All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost: A Novel [Hardcover]

Lan Samantha Chang (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 27, 2010

A haunting story of art, ambition, love, and friendship by a writer of elegant, exacting prose.

At the renowned writing school in Bonneville, every student is simultaneously terrified of and attracted to the charismatic and mysterious poet and professor Miranda Sturgis, whose high standards for art are both intimidating and inspiring. As two students, Roman and Bernard, strive to win her admiration, the lines between mentorship, friendship, and love are blurred.

Roman's star rises early, and his first book wins a prestigious prize. Meanwhile, Bernard labors for years over a single poem. Secrets of the past begin to surface, friendships are broken, and Miranda continues to cast a shadow over their lives. What is the hidden burden of early promise? What are the personal costs of a life devoted to the pursuit of art? All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is a brilliant evocation of the demands of ambition and vocation, personal loyalty and poetic truth.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Chang, director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and author of Hunger and Inheritance, sticks close to home as she follows Roman Morris from his days as an M.F.A. student in the late 1980s to his soaring career as a published poet, tenured professor, and Pulitzer Prize winner. Unfortunately, the book lends credence to the clichés that plague modern poets and the institutions that foster them: wine-fueled workshops are held by candlelight, and Roman's fantasies about his talented, beautiful, and aloof workshop professor lead to a student-teacher affair. Roman's eventual success brings out his resentment of the academy and its favoritism and politics, but this is a work of fiction, and the championing of creative writing programs should not be its cause. In Chang's hands, the world of poetry is a cliché; instead of a novel, she delivers a case study of the modern poet with little bearing in reality and characters as one-dimensional as the premise. While the language is well crafted, readers may be disappointed by the lack of quality storytelling.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Chang is director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and here she weds her professional knowledge of writing-seminar dynamics to her lucent style, producing a stunning novel that more than fulfills the promise of her early work (Hunger, 1998; Inheritance, 2004). Miranda Sturgis is an exceptional poet, and though her critiques can be ruthless, graduate students at the renowned writing school where she teaches fight to gain admission to her seminars. She proves to be a tantalizing and enigmatic figure to her students, especially Bernard Blithe, one of the most serious poets in the class, and Roman Morris, who fairly burns with ambition. Chang shows the two men, one who regards poetry as an avocation, the other as a means to an end, to be essentially similar in one devastating way: their intense loneliness, which comes from sacrificing all personal relationships for the sake of work. Among the many threads Chang elegantly pursues—the fraught relationships between mentors and students, the value of poetry, the price of ambition—it is her indelible portrait of the loneliness of artistic endeavor that will haunt readers the most in this exquisitely written novel about the poet’s lot. --Joanne Wilkinson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (September 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393063062
• ISBN-13: 978-0393063066
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #332,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Really an Amazing Novel, September 22, 2010

By 

Derek C - See all my reviews

This review is from: All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost: A Novel (Hardcover)

AIFNIL is easily read with incredibly tight structure and precise language but you can't stop thinking about it when you reach the end. Some passages are so beautifully written you will go over them repeatedly.

On the surface it is a story of esoteric academia but as you read you will witness relationships between flawed individuals, their struggles to define and achieve happiness, narcissism vs. the desire for intimacy, the damage caused by failed family relationships, the effort required to create art and so much more. This novel is heartbreaking.

I would suggest picking up another copy to share because you will want to keep yours for the bookshelf.

Kudos to the Rumpus Book Club because I would not have found this on my own.

[...].

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Jewel of a Novel, September 26, 2010

By 

D. Parker (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost: A Novel (Hardcover)

Who is TRULY qualified to tell you if you're a great or not?

That's the basis of Lan Samatha Chang's latest novel All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost.

The novels succeeds on many levels:

1) Mood and Tone: Reading this novel is almost like watching a movie where the colors are a dark-bluish. I simply felt the world around me stop as I read through each section.

2) Economy of Language. Chang delves into issues of achievement, doubt, worthiness, infidelity, guilt and betrayal with frighteningly simple language. This novel won't send you hunting for your dictionary.

Also, the writing is very visual. Often novelists stray from the story path to get on their soap boxes to talk about other issues NOT related to the story. Not Chang. She has a laser-beam focus on the story path from beginning to end.

3) Resonance: You may start to think about your own success after reading this novel, and who you allow to define whether your work is a success or failure.

This is a sparse, atmospheric novel that moves along at lightening speed. I will read again, and will recommend to others.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Chang has nailed it, December 9, 2010

By 

P. Pereira (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost: A Novel (Kindle Edition)

What a great read. I think Lan Samantha Chang has totally nailed it -- the lives and lot of poets. The four main characters, over the course of their lives, live out four related but very different life trajectories. Miranda is the stern distant demanding teacher, worshipped and feared by her students, who has an affair with one, and ends up choosing his first book for a prize, setting his career in motion, even while her own has peaked. Roman is the brilliant, lucky student, who grows to get the prizes, the university teaching gigs, the fame, but who ends up unhappy, unfulfilled, feels perhaps even a fraud. Bernard is the recluse, working all his life on one long unpublished poem, and carrying on letter-writing correspondences with "the writers of our time," who is jealous of Roman, but remains committed to his personal artistic vision-- he is perhaps the "true poet" of the four. Lucy is the poet who puts her carreer on hold to be wife and mother, supportive of another's career, and only returns to her writing later in life, renewed. It's a fascinating study of the motivations and drives and desires of poets; the relationships between students and mentors, poetry friends, poetry marriages; how things change (and don't change) over time. How in many ways "all that matters is the work." Or should it be -- "all that matters is the relationships?" Highly recommended.