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Better Together
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An abrupt death sentence given to a 50-year-old London ad exec forces an uneasy deliverance in Richardson's smartly setup, poignant tale. Given less than a month to live, Ambrose Zephyr, alphabet-obsessed since childhood, decides to spend out his last days traveling around the globe from A to Z. Ambrose and his wife, Zappora Ashkenazi (the couple is childless), begin in Amsterdam, viewing art by Velázquez and Rembrandt that has been significant to them in their loving marriage, and now looks wholly transformed. The two move between the sweet memories of past love and an unreal present, from Berlin to Chartres, the Great Pyramids of Khufu to Istanbul; when Ambrose begins to falter and they return home to their Kensington terrace flat. Reality and good manners demand that they inform their respective employers and friends of Ambrose's condition, while Zappora, a fashion editor attempting to keep a journal of the couple's last moments together, endures until the end. Richardson's tightly focused tale has panache, shadowed by a brooding suspense. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
What would you do if you found out that your life would end in 30 days? Set your legal and financial affairs in order and contact the people at hospice? Forgive your enemies and send loving messages to friends and family? Or would you take a trip, stopping at all the places in the world you have loved and all those you wanted to see but never visited?
When Ambrose Zephyr learns around the time of his 50th birthday that he has only one month to live, he makes frantic plans to travel the globe alphabetically from Amsterdam to Zanzibar with his beloved wife, Zappora (Zipper) Ashkenazi. These two people have been everything to each other for all the years of a quietly happy marriage. If he wants to travel at this time, she will go, wherever the journey takes them and whatever her own feelings may be: "Don't do this don't be this don't go without me don't go at all," Zipper thinks to herself.
Above all else this is a story about love, something longer than the alphabet and wider than geography. Although at first the travel theme may bring to mind such relentless late-life guides as 1000 Places To See Before You Die, the resemblance is superficial. Despite the book's title and some of its chapter headings -- "D" for Deauville, "F" for Florence, and so on -- this elegant, spare and beautifully written tale of Ambrose Zephyr's last journey is too delicate, witty and passionate to be ruled by alphabetical order or contained within any planned itinerary.
Things go wrong. By the time they get to C (for Chartres), Zipper longs for Paris, where she and Ambrose first met. She is haunted by a nightmarish inner alphabet: "E is for Eiffel's tower, standing in Paris. L is for London and home. Z is for Zipper. T is for terrified. H is for hopeless."
As they continue on, mistakes are made and connections lost: The travelers miss E (Elba) altogether; they never reach H (Haifa). K and J are altered, and transposed.
They do get to Paris. Their time together in that city is a blend of enchantment and apprehension as deftly and lightly created as a fine soufflé.
The surprise of this little book is not that it is poignant but that it is delightful: graceful, stylish, humorous, intelligent and lacking even the faintest whiff of sanctimony. Each page shimmers with life at its gentle, everyday best: always unraveling at one end of the alphabet or the other, laced with love.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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