The Feast of Love

Baxter, Charles

ISBN 10: 1597771449 ISBN 13: 9781597771443

Publisher: Phoenix Books Inc, 2007

Synopsis

A collection of vignettes set in a coffee shop explores the subtle movements of love between ordinary people.

About this title

Review:

Charles Baxter's novel The Feast Of Love, short-listed for The National Book Award 2000, is a beguiling and cerebral work. It opens with the sleepless author or at least a narrator purporting to be the author and using his name, wandering the streets of his hometown. He bumps into his old associate Bradley W Smith who, also an insomniac, proceeds to tell him a true story, which gives the narrator the idea and title for the book.

Baxter the narrator continues to pursue the story that Bradley begins. He proceeds to interview Bradley's friends, former lovers, neighbours and colleagues. These interviews, which become more like confessionals, act as individual vignettes. Meet Kathryn, Bradley's first wife; Diana, his second; Harry Ginsberg, his philosopher neighbour and Chloe his dysfunctional employee. At times this artifice can almost cloy. The narrator who is and is not the author, the characters who may or may not be real, tales that may or may not be fictions. But the quote at the beginning of the novel from Samuel Beckett's Molloy gives hint at the intention behind this disorientating device:

Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was but that I was, forgot to be.

It seems as though we as readers are being asked to question the very core of our identities.

The novel's crux seems to be that love is central to human nature and identity. Baxter, our lost and troubled soul, unable to sleep, journeys in pursuit of this idea to find peace. And Baxter the author succeeds in revealing the delicacy of relationships, their meanings and their power:

...what if the love we feel, what if that's central, what if it's what makes the world's soul possible, what if it's what made the world and keeps it running...

--Iain Robinson

Review:

‘Rich, strange, alive with the miracles of daily life, this novel is a banquet for the soul. So many wonderful characters, all of whom I came to cherish ... Truly, this is a novel in which the unexpected is always upon us.' Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal

'Superb. A near-perfect book, as deep as it is broad in its humaneness, comedy and wisdom. He has created a world no very different from one of those panoramic town scenes of Bruegel or Stanley Spencer – each character fully realised yet part of the larger whole – that one does not so much look at as step into, and from which one emerges a little transformed.' Washington Post

'A spectacular novel that serves up everything its title promises.' New York Post

‘Well plotted, deeply humane kaleidoscope of lives.’ Time Out

‘This novel can cure insomnia, easing the self-recriminatory worries that cause sleepless nights; it might even briefly reconcile the reader to life.’ TLS

About this edition

• Publisher: Phoenix Books Inc
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1597771449
• ISBN 13: 9781597771443
• Binding: Audio CD