Braving the mysteries of how and why two people fall in love, Maureen Howard weaves history, art, sciance, astronomy, and the compelling needs of family into the intensely romanic A Lover's Almanac - a novel of radiant intelligence and delicious wit. The exhilarating flights and emotional depth of Howard's storytelling balance the fate of young lovers in New York: Artie, a bastard, perhaps "begot in the mud of Woodstock," now a boyish computer wizrd, and Louise, a hot new painter out of the Midwest, seriously committed to her art. Their romance, seemingly shattered on the eve of the millenium, is played against he tale of two old lovers lost to each other for half a century. These intertwined lives gather history and time itself into a haunting narrative in which truth surfaces to wound and heal. Seamless entries on the exploits of formative geniuses, from Ben Franklin to Robert Oppenheimer, bring the desire for progress into perspective with the limitd dreams of private life. Brimming with the exuberance of Salman Rushdie and the moral purpose of Don DeLillo, A Lover's Almanac renders our confrontation with the past and the need to move on to the rest of our days - transforming the dear Old Farmer's Almanac into a bright book of life.
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Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Howard uses the format of the almanac as a framework for the deceptively simple story of the relationship between avant-garde artist Louise Moffett and her partner, computer nerd Artie Freeman, whose love founders at the turn of the millennium. The richness and wonder of this work comes from the characters, relationships, and historical musings that Howard weaves into Louise and Artie's tale and uses to instruct the reader on the nature and meaning of love. Complex and compelling, the work addresses important questions as it compels the reader to make intellectual leaps between the ideas of scholars past and those of the novelist present. This challenging novel deserves to be read more than once. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.?Caroline M. Hallsworth, Cambrian Coll., Ont.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Howard, a quietly prodigious literary talent on a par with Margaret Atwood, Mary Gordon, and Anne Tyler, loves to bend nonfiction forms to fictional purposes. The title of her last novel, Natural History (1992), alludes to its pseudoscientific structure, and here she improvises on the concept of an almanac, surrounding a classic love story with bits of astrology, meteorology, history, and miscellaneous observations. She also plays at predicting the future, setting her tale in January 2000, but it is the past that most concerns her brooding characters. Louise, a painter, and Artie, her orphan lover, have a battle royal at her New Year Eve's party and suffer, in the aftermath, several months of separation, an interlude that causes them to reflect on their complicated family histories. As they slowly realign, like heavenly bodies destined for a celestial event, Howard punctuates her affecting narrative with almanaclike entries about such subjects as ancient Egypt, Benjamin Franklin, and Virginia Woolf, exploring, along the way, the often unexpected consequences of acts both creative and destructive. Donna Seaman
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A magical piece of work by a master alchemist.,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Lover's Almanac (Hardcover)
This is a fantastic novel that is satisfying on so many levels. Milan Kundera has said that he believes the contemporary novel is stuck in the 19th century, and has not lived up to its potential for play and wonder. I hope he has read "The Lovers' Almanac" because this book is a splendid amalgamation of poetry, philosophy, and good storytelling. While not shying away from weighty subjects, it is Howard's light touch, the way she flits from idea to idea, that makes this such an exciting read.
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