Customer Reviews

Endless Love

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I too thought this book was "my little secret!" How wonderful to hear from others who feel the same way. One of the few books that have truly broken my heart - I felt changed after I read it. My ideas on love, obsession, living, family, and madness - all were altered by Scott Spencers' suberb, unduplicable writing stye. The intensity of his emotional and physical descriptions, coming from the viewpoint of David, leave you breathless and yearing for more. A masterpiece novel - one of my all time favorites, 15 years after first reading it!!

This book is wonderful. It touches you on so many levels. This dark love story really tinkers on an obsession rather than a true love story. The story is very deep, emotional, consuming, at times depressing & desparate, intense & complex.There are pages & pages of a detailed and explicit love making session. There are many poetic lines and verses in the story. You feel David's love, obsession, passion & eventual loss. David never gets over Jade - he cannot let go. Never. He simply can't. The book is written from David's point of view - only. We never know what Jade is thinking or feeling about David. There is not alot of character development for Jade & she makes her appearance half way through the book. We never hear her side of this story. How does Jade feel about David? Is she in love with him & as obsessed as he is with her? What is it about her that makes him act so crazy & desparate? We never really know. Which is a shame.
I wish more was written about David & Jade's earliest days together, when the meet and start the passionate relationship. Parts of the story seem missing, alot of time lapses, too. These are teenagers, not adults, who are too young to deal with a love & sexual relationship this intense & overwhelming.
This is a very sad story. Don't read it if you are feeling depressed or getting over a break up yourself. The last few lines of this book are heartbreaking, it leaves you feeling empty, sad & yet at the same time, not wanting the book to end.
I would really recommend you reading this book.

I am so pleased and surprised to see how many other readers have experienced, and been moved by, reading this book. I can honestly say that no other book I've ever read has had the same impact on me as "Endless Love'-and its been many years since my first reading. The beauty of this novel is that it can be enjoyed on so many levels-emotionally, intellectually, and, on the very surface, for entertainment. It covers a wide array of emotional ground, and you'd be hardpressed to find a reader who can't find something in it that they identify with. Certain sentences and passages literally took my breath away. The novel is truly original in that it chronoicles a love story and it's long reaching and dark aftermath without ever delving into sentimentality or cliches, it's definalty a far cry from the typical boy-meets-girl color by numbers plot. In fact, the origins of the relationship it focuses on happen off-camera, before the novel even begins, so we're left with the perceptions and memories of the characters (which may or may not be reliable) in order to construe the real facts. But, as the main character notes, what is factual is not always what is true, and the contradiction between reality and perception that runs throughout the novel only adds to its overall impact. The novel also suceeds in creating David, a protagaonist whose sanity and morality are at times highly debatable, however, he is written with such honesty and detailed insight that it is impossible not to get swept up in his journey and care about what happens to him. Despite all his recklessness and its abyssmal results, I could not honestly blame David for his decisions. While he broke the rules of society, law,and logic, he remained truthful to his heart, to point of insanity and despair, and any reader whose ever given, received, or yearned for the idealistic and maybe impossible endless love he strives to keep will find this book both heartbreaking and unforgettable.

Scott Spencer must have been bemused when this novel was embraced as a moving story of first love, but then, why argue with success? As many have noted, however, it is a very unsatisfying love story because the object of David's affection is not on the scene for most of the story. Spencer comes right out and tells you as early as page 39 that our friend David Axlerod cannot even tell the truth about his favorite color much less describe his complex emotional state. David does not know how to tell the truth. Yet, he is our only witness. By the end, his perceptions are so faulty that you really do not know what is going on. In David's final encounter with Jade (wonderfully ironic name), she is terrified. David's explanation for her behavior simply makes no sense. By this time the reader has been given enough clues to know that David is not the innocent lover he pretends to be. The reader has to try to figure out what is really happening from what other people do, (the behavior of the police, for instance) rather than from David's perception of it, because he is insane.

The focus here is not love but the shift in cultural norms that took place in the sixties which left everyone unmoored by any shared value system. David's parents represent what amounted to the serious ethical stance in the fifties, the socialist ideal. Secular humanism was the religion of the educated middle class. David's solipsistic "love" for Jade and her hippy family demonstrates the limitations of an ethos rooted only in human values. These people are not looking for love; they are looking for god. But god, as Time Magazine would soon announce, was dead.

The interesting thing about the book is the way Spencer uses the narrative to show this. That is one reason, I think, that this book did not really age well. All of these games with unreliable narrators have been played out by now. It does get tedious after a while when you cannot figure out what is actually going on, and this book definitely suffers from that fault in the final chapters. You can do all these pyrotechnics with literary devices, but you still have to give the reader a coherent story. If you want to enjoy Spencer's narrative cleverness, I highly recommend his more recent novel, "Willing." In that book he manages to combine his narrative strategies with a very funny story that may or may not have "really" happened, whatever that might mean in the context of a fictional world.

I first read Endless Love when it first came out in 1980, but probably would not have had I seen the unfortunate film adaptation first. That would have been a shame, as this book was truly unforgettable and has become one of my all time favorites. Had it not been for the badly made film, this book would still be in print and would have become a modern classic.
I have read it several times since it first was published, and am saddened to find it is no longer in print.

Spencer's writing is astonishing in its depth of feeling and the beauty of its prose. I am not a big fan of romances in general, but Endless Love is so honest in its depiction of a romantically obsessed young man that for this I make an exception. If you've ever been deeply in love, much of what is described will be painfully--and wonderfully--familiar. Trust me: this is no Harlequin romance. You will not find cliches or sappiness here. The few[physical] scenes, while explicit, are never trashy or shallow. In fact, they are necessary to truly bring to life the depth of David's feelings for his lover, Jade. These scenes are long and powerful. The type of love David experiences transforms the mundane to the poetic, the disgusting to the beautiful. ...

So are David's scenes with Jade's wordly mother Ann. The emotions in these scenes are astonishing, powerful, and many-faceted. We get to know both characters intimately, and while we could fault them for their immorality and lack of good judgment, we realize they are desperate--and both desperately miserable. They can't help what they do, so we can forgive them, and sympathize with them.

David is nearly constantly in tears or plotting to find the girl he can never forget. His misery is so intense it is almost a tangible thing. (Don't read this if you don't want to feel depressed). His traditional Jewish parents love him but do not understand him, or his obsession. Frightened and concerned about their only son, they they throw away Jade's letters "for his own good," which turns out to be the worst thing they could have done. Those letters were David's only tangible evidence of his shortlived life with Jade--and he literally falls to pieces there in front of their kitchen sink.

The saddest thing is the disparity between David and Jade's lives after the fire, and after David is released from the hospital. Jade, evidently, was able to move on and create a life for herself; David cannot--will not--let go. David is part of her past, a teenage romance, and she could take or leave him; to David, Jade is his only reason for living. Yet he is not a stalker in the sense one normally associates with that term. He never becomes violent or abusive in his efforts to win her back; the violence is only to himself. He is his own worst enemy, and he never is able to realize that, and move on. Witnessing the slow disintegration of his mind and soul is a frightening and tragic thing.

If you are able to get your hands on a copy of this book, grab it and read it! ... Spencer's writing style alone is reason enough to read Endless Love. I have read some of Spencer's other books, but this is by far my favorite.

This book changed everything about what I read, how I read, why I wanted to read. I admit to buying a copy after seeing the Brooke Shields movie when I was sixteen. It's a true shame that director Zeffereli took such liberties with the novel's point of view, timeframe while borrowing so heavily from the book for its dialogue. "Endless Love", the novel, is simply astonishing. I'm certain I've read it a dozen times, underlined passages, folded back pages, studied it inside and out. As an exercise, I even adapted it into a screenplay, then a television mini-series. It deserves a decent adaptation because, as one reviewer below put it, when telling friends about it, associated it with "the atrocious movie", tarnished forever (I don't think that needs to be so). The last page of the book is so overwhelming, I burst into tears when I read it (and no book has ever done that to me before or since). I would appreciate comments on a new adaptation of "Endless Love" as a film or mini-series (though I can't imagine a mainstream network touching it with its graphic and necessary sexual content). To get you started, I can see Susan Sarandon as Ann, Natalie Portman as Jade, but David...who could play David? He's so clearly etched in my mind, it would be difficult to associate another face. Anyway, I'm heartened to see others who share the passion for the book that I have felt for so long.

I read a lot of books.

I love to read, and my selections cover a wide spectrum - everything from Shakespeare to the much maligned Harlequin romances. But never, ever have I read anything that can compare with "Endless Love".

The gorgeous prose hooks you in from the first sentence and doesn't let up until the last line, when you're holding the book with shaking hands, wondering how to let it go. Because this is one of those rare stories that *won't* let you go. The characters - David, Jade, and Ann in particular - take root and germinate inside you, never to leave again.

David's description of falling in love and losing that love are part of the universal human experience. David merely got caught doing what a lot of us have done. Unable to let go of what others dismissed as a teenage romance, he clings to his memories of Jade and her family until the world views him as unhealthy. And maybe he is. But the reader is so convinced of the depths of his love for Jade, that being with her is the only way David will ever be happy, that we side with him, becoming his partner in crime.

The 30+ page love scene some 200 or more pages into the book is a masterpiece. I've read countless sex scenes and *none* compare to this one. It borders on becoming an out of body experience.

One feeling I was left with was that perception is everything in this story. David believed his relationship with Jade to be worth everything. Jade loved David, but essentially could live without him. They viewed their bond in very different ways.

Take a chance on this modern classic. If you've ever been so much in love that rules no longer applied, you'll walk away from this book forever changed.

This book is much more complex than simply a love story--it's a novel swimming in social, political and literary themes that are brilliantly all tied to the very real emotions of a love affair. The way that David and Jade's respective parents represent the polarity of post-war rebellion--Jade's are emotional rebels while Davids are social--make the meaning of the character's love more than insular.

In fact, whether Spencer did it subconsciously or not, I think that the primary purpose of the book is to show how obsessiveness is simply THE way that humans live now. David's constant rubbing against institution masquerading as his friend-- the hippie parole officer, the "progressive" psychiatrist--shows how we are simultaneously bound by the same systems that we like the think we broke free from, but at the same time given a taste of something much more satisfying. A great emotional reality that we find ourselves obsessively pursuing.

This book is much more than a romance novel. The 30-page sex scene in the middle is proof of this. What Harlequin novel would portray the insecurities of the characters as they make love so vividly, would be so frank about their physical limitations and roughness.

This is horrible, beautiful novel, which should be far more revered than it is.

I read "Endless Love" shortly before that horrible movie came out. Like so many others, I loved the book and hated the movie. I've read it many times, and can recall long passages, actually hear Spencer's words in my memory's ear. It is one of my most fervent wishes that this wonderful book be made into a movie that's worthy of it. I'm sure it can be done.

I read this when I was trying to get over an obsessive love myself, and it affected me very profoundly. The author deals with very profound, deep, passionate feelings of obsessive love, of loss, of obsession following loss in a way that seems totally authentic and with which I could completely identify. There was not one extraneous word in this book, not one word that was not essential to the gripping plot. It was like living with someone through his experience; it was one of the most alive books I have ever read. I don't know how someone who has never been through painful obsessive love and loss would react to ENDLESS LOVE. I drowned in this book--I needed to. I have read Scott Spencer's other novels--he is a great American writer--one of the greatest!