Customer Reviews

Feast of Love

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(47)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

What do we talk about when we talk about love? This fine novel answers that question in ways that delighted, surprised, and fascinated me. Think about it. We spend hours and hours talking about love--how it enthralls and defeats us--with our friends in cafes or with our lovers in the dark, but what do we REALLY learn about ourselves during such chatter? Baxter, one of our best ever short story writers, casts the most ordinary moments of love as extraordinary in this inventive novel. The narrator (named Charlie) coaxes stories of love--good and bad--from his characters (who present themselves as his actual neighbors and Ann Arbor acquaintances). Instead of melodrama and Shakespearean high tragedy, however, these love stories offer insight into the true affections that tug at our inner selves. I was most affected by the crazy passions of Baxter's teen lovers, Chloe and Oscar, and by the pained poignancy of a father's wrenching love for his mentally-ill son. This novel is deep and subtle. It's also sexy, savvy, sly and very, very funny. I highly recommend it to anyone who has been baffled by the circus tricks of the human heart.

Charles Baxter, author of the book Believers, has a writer's block. He is wandering around his neighborhood late at night, hoping to get ideas for his novel. When he sits on a bench, a young fellow named Bradley has a marvelous idea for a novel. The name of the novel is The Feast of Love.

This is a wonderful piece of literature. It vaguely resembles Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, except that this novel is utterly contemporary. The novel is about love. The author explores different kinds of human relationships. There's Bradley: the hopeless romantic; there's Harry Gingsberg: an old philosopher with a troubled son; then there's Chloe and Oscar: the young, wild lovers. Chloe and Oscar touched me; their love was so pure that it made me cry.

This novel is breathtakingly beautiful. I love the language; the characters' voices are very expressive. I highly recommend this novel. Now run along and get it!

There's such a thing as comfort-eating. Food you turn to when feeling sad or lonely. Food that is familiar & yet delicious, & can help get your spirits up each time you turn to it. Well, I believe there is also such a thing as comfort reading. "The feast of love" is one of the best novels that I read last year. After reading it for the first time, I've found myself returning to it again & again, turning to favourite pieces, or simply reading it from cover to cover, on long, rainy, lonely weekends. It's the kind of novel that makes you step out of your everyday-world, forget all that's on your mind, & live through the characters inhabiting the book.

I've been a fan of Charles Baxter for ages, he's definitely one of the best american short-story writers, & my personal second favourite, after Lorrie Moore. "The feast of love" came as a surprise, because it's different from other works by Baxter. It's a novel, but it's also a collection of stories, so in this way Charles Baxter doesn't move far from his usual style of writing. One of the surprises is the fact that the author appears as a character in the book. This "trick" could work or could not, & then would be considered just a party-trick & thus, tacky. Here, it works.

"Charlie" (aka Charles Baxter) is a blocked writer who suffers from insomnia & wonders the streets of Ann Arbour, Michigan during long nights, looking for ideas but finding none. On one of his nightly walks he meets his neighbour Bradley, who's walking his dog, also named Bradley. "Why not name your new novel Feast of love"? Bradley suggests. I could tell you stories about myself & people around me, & you could talk to some of them yourself. This is the basic idea of the book, & the stories start unfolding, one more enchanting than the next.

This book vaguely reminded me of "things we talk about when we talk about love" by Raymond Carver, & also other books by R.Carver. It's one of the best collections of love stories I've ever read, & for me getting such a strong emotional response from a book is reason enough to love it. There's no point in getting into details about the actual love stories. Just read this book, read it when you're in the right frame of mind, enjoy it & pass it on to a friend.

Where has Charles Baxter been all my life? A friend whose opinion I respect recommended this book to me, and I simply couldn't put it down.
At first, I couldn't see the connections between the various "pieces," and I thought perhaps I was reading a collection of loosely woven together short stories. But no. The Feast of Love is a novel, all right, and a spectacular one. Essentially, the characters are connected by their relationships within a small coffee shop, and we get to know them thru their interactions with each other in small but very poignant vignettes. And we inevitably grow to care deeply about them.
Baxter's book explores many facets of love: passion, infatuation, loss, idealism, old age, parent/child love, etc. Much of it is touching and intense, but must is also very, very funny - I mean, laugh out loud hard enough to waken a sleeping spouse kind of funny.
This is a masterful piece of fiction; don't miss it.

A book with plenty of wonderful metaphors and richly ironic observations, "The Feast of Love" is somewhat less than a sum of its parts. The main problem is that all the characters are written in minor variations of the same voice; I never really believed any of them were different from Bradley, whose narration is the seam upon which the other stories are stitched. I admit I did not especially like Bradley (his dog, by the way, shares his name--a bit odd). He seems weak and ineffectual, a furry fuzzball of a man with the nickname "Toad." Undoubtedly, you will appreciate the book more than I did if you like soft-spoken, homey middle-aged midwestern guys--college professor types. This fellow runs a coffee shop. The novel's other "speakers" (the chapters rotate among them) run the gamut from an old Jewish philosophy teacher, to a hard-charging female lawyer (a touch of misogynism is evident here), to a pair of dopey teens who fall in love with each other's idiosyncracies. Sometimes the potrayals seem stereotypical. There is also a dreadfully sentimental last chapter by the young girl. The novel strives for the cosmic but I mainly heard the undercurrent of the neurotic. And the narrator merry-go-round reminded my of an overly-clever Hollywood film--it's hard to lose yourself in the story when you are constantly reminded of its structure. But let me be clear. There are plenty of fine sentences, sometimes one following another, and if I were to compare this book to the summer epistles sold in a beach hotel's gift shop, I would give it five stars without hesitation. Yet the book clearly has the lofty ambition of literature, and in that realm it struggles for two.

Charles Baxter, an acclaimed master of the short story, proves himself equally adept as a novelist in The Feast of Love. The writer "Charlie" scrambles out of bed late at night because of a recurrent nightmare and decides to take a walk. A few blocks from his house, he encounters Bradley, an acquaintance and fellow insomniac who is walking his dog (also named Bradley.) There, in the middle of the night in Ann Arbor, Bradley the human dictates the title and characters of the novel Charlie should be writing. What follows then is pure structural brilliance: Charlie, as an invisible interviewer, pursues the "real" people who have touched Bradley's life: ex-wives Kathryn and Diana, young employees Chloé and Oscar, neighbors Harry and Esther - and the people who affect them. Each character tells a part of the story in his or her own voice. Soon, Charlie the interviewer fades into the background, emerging only when details that he has revealed at the beginning appear in the lives of his characters and thus remind the reader that, in true metafiction style, this fiction has a creator.

These love stories tell of mistaken love and true love - and the heartbreak that comes with both. Although they begin as separate tales, by the end they converge, bringing the novel together in a heartwarming whole. Baxter's prose is, as always, precisely clear. The distinct voices of the narration are superbly handled, especially in the case of Chloé, who is the most memorable character in the novel.

Charles Baxter fans should not pass up this extraordinary novel. If you like the metafiction in Ian McEwan's Atonement or the quirkiness of Anne Tyler's characters, you should appreciate this novel.

This is my first exposure to the writing of Charles Baxter; that I will continue to read more is a testament to good writing. This book was a joy to read and I left it with a deeper respect for the differences in other people. From previous reviews, it appears as though there is a love/hate relationship between the reader and the characters. I loved them; laughed at them and with them. Each character narrates sections of the novel to the "writer," describing their lives over the brief period of time which this book covers. Granted the main thrust of each conversation centers around love, but so much more of their lives is included as well. The narrator-characters include Bradley, a coffee-shop owner, his employees, Chloe and Oscar, his first wife and second wife and his neighbor, a Jewish philosophy professor caught up with the "Christian" philosopher, Kierkegaard. Evil and love-absence threaten in the form of Oscar's dad, Bat. Jesus Christ briefly appears and asks for directions at a wedding reception. A fortune-teller predicts death accurately. Over all this or through all this, the sense of a Divine Love emanates outward.

I for one am glad Baxter couldn't sleep, and when he was roaming in the park, he came across his neighbors, Bradley and Bradley!!

The quick-reading chapters are provided by Baxter's characters, making the story read like a "book within a book". Each chapter is a tale told by an individual character. As each shares their story of love and loss, they ultimately meet, and inter-twine with each other, giving us a full portrait.

We are reminded after reading this, that love indeed, comes in all shapes; sizes; wants and needs. Baxter has touched a nerve with many, he has also opened hearts of others, by sharing the lives and loves of the people we meet in The Feast of Love.

I too have had feelings and thoughts like the characters here. Some painful, some humerous, but most of all, loving. That's life folks - so, pick up a copy of the book, join Baxter on his walk in and around Ann Arbor, and meet his "works of art".

The funny thing is, I read about six pages of THE FEAST OF LOVE and put it back on the shelf because I did not like what I read. Then, I almost gave it away without reading it. Then, as these things go, I picked it up again, having forgotten that I had read the prelude, but this time something compelled me to read on...and on. This is a wonderful, wise, sad, funny, profound, and mystical book.

Baxter frames FEAST with his nightly perambulations associated with insommnia. He can't sleep. He says Shakespeare wrote two plays about sleeplessness, 'Macbeth' and 'Midsummernight's Dream'. The first is associated with death and the second with love. He says death and love are first cousins. Baxter dedicated FEAST to his brother who died two years ago.

Baxter's nightly wanderings lead him to encounter others who are up and about at night. First he meets his neighbor Bradley who is walking his dog Bradley whom he acquired at the Humane Society Animal Shelter. Bradley took his wife Katheryn to the Animal Shelter (against her will) to help her overcome her fear of dogs. Katheryn has left Bradley for Jenny, but Bradley has the dog Bradley from his visit to the animal shelter. Bradley's second wife Diana (troubled with agoraphobia) leaves him after a less than sucessful honeymoon trip to the woods of upper Michigan fails to cure her of her fear of open spaces.

Bradley is the manager of a coffee shop called Jitters where two young lovers named Chloe and Oscar work for Bradley. As Chloe says, she and Oscar are at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. But, Oscar and Chloe have found true love. And, they make lots of love, once on the 50-yard line of the stadium at Ann Arbor.

Bradley's neighbors Harry and Ester Ginsberg keep two little fish named Ethel and Julius. Harry is a philosophy teacher whose interests are Soren Kierkegaard who (according to Harry) has said "nearly everyone intuits the sublety of God, but no one knows how to speak to him." Sometimes Harry thinks about Wittgenstein who picked the lint off the suit and lost the suit, or Kaftka and his castles. Harry and Ester wait for the return of their prodigal son Aron. One cold snowy night they get Chloe instead.

Other characters, all associated with each other whirl around this amazing book. Baxter has alluded to the Escher hand drawing the hand (on a tee shirt) which was probably what put me off the book to begin with as it seemed a bit trite, but Baxter is far more subtle than this initial allusion led me to believe. This book touches the most profound mysteries and truths in a way only really good literature can. I laughed out loud and I cried.

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath elsewhere had it's setting..."

As Chloe says, this book is about recycled souls.

This is perhaps one of the finest books I've yet to manage to read this year. A friend recommended this book to me and after reading the blurb, I didn't hesitate to buy this book. And now, I highly recommend everyone to buy this book ~~ or at least read it as it is an example of America's finest writings for this century.

Baxter takes the stories of several people in his insomniac journey and gives them life in the passage of love. There is Bradley, the main character, who is unlucky in his choice of wives ~~ Kathryn who leaves Bradley for love of another woman and Diana, whose cold, secretive nature makes her more suitable as a mistress than as a spouse. There is Chloe and Oscar, employees of Bradley's coffee shop ~~ whose love for one another and dreams of love are more traditional than their multiple piercings and tatoos. There are Harry and Esther, Bradley's neighbors, whose love for their son persists in spite of his hatred for his parents. And Baxter weaves their tales among Bradley's quest for conjual happiness in life.

It is well-written, witty and charming. It is also humorous as well. It is such a fun book to read ~~ with all the characters' voices in harmony.

I don't think anyone who reads this book will regret this choice ~~ and I've read many books in the last year. This book will not only be passed onto others ~~ it will serve as a conversational piece among lovers and friends ~~ who all share different points of views on love. It will leave the reader with a good feeling too ~~ more optimistic and hopeful than when one starts this book.

This is my first Baxter book and I want to read his others ~~ anyone who can write like he does deserves lots of space in my personal library.