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Loading... Reunion (edition 2004)by Alan Lightman (Author)
Work InformationReunion by Alan Lightman
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) ennie | Jul 5, 2011 |  ) bobbieharv | Aug 5, 2007 |
 What makes this book a hefty cut above most is the accurate - occasionally emotionally brutal - writing, and the honesty with which Lightman/Charles approaches his task. This could have been mawkish in other hands, but Lightman's touch is as his name would suggest.  This nostalgia-fest is soggily sentimental but its sharp, elegant style is some compensation. Nevertheless, Lightman's lyrical meditation on aging and nostalgia may hit home for just about any reader on the downhill side of 40. Like most good books, "Reunion," too, is a microcosm, a scale model of the world we know. Alan Lightman's elegant new novel, spare, economical and charged with meaning, is a seasonal reminder that special effects can be luminously achieved without pyrotechnics. For a while, there’s much to admire, like the satiric set piece about academic pettiness that introduces Galloway, and the allegorical aside about an amorous (and fictional) 19th-century astronomer named Ulrich Schmeken. But the cycles of passion and fear of connecting that Charles and Juliana go through are like an emotional Möbius strip - there’s far too much repetition here for a novel so short - and after a while you start to feel you’re trapped in the mind of a slow learner. Awards
At fifty-two, Charles is a professor at a minor 'leafy little college', a once promising poet, divorced, admiring of passion but without passion himself. On an impulse, he decides to attend his thirtieth college reunion - and there magically witnesses a replay of his last year in college. Thirty years ago, Charles, then a romantic and tender twenty-two year-old, had fallen obsessively in love with a beautiful dancer. Drawn back into his past like a moth to a flame, he recalls his love affair played out amidst the social and political chaos of the late 1960s. Struggling with memories that often appear contradictory, Charles confronts once again the series of devastating events that forever changed his life... No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.19)
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