The Cloister
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From National Book Award-winning writer James Carroll comes a novel of the timeless love story of Peter Abelard and Héloïse, and its impact on a modern priest and a Holocaust survivor seeking sanctuary in Manhattan.
Father Michael Kavanagh is shocked when he sees a friend from his seminary days at the altar of his humble parish in upper Manhattan—a friend who was forced to leave under scandalous circumstances. Compelled to reconsider the past, Father Kavanagh wanders into the medieval haven of the Cloisters and stumbles into a conversation with a lovely and intriguing docent, Rachel Vedette.
Having survived the Holocaust and escaped to America, Rachel remains obsessed with her late father’s greatest scholarly achievement: a study demonstrating the relationship between the famously discredited monk Peter Abelard and Jewish scholars. Feeling an odd connection with Father Kavanagh, Rachel shares with him the work that cost her father his life.
At the center of these interrelated stories is the classic romance between the great philosopher Abelard and his intellectual equal, Héloïse. For Rachel, Abelard is the key to understanding her people’s place in history. And for Father Kavanagh, the controversial theologian may be a doorway to understanding the life he himself might have had outside the Church.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carroll's latest novel (after Warburg in Rome) is a sweeping, heartbreaking blend of history and fiction. In 1142 in the Duchy of Bourgogne, the aging Abbess H lo se finds the dead body of her former lover, Peter Abelard. This story line is woven together with the 1950 story of Father Michael Kavanagh, a New York priest, and Rachel Vedette, a museum docent. They meet when he takes shelter from a rainstorm in the Cloisters at the top of Manhattan, where Rachel works. Over multiple meetings, the two build a rapport; back in the 12th century, Peter and H lo se's love story unfolds. Rachel and Michael are both haunted by people from their pasts her now-dead father, whose life's work was an unfinished book on Abelard, and his lost friend from seminary. As Michael discovers his friend's secrets and Rachel deals with her complicated feelings about her father, H lo se and Peter's troubles escalate. The entwined stories move at an engrossing rhythm, making this a very magnetic, satisfying novel.
