Enduring Love
Sayers, Valerie
EU P, U P & AWAY Valerie Sayers // ~ an McEwan's elegant, unsettling novels seek out the dangers that lurk, waiting to disrupt everyday lives: child snatchers, accidents, vicious animals,...
...Clarissa, though, is seriously disturbed by Joe's response to Parry...
...But Jed's religion, as Joe points out, is "dreamily vague on the specifics of doctrine...
...24.95 ISBN: 0-7885-0133-X Religion and the War in Bosnia Paul Mojzes, editor This book provides a bold exploration of the religious dimensions of genocide and contemporary ethnic warfare...
...LORD PETER HARRIET Elizabeth Bartelme ong ago (or so it seems) I approached Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night as one might open the Iliad...
...Publishers Weekly 208 pages ~ $25.00 cloth Available at better bookstores, or call 1-800-386-5656, orders only...
...Parry's religious belief, as hopelessly deluded as his erotic fixation, is a variant of the syndrome...
...EU P, U P & AWAY Valerie Sayers // ~ an McEwan's elegant, unsettling novels seek out the dangers that lurk, waiting to disrupt everyday lives: child snatchers, accidents, vicious animals, stalkers...
...I failed to read it...
...In these books Sayers was in top form so perhaps a fair comparison cannot be made with this new/old work...
...The ideas trying to anchor that plot drop one by one to the ground...
...He based these short chapters on extensive interviews w4th dozens of priests, and the diversity represented here offers a valuable window on the changing face of the Catholic Church...
...Part of Jed Parry's disturbance is religious belief, and one of the novel's early promises is the possibility that Joe's rationalism will be seriously challenged by religious faith...
...Parry is another of the men who drops to the ground with Joe Rose in the failed rescue attempt...
...Joe is a science writer who has abandoned the academic world for the life of the free-lance popularizer...
...Parry's affliction is identified as de Clerambault's syndrome, in which the sufferers believe that the objects of their desire return the love and send secret signals of reciprocation...
...Essential for thoughtful Catholics...
...Box 133089 _9 Atlanta, GA 30333-3089 Phone: 888-747-2354 (toll-free) or 404-727-2354 _9 Fax: 404-727-2348 Commonweal 2 4 May 8, 1998 disrupt his life: phoning, writing, stalking, and finally attacking him...
...The same complaint might be made of the last scenes of the novel, thrilling, amusing, and unsettling though they are...
...Joe buys a gun in a funny and depressing scene that seems to come out of another (naturalistic) novel, then sets out to rescue Clarissa...
...Uncovers the defining metaphor for each priest's career...
...The narrator and protagonist of the novel, Joe Rose, explores the accident's connection to notions of selfless love, community, and self-preservation...
...Thrones and Dominations, Sayers's unfinished novel, completed by Jill Paton Walsh (Knowledge of Angels), sent me back not only to Gaudy Night, but to The Nine Tailors, surely the most imaginative mystery novel of the twentieth century...
...Valerie Sayers is professor of English at the University of Notre Dame...
...At the scene of the accident, he falls instantly and pathologically in love with Joe and begins to American Academy of Religion The Great White Flood Racism in Australia Anne PatteI-Groy "Pattel-(3ray's overriding concern is psychological and educational empowerment of aboriginal Australians...
...A winning ethnographic portrait of 28 American Catholic priests...
...The story ends with the notion of forgiveness, but it's a partial resolution, for poor Jed Parry is locked away with his delusions, and neither narrator nor narrative is concerned with what forgiveness or peace might be offered him...
...The author argues that racism is an endemic and chronic problem that must be addressed and solved...
...to a more predictable movement of plot (will she believe him in time to save them from Parry's violence...
...Edward J. Perkins, University of Ok/ahoma, aM former US Ambassador to Australia This volume examines the impact of racist government legislation and policies upon the indigenous people of Australia over the last 200 years...
...It's an interesting notion, this coupling of erotic and religious delusion, but because the religious aspect is expressed only in Jed Parry's melodramatic pronouncements, it can't be explored physically (or for that matter philosophically) in the same way that the idea of human love can be...
...Commonweal 2 6 May8, 1998...
...Kirkus Reviews "A crisply written, insightful journalistic survey of the Roman Catholic priesthood today...
...19.95 ISBN: 0-7885-0428-2 Scholars Press Customer Service P.O...
...His wife Clarissa, a Keats scholar, is more interested in the intuitive and the emotional...
...His belief in the rational is absolute...
...In the agonizing seconds that follow, they must decide whether to hold on together or to save themselves by dropping, singly, to the ground...
...In Enduring Love this connection is explicit: from the opening scene onward, it is clear that McEwan means to balance his usual Gothic elements with complex explorations of the ideas they represent...
...She is sketched, believably, as Keats scholar and as a maternal figure who cannot bear children (the motif of children--especially as objects of selfless love--is one of the most successful), but her lack of faith in Joe is not entirely convincing...
...These threatening motifs are connected, often implicitly, to questions of political and philosophical belief...
...It is also the belief of a madman, and as such Parry's challenges are hardly taken seriously, either by Joe or by the novel...
...This book defines and clarifies racist terminology and language, reviews historical and contemporary expressions of Australian racism, and assesses both the concept and the recent process of reconciliation in Australia...
...This is not to say that Enduring Love is not engaging throughout--it is more than engaging, it is clever and compelling-but rather that it is considerably lightened at the end of its journey, that its balance tips, finally, toward the pleasures of unburdened plot...
...Booklist "Kunkel's engaging and informative report focuses not on sterile analysis but on the real lives of real priests today...
...The balance between dramatic scene and philosophical narrative, between exterior reality and interior struggle, is beautifully achieved...
...But that was yesterday...
...The story has begun, of course, with a bungled rescue, and one of the novel's concerns is the strange movement of narrative itself: narrative in science, narratives of grief, narratives of the imagination...
...This standard assigning of sex roles might be irritating were it not for the casting of Keats's long romantic shadow in the n o v e l - - and were it not for a third principal character, Jed Parry, who disrupts all notions of assigned sex roles...
...The novel moves from another interesting tension (why can't the sensitive, intelligent Clarissa understand that Joe's terror is in fact a completely rational response...
...This is a thorough study of racial and social issues which are essential considerations as Australians work to bring about cohesion, empowerment and cooperation in achieving economic, political and social equality for all Australians...
...Nevertheless, if not one of her peak performances, Thrones has a high entertainment quotient, and its probing exploration of various concerns of Sayers raise it to the level of a serious literary work...
...Very accessible...
...Her most recent novel is Brain Fever (Doubleday...
...Peter reassures her, telling her that they represent a "dream of justice, an ideal that had to be kept alive in a very unjust and dangerous world . . . . " So Harriet must "make murder most "Essential for though ul Catholics...
...Inside the passenger basket crouches a terrified young boy who may be swept away at any moment...
...The men grab ropes and are themselves carried off, dangling from the balloon, by a violent gust...
...Seventeen American and Balkan scholars representing a wide variety of perspectives-Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and secular--examine the role of religion in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina...
...Clarissa's role in the novel though key, is not explored in nearly as much depth as Joe's or Parry's...
...Sayers's hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, appeared precious beyond reason, and his love-interest Harriet Vane's problems hardly worth solving...
...Harriet Vane, the unlikely sleuth, now married to Lord Peter, continues to write her detective stories, but she worries about their value, about their moral worth...
...The novel opens in a field in the Chiltems, where five men see a balloon descend and race to help the inept pilot anchor it...
...As the plot progresses, it appears that so, too, will the tensions between the rational and the irrational...
...Some of its most disturbing suggestions (this is not the first time McEwan has used homosexual desire as his central threat) are never fully explored...
...so much for first impressions...
...Racism in Australia is rooted in the long and corrupt relationship between government and church...
...It seems more plot-driven than it does character-driven: it is necessary for the story to progress, therefore it exists...
...later she wonders whether Joe is in fact inventing his obsessive presence...
...With economy and sensitivity, Kunkel brings these priests to life, portraying them as both fully human and a breed apart...
...One of the principal tensions of the novel, then, is eased out early, and it becomes clear that rationalism will not be tested by religious faith but by faith in human love, the possibility of "enduring love" that Joe Rose believes he and Clarissa can achieve...
...The persistence of racism in every area of Australian society is documented, from government to schools to courts to churches, and the illusory humanitarian and human rights stances of both institutions are here exposed...
...It is fitting, then, that narrative might loop Commonweal 2 5 May 8, 1998 back on itself this way, but the story floats away as quickly as the balloon which set Joe Rose's ordeal in motion, and the current carrying it is plot...
...a self-made affair, generally aligned to the culture of personal growth and fulfillment...
...You're so rational sometimes," she tells him, " y o u ' r e like a child...
...Kunkel writes as a Catholic seeking to understand the tumultuous changes of the post-Vatican II Church...
...this is as stunning and promising a novel opening as I have read...
...Joe is one of the men who chooses to drop to the ground, and so must face his own ordinary cowardice, but that is only the beginning of his dilemma...
...Code: 01 07 02 328 pages (1998) Paper...
...Code: 011203 306 pages (1998) Cloth: $49.95 ISBN: 0-7885-0429-0 Paper...
...At first she believes Parry's only a pathetic character...
Vol. 125 • May 1998 • No. 9
