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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An improvisational, personal meditation on the subject of love. The concept of love can be tricky to pin down. Many definitions include a variation on the feeling of passionsomething powerful, inflamed, wild, difficult to control and all-consuming. Intensity, desire and enthusiasm are common to feeling love for something or someone. In this warm, musical exploration on love, Rosenblatt (English and Writing/Stony Brook Univ.; The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood, 2013, etc.) wanders down all of those paths, but he spends extra time examining the idea of being in love. He begins with a story about the Chinese inventing the clock and it being stored away in the emperor's vaults, forgotten. When sailors from France arrived 400 years later with their new inventionthe clocktheir Chinese hosts were amazed, having never seen anything quite so wonderful. More than 100 pages pass before Rosenblatt tips his hand"You don't forget something important to you unless it isn't important"only to show that his cards won't reveal answers, except for the ones we already know but require a new perspective to see. If that sounds vague in an off-putting way, worry not; there's all manner of insight to be found, packed neatly into fewer than 200 pages. Rosenblatt pulls from popular culture, mythology and anecdotal stories to create a mural that is both wide-ranging and focused. "I sympathize with people who seek to create a unity of thought and emotion out of disorder," he writes, "but I also believe that trying to fit parts into a whole makes each component smaller, less interesting and inauthentic." While plenty of writers have tried their hand at capturing the improvisational brilliance of jazz, with varying degrees of success, Rosenblatt's wanderings with the subject of love are like Coltrane at the Village Vanguard. When you hear it, you know. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This short, small book on a big, big topic could probably be read in one sitting, but it's too clever, and it dashes here and there, and for many such reasons, it's a book to savor. Moreover, it can be opened and read at nearly any point. For Rosenblatt wittily, urbanely, wholeheartedly is in love. With you. You means many things in this book, most assuredly his wife, and sweet and tender as his loving streams of consciousness are, she comes first and always and, boy-oh-boy, forever. But it could be you, and it is also trees, light, music, the world, and although the words and construction are definitely his own, he also brings in some of the thoughts about love he has heard. Many of them song lyrics, poetry, and such roll past and weave through as he muses (It had to be you, you and the night and the music). In the same format, he riffs on the harder parts of love as well forgiveness, betrayal, power, loss. The Book of Love is a sweet read, but it would also make a wonderful gift for . . . guess who?--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
If the thought of traditional candy hearts and red roses on Valentine's Day makes you want to hide under the covers, "The Book of Love" may be a heartening companion. The book defies convention: It's part jazzlike improvisation; part prose poem; part mash-up of music, art, literature, history, philosophy and pop culture. Rosenblatt sprinkles in references to Cole Porter and Vermeer, van Gogh and Goethe, polar bears and baseball, and whips it all into a swirling meditation. Rosenblatt muses about love of all kinds: familial, romantic, love for the unloved, love for one's body ("Love my missing thyroid gland and its synthetic replacement. Love my prostate cancer, radiated out of existence. Love one-fifth of my face below my right eye, which was removed to dig out a melanoma, and then put back") and love for a world of loss, confusion and contradictions. If the riffs occasionally veer into the saccharine ("I saw only you, and the strawberries, and the windfall of light on your hair"), they're balanced by more astringent notes ("Why should I be impressed by the fact that you really really love me? Really? Frankly, I'd prefer that you loved me a little less really, and with more restraint"). The book's most affecting scene features the writer's 3-year-old grandson, James, whom he's helped raise after the sudden death of his daughter. Rosenblatt recounts driving James to preschool one day. When they pass a man replacing a tire, James says he wants to invent an "Everything Car, which would be covered with spare tires, so that no one would ever be stuck or stranded." "The Book of Love" is exactly that, an Everything Car for the open-minded reader ready to be taken for a wild, soulful ride.
