makes Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre my favorite love story is not only her couple's mutual passion but Jane Eyre's character. Here is a female protagonist who does not lose her moral compass, whose brain does not turn to fondant the moment she becomes enraptured.
From childhood on, Jane stands up to injustice. Once she discovers that Rochester is irrevocably married (albeit to a madwoman living in the attic), she leaves him at the altar. Rather than do wrong, she is willing to turn her back on the man she loves, on civilization, and face the wild.
Jane Eyre's life often seems like a long road comprising mostly rough patches. Yet she doesn't view herself as a victim. Instead, she does the best with what she has, and has room not just for herself, but for others. What a brave dame! Ernest Hemingway famously said courage is grace under pressure. He must have been reading Charlotte Brontë.
Susan Isaacs is the author of "Close Relations"; her most recent novel is "Any Place I Hang My Hat."
James Hynes
John Crowley's magnificent fantasy novel Little, Big is also an epic family saga, the sort with a family tree in the front, and the bright red line that runs through that tree is the happy marriage of Smoky Barnable and Daily Alice Drinkwater. Their youthful courtship in the first chapter captures better than any other account I know the giddy mixture of joy and incredulity of a young man in love, that lucky-bastard feeling of disbelief that this stunning, ethereal and even wise creature could possibly fall in love with a toad like me. And even more miraculously, this love survives through children, infidelity, aging and the end of the world as we know it. In the saddest and most beautiful ending I've ever read, one of them dies and the other (because this is a fantasy) becomes royalty among the fairies, and the survivor preserves the memory of their anniversary as a summer's day "of such brilliance, a morning so new, an afternoon so endless, that the whole world would remember it ever after."
James Hynes is the author of "The Lecturer's Tale" and "Kings of Infinite Space."
Paul Theroux
When I read recently that Arthur Miller, nearly 90, was engaged in a dalliance with an artistic woman in her mid-thirties ("I had thought he was dead!" she confided to an interviewer), my mind raced back with pleasure to one of the last short stories V.S. Pritchett ever wrote, "On the Edge of the Cliff."
Set on the Cornish cliffs, this unexpected love story about a man in his seventies and a woman of 25 is only glancingly sexual, yet it is vividly physical. The man's young lover sees him in the morning: "His glasses were off and he had finished shaving and he turned a face savaged to the point of saintliness by age, but with a heavy underlip that made him look helplessly brutal. She laughed at the soap in his ears."
Later, the old man bumps into a former mistress: She too has a young lover. Noticing the old man's reveries, his young lover asks him what he's thinking about.
"He was going to say, 'At my age one is always thinking about death,' but he said, 'You.' "
Paul Theroux is the author of "The Mosquito Coast" and "Dark Safari"; his most recent book is "The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro and Other Stories."
Gail Godwin
Anton Chekhov wrote "The Lady with the Little Dog" in 1899, when his tuberculosis forced him to live out his winters in "the hot Siberia" of Yalta while his future wife, the young actress Olga Knipper, stayed in Moscow to star in his plays. The point of view throughout this extraordinary and unforgettable story is that of Dmitri Gurov, a cynical, married philanderer, as he seduces a young married woman he has seen walking with her little Pomeranian by the sea at Yalta. ("And only now when his head was grey he had fallen properly, really in love -- for the first time in his life.") In the process, Gurov minutely observes his whole life, and yet to the end he remains a mystery to himself. More than any other love story I know, "Lady" illustrates how no love affair is ever generic: It is as peculiar and irreplaceable as its set of lovers.
Gail Godwin is the author of "The Finishing School" and "The Good Husband"; her next novel, "Queen of the Underworld," and her memoir, "The Making of a Writer," will be published simultaneously next year.
Nick Hornby
I know it's everybody's favorite book of all time, but reading Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude nearly killed me; it certainly did a good job of convincing me that magical realism wasn't ever going to be my thing. ("Hold on . . . people can just do what they want? Whenever they want to do it?") So I have no idea why I read Love in the Time of Cholera shortly afterward. I was in my twenties, and I dimly recall that it seemed to me at the time that I was going to be in love with the same unattainable woman for all eternity, and then I found a novel dealing explicitly and perfectly with this unhappy state. My own misery lasted just long enough to enable me to finish the novel and weep; if you find yourself in a similar place, pop a copy in the post to the relevant party today. It can't do any harm -- unless a little old man or lady knocks on your door in 50 years' time, expecting long-deferred and rapturous sexual union.
Nick Hornby is the author of "High Fidelity" and "How to Be Good."
Kay Redfield Jamison
In the months following my husband's death, I reread three of my favorite love stories: Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam. All deal with love, death and the struggle to find that which endures. All grapple with doubt and faith. Of the three, Tennyson's beautiful and complex elegy affected me the most deeply, perhaps because his pain was so raw and his description of loss so real: the mourning, and then the dreadful missing; the "wild unrest that lives in woe"; the nights and seasons that pass unshared. Yet hope prevails -- despair cannot indefinitely "live with April days, / Or sadness in the summer moons" -- and love, however altered by time and circumstance, remains: "[The years] they went and came, / Remade the blood and changed the frame,/ And yet is love not less, but more."
Kay Redfield Jamison is a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author of "An Unquiet Mind"; her most recent book is "Exuberance."
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