All for Love (Nation Books) - Softcover

Mehta, Ved

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560254491 ISBN 13: 9781560254492

Publisher: Nation Books, 2002

Synopsis

Ved Mehta joined the staff of The New Yorker in the 1960s, blind since the age of four and already on his way to a career as a writer. In a series of four relationships he demanded that his lovers, like him, pretend he could see. With lyrical and stirring accuracy, Mehta revisits these love affairs today, tracing the links between his denial of his disability and the cruel transformations that each of his lovers underwent. “Poignant and occasionally hilarious.”—The New York Times Book Review “This elegant volume remains a striking piece of insight into the nature of love.”—Publishers Weekly “[An] excoriatingly truthful and heartbreaking account of the pursuit and loss of love....”—The Times of London “A mesmerizing account ... the most arresting passages are Mehta’s mind-expanding descriptions of how he perceives the world.”—Booklist

About this title

About the Author

Ved Mehta was born in 1934. He was educated at both Harvard and Oxford following which he pursued life as a writer (something he had not considered doing), travelling and writing for New Yorker magazine. He has written many books the first of which was published when he was just twenty years old.

From Publishers Weekly

In this excruciatingly honest autobiographical work, author Mehta conducts an exquisite exploration of his love life as a young man, attempting to focus an objective lens on the most subjective of matters. The volume, the ninth in Mehta's Continents of Exile series, examines the blind writer's pathos-laden involvement with four different women while living in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s and working at the New Yorker. In rich, sensuous language, he paints a precise picture of people and place, skillfully depicting both India and Manhattan. Much of the memoir consists of letters between Mehta and his various lovers, and this epistolary element best represents the spectrum of emotions. The letters include the minutiae of relationships pet names, inside jokes, mundane retellings of the day's proceedings yet they also reveal a great deal of angst and psychological despair. Mehta demonstrates more than a little bravery by stripping his life to its essentials, and he succeeds magnificently in his endeavor, in part because of his detachment from the events he chronicles. The last section an account of Mehta's psychoanalysis represents the book's only significant flaw. Presented principally as a dialogue between the writer and his psychiatrist, it echoes clich‚d Freudian exchanges between any patient and doctor. In the earlier chapters, Mehta proves his ability to contemplate and investigate his romances on his own, so the intrusion of the analyst is particularly grating. Though the concluding chapter falls short of those preceding, this elegant volume remains a striking piece of insight into the nature of love.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Nation Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1560254491
• ISBN 13: 9781560254492
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 456