Raymond and Hannah

very unusual writing style and literary format, but it works! a love story between a young Jewish woman who meets a nonJewish guy in Toronto, Canada a week before she is going for an entire year to Jerusalem to study in a Yeshiva to understand Judaism better. they click, have an intense love affair and struggle for a year to keep their relationship going by writing. good story.

I like reading it, but I wasn't into it. Marche's language is beautiful and reading this book made a couple subway rides fly by, but when the choice was between reading this book and anything other than staring at ads on the subway, I wasn't interested. I don't really care about Raymond or Hannah. I read the last section of the book this morning to see what happens, and then I returned it to the library.

An inauspicious start, given the force, breadth, and majesty of his second book. A brief and worthwhile romance with a very slight twist on the form. Skip this and just read Shining At The Bottom of the Sea again.

Fresh and unique writing style with lyrical, enduring diction. Beautiful story about intense and unexpected love and the painful realities of life and cultural differences. beautiful, impossible, realistically ironic.

"Species and languages die out everyday. The whole world is clamouring with lost things and every day an army of mourners-editors, lecturers, curators, writers, archivists- rush to preserve the frailest relics of everything we love that vanishes. The vanishing makes us all want to burst into song and to burn something and to blow up. Every library is an incomplete encyclopedia of the vanishing's spread."-page 28