If you like your elegies elliptical, try the novelist David Plante's brand new 114-page book, The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief
, which describes his nearly forty-year relationship with Nikos Stangos, the Thames & Hudson editor and poet who died of brain cancer in 2004. They were a very, very literary couple sharing homes in New York, London, Italy, and Greece, providing quadruple fodder for fights about keeping order. (Stangos complained if Plante turned the light on or off by pulling the cord rather than by pulling the small wooden ball at the base of the cord.) The Pure Lover was released last week and yesterday earned a glowing review from Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda. He writes:
"Grief memoirs have become all too common, largely because of the
widespread devastation caused by cancer and complications of AIDS, and
further encouraged by our relentlessly confessional culture. But,
despite the subtitle and the repeated use of "wrenching" in its dust
jacket blurbs ... The Pure Lover leaves one exalted rather than depressed. To
me, it recalls both "The Orchard," Harry Mathews's similarly
pointillist portrait of his friend, the experimental novelist Georges
Perec, and Gore Vidal's unblinking account in Point to Point Navigation of the illness and death of his longtime partner, Howard Austen."
It sounds as if the memoir would also call to mind Heaven's Coast
by Mark Doty, who coincidentally gives Plante this blurb, "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." Other blurbers are Edward Albee, Philip Roth, Siri Hustvedt, and Marina Warner.
One of Plante's two previous memoirs mined his friendships with three Difficult Women: Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer.
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