The Book of Love
Improvisations on a Crazy Little Thing
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The beloved New York Times bestselling author Making Toast and Kayak Morning returns with a powerful meditation on a universal subject: love.
In The Book of Love, Roger Rosenblatt explores love in all its moods and variations—romantic love, courtship, battle, mystery, marriage, heartbreak, fury, confusion, melancholy, delirium, ecstasy; love of family, of friends; love of home, of country, of work, of writing, of solitude, of art; love of nature; love of life itself.
Rosenblatt is on a quest to illuminate this elusive and essential emotion, to define this thing called love. Cleverly using lines from love songs to create a flowing ballad—as infectious and engaging as a jazz riff—he intersperses fictional vignettes that capture lovers in different situations, ages, and temperaments along with notes addressed to “you,” his wife of fifty years. “The story I have to tell is of you. Of others, too. Other people, other things. But mainly of you. It begins and ends with you. It always comes back to you.”
Lively yet profound, poignant yet joyous, The Book of Love is a triumph of intellect and imagination: a personal discourse on love that is both novel and timeless.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Improv is usually associated with comedy, and while Rosenblatt (The Boy Detectives) imbues this work with plenty of humor, his stream-of-consciousness musings on all the facets of the things people love, from lovers and family to work and art, are more metaphysical than comedic. As in his other works, the main topic is just a starting point for a literary adventure; he combines genres, including memoir, essay, prose-poem, and literary/cultural analysis, the way an artist mixes paints or a musician combines notes. The result is dynamic writing that changes from sentence to sentence and thought to thought as Rosenblatt touches on personal memories, sports, movies, literature, the classics, and random observations of daily life. More amazing than his ability to connect all these distinct and disparate ideas into a cohesive narrative is his capacity for tying them all into the notion of love, both a universal emotion and a very personal feeling. By opening up his own heart and mind, Rosenblatt creates a work so diverse and comprehensive that it feels more like a shared dream than merely an intricately written reflection of one man's life and loves.
