Customer Reviews

All for Love

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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.

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.

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!

In yet another installment (whenever will it end?) in his self-serving autobiogrpahical series, Mehta devles into far too much detail about his love life. The point? I'm sure there must be one, but it's painfully clear than Mehta wants to prove that despite being blind, he was still man enough to get girls. His vanity and hubris are on clear display and one has to wonder why he felt the need to share this type of personal information with the general topic. Perhaps he's running out of things to write about. In any case, this book is a work of pure ego and not worth the time.