Raymond and Hannah [Import] [Paperback]

Stephen Marche (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 6, 2005

From a new Canadian talent who will sweep you off your feet, a love story about a man and a woman irresistibly drawn to each other despite the impediments of geography and culture.

Meeting as strangers at a party, Raymond and Hannah stumble into a one-night stand with unexpected consequences. Together, they share a single, magical week before Hannah leaves for Jerusalem, where she is to spend nine months at an orthodox yeshiva learning Torah among students who disapprove of intermarriage. Raymond, a graduate student researching love in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, struggles with his loneliness and Hannah’s increasing religiosity.

As their separation comes to an end, Hannah questions whether she can live with a man who is not of her people, and Raymond’s hunger for human intimacy reaches a crisis point. He cheats on her; she begins to practice the Commandments. Still, neither can tolerate the other’s absence. Unable to make a clean break, they’re forced to try their insoluble problems in the city without solution, Jerusalem.

Acute and closely observed, Raymond and Hannah captures with gripping precision the thrill of new romance, the bitter doubt of longing, the inescapable urgings of love.

Excerpt from Raymond and Hannah

Preliminaries

“What are you here for?” Hannah asks Raymond.

“What am I here for? I was invited.”

“You know Paul.”

He nods. “And you?”

Hannah sips her champagne. “I’m here to meet men.”

A moment’s pause, while he casts a critical gaze across the offerings of the room. “What about Jim?”

“Which one’s Jim?”

He points to a hippie leaning on the radiator across the room, a large-bearded man in jeans and a check flannel shirt whose laughter drunkenly booms like dropped tympani over the light chatter. “I realize that I’ve just ruined it by pointing, but maybe it’s all for the best. It wouldn’t have worked out with Jim anyway. He’s married or something. How about Roger?” He bugs his eyes in the direction of a man in overalls. Hannah looks, arching her elegant neck to see the scruffy poseur affecting boredom beside the refrigerator. “The one in overalls. His name’s Roger. Actually I have no idea who he is. I made up the name.”

She frowns. “That one’s not bad. Excuse me.” She reaches over to the table for the champagne and refills their cups.

“My name’s Raymond,” he says.

“Hannah,” she replies.

They touch cups, and Raymond again scans the room, apparently displeased with its contents. “The pickings here really are a bit slim. I suggest we inspect the other rooms to see if this is all the night has to offer.”


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his startling debut, Marche offers up a rare hybrid: the page-turner prose poem. Raymond and Hannah meet at a party in Toronto, and what might have been a one-night stand blossoms into something more enduring. In lyrical paragraphs labeled in the margins (e.g., "Lost virginities"), Marche maps out their five-day love affair with bursts of confession, philosophical musing and notes on the infinitesimal shifts of mood between kisses. On Raymond and Hannah's second day together, "The afternoon is a labyrinthine flex of joints twisted around each other in a variety of blisses." But at the end of the week, Hannah leaves Canada and her WASPy lover for a previously scheduled nine-month stay in Jerusalem. Their e-mail exchanges about their respective cities and pursuits—Raymond is writing a doctoral dissertation on Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy while Hannah studies Torah at an Orthodox yeshiva—don't necessarily forward the plot, but rather reveal how little two people can really tell each other. In between their letters, the novel offers utterly convincing glimpses of both characters' lives. Especially full-bodied is the evocation of Hannah's struggle to understand her Jewish identity, not just through study but through the city of Jerusalem itself. In this lushly romantic book, love between Jew and atheist gentile resembles the divided city, simultaneously impossible and actual. Agent, Jacqueline Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists (Toronto). (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

A week before leaving for an intense course of study in Israel, the Jewish Hannah picks up the Gentile Raymond at a party. What is meant to be a one-night stand turns into an intense, weeklong affair. The assimilated Hannah is going to Israel to try to discover her roots and herself. Raymond is trying to avoid writing his dissertation on Robert Burton. They decide to continue the affair via e-mail and phone calls. This lyrical first novel is written in brief passages, each with its own subtitle. At first this might seem like an -Internet-age or postmodern writing gimmick, but the technique suits the subject matter well. The intellectual journeys of both protagonists are perhaps a little overexplained, since what is compelling here is their relationship with each other. The characters are likable and believable, and their romantic dilemma will resonate with many readers. Marta Segal
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Anchor Canada; First Trade edition (December 6, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 038566124X
• ISBN-13: 978-0385661249
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,814,341 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Builds and satisfies, June 20, 2005

By 

Kaitlyn Kochany (Stratford, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Raymond and Hannah : A Love Story (Hardcover)

Raymond and Hannah seems at first like a pretentious little trip into the heart of an urban relationship. There's the very post-modern device of the author leaning into the text - in this case, he divides the book into short vignettes, emails, impressions, non sequitors and snippets of dialogue, all designed to create a layered and informative effect. Surprisingly, it works.

The characters of Raymond and Hannah, and their lives as students and lovers, come vividly alive in this book. When their torrid affair ends and Hannah leaves to study in Jerusalem, she goes a disaffected and modern woman. While at the yeshiva, however, she encounters her Jewish roots and creates an identity as a Jew, a woman, a woman in a long-distance relationship with a Gentile, and a complete, nuanced character. Raymond is just as fully fleshed out. Their first week together is just as vivid, packed with the details and shimmers of Real Love that is vital in making an experimental piece of writing work.

There are flaws here, as in everything. While perhaps vital as illumination to his character, Raymond's thesis is incredibly dull. The last third of the book is a touch confusing - the characters and the writing both lose a bit of focus. Overall, however, this is a charming and totally readable bit of fiction, and an interesting and modern meditation on identity, religion, finding one's place in the world, and love.

1.0 out of 5 stars So many words to describe this (audio) book..., June 3, 2007

By 

Amazoniac (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Raymond and Hannah (Paperback)

...unfortunately, the words that come to mind are mediocre, lame, lazy, shallow, and a phrase: falling way short of its potential. Did the other reviewers even read (listen to) the same book I did?

Where to begin. The characters of Ramond and Hannah are NOT fully nuanced, ever. Their lives away from each other are not vivid and developed. They are incredibly shallow characters-- not because of the week of sex-- although that part could have had some more emotional depth, too. They seem to have no real interior lives, and so they have nothing to share with each other.

I'm very critical of reviewers who review the book that should have been written instead of the book that WAS written... but I'm going to do that very thing. The premise was good. Two people meet, have a week of passionate connected sex, fall in love, separate to two very different lifestyles. Can their love sustain the separation and changes? Good idea.

But when Raymond and Hannah separate, their emails are one and two liners most of the time. This is why I say they are shallow and have no interior emotional or intellectual worlds to share with each other or through which to connect. I still have one hour to listen to, but up to this point, they only talk on the phone ONCE. Hel-LO! In love? I don't think so. They don't pour out the details of their lives the way people do when they're newly in love and want to know everything about each other. This is why I called the book "lazy." I think the author was just too lazy to do the work of filling out his characters. The novel has NO conflict. I would say this is just a very long short story, but even short stories have conflict. One of the reviewers above called this a "prose poem." Give me a break. That's just more laziness on the part of the author. I reminds me of kids in school who think that if they just write something out in lines with a capital letter at the beginning of each one, it automatically becomes a poem. And those long quotes from "Anatomy of Melancholy"? More laziness... let's increase the word count by quoting extensively from another book. Yeah, I'm sure those passages had something to do with the "plot," but by that time I didn't care about the characters any more.

I found it completely unbelievable that after only a few months in Jerusalem she felt familiar enough with Hebrew to read from the Torah at a service after only *one week's* focused preparation! People take months to prepare a Torah reading. To prepare herself in a week-- did not compute.

BTW, the ensemble of readers who performed this book made several pronunciation/usage errors (English words, not Hebrew words) that were pretty major. I don't know if these were editing mistakes or reading mistakes. I can only remember one of them: the comment was that someone was of a certain ethnic "extraction," but the reader said a certain ethnic "abstraction." There were a few others that escape me.

Edited to add: I finished the book, and alas, the last hour didn't offer anything to change the opinion I expressed in my review earlier today.

Before I comment on the last hour of the book, I must mention something that was INCREDIBLY annoying, and that was the incorrect presentation that emails back and forth get repeated "RE:"'s added to the subject line. That does not happen. When something is forwarded on repeatedly, you will get a chain of "FW: FW: FW:"'s, but that does not happen with "RE:." You can email back and forth with the same subject and it will still just be "RE: pie-baking," or whatever, no matter how many emails go back and forth. Geez.

I have comments about the last hour of the book that contain spoilers, so I've added them at the very bottom.






***WARNING! SPOILER FOLLOWS!**




Okay, so finally Raymond sleeps with someone else, a month before he is to go visit Hannah. There was NO inner conflict on his part leading up to this. Yeah, it's believable, but why now? Why not sooner?

And where is Hannah's struggle? The only conflict she's revealed so far is wondering what to do with her new Jewishness after the Institute. Hmmm... I gather there are quite a few Jews in Toronto. Now if, after Jerusalem, she were headed to North Dakota, or West Texas, then she might wonder how she would nurture her Jewish identity in those places where there are few Jews, but in a major cosmopolitan city-- no problem. Why doesn't Hannah form any major relationships in Jerusalem. She has some girlfriends, but their conversations never get very deep.

Judiasm is a religion of action, but her new discoveries about the ritual details haven't (so far) led her to making a commitment to *tikkun olam,* working to mend a broken world. Yeah, she's real high on candle lighting, but ritual gestures have to be accompanied by a Jewish life that extends out into the world. Maybe she figures this out during the last hour of the book.

Now, if Raymond had become involved with Laura much earlier, AND if Hannah had started an affair with her married rabbi Jack Katz, or contemplated becomine ultra-orthodox and staying in Jerusalem permanently, or met a very attractive and Jewishly committed Israeli man, or decided to join the Israeli Defense Forces-- THEN we might have some actual plot elements.

I realize I still have an hour to go, so maybe there will be some earth-shaking events before the end of the book. I keep listening because I can't believe how bad this is, how lame, how mediocre... but I said that already.

If I have any major insights after I finish the book, I'll be back with more comments. The way I feel now, I suggest you avoid this book.


Edited to add (after finishing the book):

Raymond confesses to Hannah that he slept with Laura almost immediately after it happens. But she still wants him to come to Jerusalem. That doesn't work for me. But anyway, he goes, their visit is awkward except that they fall back into the pattern of the first week-- lots of sex and eating but no talking. These two don't have a real conversation at all in this book. Maybe this is really "Last Tango in Paris."

One strange thing really stands out: the trip to Hebron. That is so vivid and such a compelling narrative that I'm forced to conclude that this author didn't write it. He probably knew someone who took a trip to Hebron and emailed him about it, and he just lifted their entire narrative. Sure enough, when Raymond and Hannah get back to Jerusalem, the book slips back into the pseudopoetic oneliners and terse, cryptic dialogue.

After Raymond comes to Jerusalem, he and Hannah never once declare their love for each other (she is still pissed about the affair, but not too pissed to sleep with him), and yet at some point out of the blue, Raymond states that he wants them to be together and they can raise their children Jewish. It's not clear if he is addressing this declaration to her or to himself. And what was the basis for this change of heart?

Raymond's couple of diatribes against religion are also out of the clear blue sky and no basis is given by the author for Raymond's point of view. Why does he feel this strongly? Is it emotion-based or logic-based?

Anyway... enough. This is one of the most trivial and worthless books I've ever read, and it's sad because the premise was a good one.

5.0 out of 5 stars Suprisingly good read, one to remember, July 22, 2006

By 

Sarah Vibrantzek "occasional reader" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Raymond and Hannah (Harvest Original) (Paperback)

This elegant story tells of a romance with nuance, charm, wit and some depth. The characters ultimately feel very real, despite the seeming unreality and coincidental nature of their meeting. The marginal notes that seem almost like journal entries on the side of the action add to the text, like a third voice in a three-part chord. Quickly, these notes become comfortable for the reader, as brief commentary on the action. The story concerns Hannah, who is Jewish and "finding herself" in Israel and Ray, who is not Jewish, a graduate student who remains in her native Canada at this time; the story describes how their relationship is affected by their separation and their separate challenges. In the end, the story also very quietly, without much fanfare suggests how the trajectory of the relationship very subtly echoes the pain and possibilities in the cultural and political situation Israel confronts with its Arab neighbors. This is a quiet subtext, yet appears to be present and nicely surfaces near the end of the text. In the end, the story may be about all such encounters with difference where there is also deeper relationship. It was a surprisingly good read, a romance with some depth. Like a fine dessert, it's sweet, a little bit rich and textured, yet not unhealthy.