Customer Reviews

A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Nehring's sweeping study of the amorous drives of men and women from classical antiquity through the present is a delight on many levels. She writes with the wit and grace of the journalistic pundit she is, but her scholarship is thoroughgoing and illuminating--especially about texts educated readers too easily assume they know all there is to know about. Nehring has surprising yet supportable things to say about Plato's amorous dialogues, Dante's Vita Nova, Trstan and Iseult, and the emergent courtly tradition. She delves deeply into creative lives, especially women's, to underscore what is unavoidably a radical and challenging thesis: that passionate--even seemingly crazy passionate--love far from blinds lovers; it lights their way as no other condition can. In Nehring's view, Love, acknowledged for what it is, is the way out of the deadening cultural malaise created by love-averse pundits on both right and left. This is a no-category treasure of a book.

All for Love

This wonderfully learned, wonderfully exuberant defense of love looks simultaneously at how we live in the contemporary world and how great lovers have behaved in the past. Sadly, for all our freedom of choice and opportunity, we moderns finish a distant second (or fourth, or fifth) place. Taking on the received wisdom of the decades following the sexual and feminist revolutions of the 60s, Nehring draws from her deep reading of the classics to argue for the qualities usually seen as threats to a desirable relationship: inequality, transgression, long distance, aggression, among others. Although all this stuff mother warned you about can easily turn a couple into wrecks like Sid and Nancy rather than the idealized lovers Nehring lingers on, we forget at our peril how human nature craves risk and obstacle to confront and overcome.

In its humanity and range of reference--Nehring is equally at home among the writers of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the modern periods--this book reminds me of Ocavio Paz's splendid The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, on the same subject. But where Paz's book reflects on love after a long lifetime of experience, Nehring's plunges in with the spirit of youth and an appetite for more life, more experience. Although one does occasionally wish for a more vigilant editor--figures such as "the famous French novelist of the nineteenth century, Stendhal" and "the Greek philosopher, Plato" stumble into the book before finding surer footing in Nehring's larger arguments--the author's deep, personal engagement with her material makes this volume a compelling read.

Cristina Nehring navigates the rocky shoals between angry feminists and men honeslly confused by their movement to assert that we need a new time of "revived romantic hope...of fresh daring" between people who long for joy that love once seemed to promise to couples. She plumbs literature and literary biography to explore how love brought pain, joy, sorrow, and sublime engagement with life to her subjects, most of whom are from Western culture and the early modern world.
Her project is nothing less than to reinvent romantic love for the early 21st century, when we are often diverted by gender and power issues and a sense of triumphalism that sees marriage as the ultimate and only measure of success. (Not for a moment does she discount that wondrous outcome for many, however.)
It appears that Nehring's wellspring for her study may have come from her insight that "the more intelligent [women] are, the more ironical and distant [they] must be" to love's calling, its demands, its challenges. Au contraire, insists this American writer living in Paris: intelligent women are "excited by men."
For some of us, her chapter on "Love As Failure" may offer deep consolation over lives where love did not "succeed." She draws on the stories of Heloise and Abelard, Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther," and Ralph Waldo Emerson's love for Margaret Fuller. Each had its "brush with the sublime," she insists. Each partook of the "heroic and transcendent" nature of love, which we have lost and which she wants to "make honorable" again.
If you believe, or once did, that love held out a hope worthy of life itself, this book vindicates your belief. Argue against that proposition, if you will--but enjoy an inspiring argument, based in rich scholarship, and
presented in prose that doesn't miss a beat or a line.

Cristina Nehring's academic yet passionate approach to the topic of "love" and "passion" adds a perspective seemingly having been lost in our more efficiency-oriented society. She successfully recaptures, or at least provides a strong polemic arguing for, the resuscitation of that most human about us that may not so neatly "fit" the more orderly, at times rigid and overly controlling boxes into which we attempt to contain matters of passion and the heart. Bravo for Nehring's cutting through to what would feel far more vibrant and alive within us.

This book offers some very compelling arguements about love throughout the ages and is a great academic source to find out what to read if you want to know more about great love affairs.

I couldn't put down this book. It was like reading some of my own thoughts about love, friendship and romance beatifully expressed and deeply developed.
The only downside of the book has nothing to do with the author but with the edition I've got, the border of the pages is not neatly cut, aggg! Why do they keep on doing that?

There simply are no words that can explain the salve her book brings to those who live like glowing Roman Candles, be it in love or elsewhere in life. The words of Viktor Frankl come to mind, "That which is to give light must endure burning."

Simply a brilliant, majestic book.

I first heard Cristina Nehring discussing her subject on public radio. She was so passionate and clueless about the usual talk show bromides and how to sell herself that I immediately ordered the book. Her Vindication resembles the polemics that Germaine Greer and Kate Millett wrote years ago -- intelligent, hyperbolic, intensely literate -- but is a lot more fun to read. And -- no small thing -- inspiring to a sometimes grim second-generation feminist like myself. Her take on lovers and love stories from antiquity to right now is like a Comp Lit whirlwind course in the History of Love, that insists -- using case studies -- that it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Excellent writing, I look forward to more!

One of the more frustrating books I've read in awhile; yet I managed to devour it in 2 sittings. Go figure. Nehring selects noteworthy examples of couples and partners from history to slam home some insights about the importance of Romance in our lives. Much of this is hard to digest, probably due to my cynicism tied to our general inability to accurately access the contributions (or lack thereof) of historical figures from even a distance of years, let alone centuries.

I'm now pouring over a book of love letters from Simone De Beuvoir to Nelson Algren, trying to salvage my shattered image of this feminist icon. Yes, Nehring has some decent retorts to anyone looking throw cold water on someone like De Beuvoir. But it's still difficult reconstructing an image. Nehring draws some grand conclusions, separated into organized thematic packages. Some of it actually sticks. But more importantly, Nehring boldly burns some sacred totems of our contemporary Feminist agenda, and stakes out an intriguing case for embracing new levels of risk and potential mayhem in relationships. Most importantly, I suspect, her book made me think, which is always worth the price of admission.

Consistent with one of Ms. Nehring's underlying themes, my two star assessment is more of an attempt to keep the fires burning under this writer, than to render a judgment of her skills. May my risk-taking in under-shooting her abilities be the tonic that sets her free to surprise us (and her) with her next book...

William J. Gianopulos
Thessaloniki, Greece

For a book that purports to deal with love in the 21st Century, it spends most of its time in the--often very distant--past. Many pages are filled with what amounts to literary criticism or the exploits of fictional or legendary characters or famous lovers of times gone by. And to reach what conclusion? The same old cliches:
men and women allegedly enjoy romantic challenges and opposites attract. Disappointing, I would have expected more from her based on her work in The Atlantic.