✍ Scribed by Plante, David
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In this simple, heartfelt memoir, author Plante (The Family, American Ghosts) shares a series of disjointed memories about his lover for 40 years, the recently deceased Nikos. Reflecting the way longtime partners become one, even Nikos's earliest first-person recollections enter into Plante's memoir, including dreamy passages about Nikos's childhood in Greece: watching his mother leave, witnessing his father dying in bed, attending college in the U.S. Having met in London in their mid-20s, Plante and Nikos immediately began a relationship that would last a lifetime. Readers unfamiliar with either man's literary legacy won't get much of an education; references to their careers are sparing, and the absence not only keeps readers at arm's-length, but gives the material an unanchored feel. The book ultimately seems written for an audience of two, rather than a general readership; Plante's intimate, guarded tone keeps readers feeling like intruders.
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�How a book can be at once so raw and so artful is a mystery; The Pure Lover joins a handful of necessary volumes that speak directly from grief�s wild, inconsolable center, and readers will find it bracing, unflinching, and honest to the core.�
�Mark Doty, author of Heaven�s Coast
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��A wrenching and boldly intimate lament.�
�Philip Roth
�_The Pure Lover_ leaves one exalted . . . A lovely book, joyful, plangent and true.�
�Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
�_The Pure Lover_ is a short but moving elegy. . . . It�s a difficult subject, handled with lyricism, pain, indiscretion and love.�
�Margaret Drabble, _New Statesman
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�David Plante�s fine meditation on love and loss is the work of one who has been there and who knows that it is the dying who are losing all and that the grief we obtain is the survivor�s treasure.�
�Edward Albee
�Innovative and incantatory . . . Bracingly poignant . . . A cumulative portrait, taken in snapshots, of a long-term gay relationship that�s as valid a marriage as any other.�
�Jason Roush, The Gay and Lesbian Review
�A fierce encapsulation of grief, the fundamentally private wrought wrenchingly public. This sublime remembrance�more a compilation of memory fragments than a linear life story�evokes a whole man (in truth, two whole men).�
�Richard Labonte, Book Marks: Best of 2009
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