Love Again
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"She has revealed that brilliant kernel at the heart of it all that we recognize as the truth." — Francine Prose, Washington Post Book World
Love, Again tells the story of a 65-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her life as she knows it. Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater in London. During the production of a play, she falls in love with a seductive young actor, the beautiful and androgynous 28-year-old Bill, and then with the more mature 35-year-old director Henry. Finding herself in a state of longing and desire that she had thought was the province of younger women, Sarah is compelled to explore and examine her own personal history of love, from her earliest childhood desires to her most recent obsessions. The result is a brilliant anatomy of love from a master of human psychology who remains one of the most daring writers of fiction at work today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The country of love... a desert of deprivation... longing and jealousy'' is the focus of Lessing's newest novel . She charts her heroine's emotional landscape with assiduous attention to the most minute nuances. Sarah Durham was widowed young; now in her mid-60s, she is manager of and playwright for a London fringe theater group. A production of a play based on the journals and music of a 19th-century quadroon from Martinique, Julie Vairon, inflames Sarah's dormant sexual impulses. And she is not the only one: all of the actors, the director and a rich patron, Stephen Ellington-Smith, are also sublimely seduced by Julie's words, music and the few portraits of her that survive. In this highly charged atmosphere, suggestive of the magical transformations of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Sarah craves an actor half her age (who leads her on, but beds others); Stephen, whose marriage is tragically unhappy, becomes unhealthily obsessed with the dead Julia; Sarah and the director then acknowledge their sexual longing for each other--and on and on it goes, in a quadrille of lovesick changing partners. Lessing's perceptive insights into the condition of being female and elderly and emotionally excluded ("on the other shore, watching'') are as astute as anything she has ever written, and so are her comments on contemporary English society and on human nature in general. Although the book is long and rambling, asking much of a reader's patience and willingness to spend so much time inside Sarah's head, Lessing, whose memoir, Under My Skin, appeared last year, wields a formidable analytic intelligence that makes this work provocative and often astonishingly beautiful.
