The Last Time They Met

"Such extraordinary emotions in the space of paragraphs." - Thoughts on The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve

I hate you, Anita Shreve.

I hate you for writing The Last Time They Met. For making me fall in love and breaking my heart, all at once, on the same (last) page. I hate how you pretty much destroyed my hope in finding love as perfect and enduring and dangerous as that of Linda and Thomas. I will now probably end up an old maid with delusions of love so grand, there is no possibility whatsoever that I will find it. All thanks to you.

I hate you for creating a character like Thomas: a man who has his faults, but who loves with such a passion that all faults are forgotten. You just made me go against my personal standard of not show more falling for men who smoke, all for someone who unfortunately exists only on paper and in your words.

Thomas, oh Thomas. Who aged so beautifully backwards, whose poetry I was never able to read (yes, women who are reading this, this lovely character writes poetry!) but for which I am willing to bet a limb on is beautiful prose. Thomas, whose love never waned from boyhood to manhood to old age, despite all the sad in-betweens and heart-wrenching subplots to the story. I caught myself asking - nay, praying - if the good Lord will permit him to come alive, so that I may look for him, find him and fall in love with him, in the hopes that he will love me in return. But then I realized this cannot be - nay, this shouldn't be - because I am no Linda: I am not the woman he was meant to be with.

And Linda, whom I envied with such conviction because she was capable of love so enduring that it survived personal tragedies, subsequent relationships, distance and time. Linda, compared over and over to Magdalene - a fallen woman. And yet despite that she had the luck of the draw; she, whose soulmate was a man equally, if not more, madly in love with her as she is with him.

I hate you for writing The Last Time They Met the way it's written: backwards, like reading a book from the last page forward. And yet, it never read like a flashback or a memory or a reminiscent. Oddly, Thomas and Linda seemed to have grown more as they aged younger, from fifty-two, to twenty-six, to seventeen, yet at the same time they also seemed more bare as the story progressed; like watching an artist paint on tape and in rewind: a complete portrait, fully painted, worked in reverse until all that remained were the sketches, skeletal. But aren't skeletons the basic means of support?

I hate you for giving them writing professions, for making Thomas a poet, and for letting him tell Linda that she's cut out for novels than poems (Did you become a poet because of me?). I hate you for including an exchange of letters, for allowing a peek more intimate than any narration could ever hope to achieve: words written by the characters themselves, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, overall inadequate. As Linda first wrote to Thomas: "I think that words corrupt and oxidize love. That it is better not to write of it."

And to which Thomas promptly replied: "Write me. For God's sake, keep writing."

I am running out of words as to how your book has ruined me, Anita Shreve. And so I will resort to quoting from their brief exchange of love letters - a more adequate show of the agony you have put me through:

"So much has been left unsaid."

Ugh, Anita Shreve. Your book has turned me into a blabbering lovestruck buffoon.

PS. The ending was the death of me. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

Orinigally posted here. show less

I enjoyed the author's style. She writes just enough information to keep the reader guessing and wondering what comes next. I also enjoyed how the book traveled backwards through time - a very unique storytelling method that had to be somewhat difficult to accomplish successfully.

However, I was not surprised as other people were by the ending of the book. What clued me in was the description of Thomas's Magdelene poems; the description could only fit one character and only one circumstance. This foreshadow easily cast the scenes of the book in a new light - I expected the ending.

The Last Time They Met is an excellent read from an excellent writer.

Linda and Thomas are in their early 50s and haven't seen each other in 25 years but, at one time, were desparately in love with each other. They are both poets now and happen to run into each other again at a gathering of authors. Shreve takes the reader back to their past, when they were together and when they were apart. Then we get to the ending. It is what I call a what-the-hell moment! After my initial shock, I then went back over the book to try and find clues that would have alerted me to what was going to happen at the end. Like it or not, it was an ending that makes the reader think and keeps the story in your mind for a long time.

rabck from Calimade. The middle (and largest) section is set in Kenya. The author has been there and it shows in her writing - by far the best part of the book. Linda and Thomas meet and sleep together just 3 times - when they are in their 50s, in their 30s and as teens. In their 30s, they are both married, so it's an affair. In their teens they are torn apart by their families and in their 50s, they aren't sure they want to pursue a relationship again.

I loved Eden Close and other Shreve books, but when I started this book I seriously thought I couldn't get through it. It was sleepy and slow, nothing happening in the story line. Just another story about frustrated lovers who meet one last time before they go their separate ways. I managed to muddle through it and then got the surprise of my life on the last page. It was so shocking that it turned the entire book on its head and I immediately went back to page 1 and started the whole thing over again. I've never done that before, but I simply had to reread the book and look for the clues that would give me the inkling of what was about to happen. No such clues. Just BAM!

My opinion of this book changed immediately and I convinced show more everyone on the beach to read it so I could lead a book discussion about it. While I sat next to my sun-basking friends, listening to them complain about how boring the books was, I was encouraging them to stay with it all the while chuckling to myself because I knew what was coming. To quote nearly everyone who finished it, "Oh my God! I didn't see that coming!"

So now you must read the book without going to the last page and see what everyone was so shocked to learn. show less

The story, divided into three parts, starts from the perspective of Linda Fallon at 52 years old. Widowed with two adult children Linda is a poet with a complicated past. Her tangled history is confronted when she encounters her former lover, Thomas Janes, at a literary festival. Thomas, also a poet, has gone on to become a legend of sorts after the drowning death of his young daughter drove him into seclusion. What the reader learns in Part I is that Linda and Thomas started a romance in highschool that ended badly. Part II is from Thomas Janes's perspective in Africa 25 years earlier than the festival. Linda, then 27, has married and is working for the Peace Corps when Thomas, also married, encounters her in an African marketplace. show more The fuzzy details of their teenage romance hinted at in Part I become a little more defined in Part II. The reader discovers a terrible accident allowed overly protective adults to separate the young highschool lovers and effectively dismantle their relationship by putting distance (and silence) between them. Part III is ten years prior to Africa. Thomas and Linda are 17 and in highschool. This final section brings the entire sage full circle. In all honesty my favorite way to read The Last Time They Met is front to back and then again, this time back to front. The tiniest of details become glittering and sharp when exposed by more supporting story. show less

I will always remember my English Literature tutor saying that he no longer read novels because he always knew the plot after reading the first chapter. I sometimes know how he felt, so this novel gets an extra star because I didn't foresee the last few pages.

This is a love story, going backwards from two people in their 50's at a literature festival, married to other people in Africa, then as teenagers in the USA.

I preferred the first part, and I actually felt that I was reading three separate novellas, but the last pages caught me off guard, and left me thinking.