An Encyclopedia of Love: A Memoir

By M. Scheil and M. Scheil

Book Overview

In encyclopedia form, the utterly original, captivating story of two people in love A memoir like no other: in encyclopedic entries, a love affair comes to life, with details that range from... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312252838
• ISBN13: 9780312252830
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

An original and profound love story

I can't recommend An Encylopedia of Love too strongly. It is a highly unusual memoir, not so much the story itself - although that is remarkable enough - but more in the way it is told. It is about two middle-aged people, an American writer living in Britain and a British artist, who meet, fall in love and set up home together, only for disaster to strike when the man is diagnosed with cancer. The writing is so superb that even if the story were told in a straightforward linear fashion it would be absorbing and deeply moving, but Ms Scheil has done something quite different and much more original, challenging and profound both with her story and with her gifts as a writer. The lovers' story, its whole arc from their first meeting to the man's premature death, is broken up into all its details and recounted in alphabetized, indexed and cross-referenced encylopedia form, with about 450 entries, covering everything from their diets and attitude to money to their sexual life, all discussed with admirable frankness, humour and lack of sentimentality. The result is a remarkably detailed and comprehensive portrait of two intertwined lives.The ideal way to read the book is not to start at the beginning and read it straight through but to dip into it at random, allowing the cross-references to take you where they will, until eventually you find yourself saying on every page "Hey, I've read this before". Even on a second or third reading, the form allows each fragment of the story to remain fresh and somehow different, because it is being read in a different context, viewed from a different perspective. That is exactly how things are in real life. We don't live our lives or our relationships in linear narratives like novels. They're more like shifting mosaics or kaleidoscopes, always falling into new patterns, continually being recycled with new meanings emerging. The encyclopedia form works magnificently because of this kind of higher psychological realism, but it goes deeper than that, especially in the way the form resists closure. A conventional narrative would have necessarily ended with the man's death, but here he continues to live in these endlessly circulating, self-redefining mini-narratives. In a conventional memoir, it would be painful to go back and read about the couple's past happiness, since you would inevitably read it through a haze of elegiac regret, but in An Encyclopedia of Love that doesn't happen. Each part stands separate, as radiant as a piece in a mosaic, uncontaminated by linear notions of past and future, and so when I read about "him" (he remains unnamed) in the early days of the relationship he stands before me vibrant and cancer-free, his whole life ahead of him. What greater gift could a woman possibly give to a man she has loved and so tragically lost?