All for Love (Nation Books) [Paperback]

Ved Mehta (Author)

Book Description

Series: Nation Books | Publication Date: September 18, 2002

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

Editorial Reviews

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Since 1972 Mehta, a prolific author, MacArthur fellow, and longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, has been producing a series of autobiographical works titled "Continents of Exile." This, the ninth volume in this series (after Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker), focuses on his relationships with four women during the 1960s. Each affair is related in meticulous detail, and although each was quite different, they all shared several characteristics: an early physical intimacy, Mehta's yearning to get married, and the woman's abandonment of him, followed by a long period of depression. It was significant, says Mehta, that during these relationships his blindness was never mentioned. Ultimately, these breakups led to a long period of psychoanalysis, which helped Mehta to accept his blindness and to understand his relationships better. Although Mehta's aim in the series has been to relate his experiences objectively "and so avoid the pitfalls of confessional writing," in this memoir he seems to re-create all the self-absorption, self-pity, and emotional turmoil that he spent years confessing on his psychotherapist's couch. This narcissistic brooding may appeal to Mehta's ardent fans, but most readers will find it hard to plod through. Suitable for larger public libraries. Ilse Heidmann, San Marcos, TX
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books (September 18, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560254491
• ISBN-13: 978-1560254492
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,342,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love Is All, December 2, 2001

By 

mary richie smith (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All for Love (Hardcover)

Ved Mehta's remarkable "All For Love" might be called a memoir, a looking back upon a fumbling, yearning period in a complicated man's younger life. But the book inhabits both the past and the present, the author understanding at one and the same moment what he was and what he is. He looks at four long-ago love affairs, and through the inclusion of the women's love letters to him he lets us see who they were, to themselves as well as to him, at that time. He writes as a man from India assuming the role of a major New Yorker writer. Though he cannot see, he understands how everything looks. Emotionally, he seems to know what love did to him, and what he did to love. He was much helped, as he explains, by psychoanalysis; but his insights come through that painful and courageous reaching into the dark which is the only way to the light. This is a beautiful and courageous book by a writer who lives, within and without, in many dimensions. I was very moved by it and doubt there will ever be another book quite to match it.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From the Personal to the Universal, November 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: All for Love (Hardcover)

This book is above all a compelling read. It is the only memoir I have ever encountered which is not in the least self-serving, prideful, or rancorous. In fact it is excruciatingly objective. By describing in elegant, spare prose the particulars of four love affairs as he lived them at the time, he reveals something profound and universal about what it is to fall in love, and his very real blindness becomes a metaphor for the blindness that produces fantasy, misunderstanding and, alas, pain. This is a beautiful and wise book, as gripping as a novel, and utterly absorbing. I have recommended it to friends who then found they could not put the book down.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loving "All for Love", January 2, 2002

By 

Lynn (Syracuse, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All for Love (Hardcover)

I loved this book. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to start it again. My college-age son is enjoying it too. It is a wonderful way for the two of us to connect. With elegance and humor, Mr. Mehta captures those all-too-familiar feelings of being uncontrollably drawn to someone long after good sense would tell you to move on. His courage and honesty in discussing his psychoanalysis make his childhood games of leaping from rooftop to rooftop, despite his blindness, seem tame in comparison. Ultimately, "All for Love" allows the reader to forgive himself or herself for lapses of judgment they may have made in their own romantic encounters. Read it!