ASA, AS I KNEW HIM

By Susanna Kaysen

Book Overview

Dinah Sachs and Asa Thayer have had a love affair, conducted in afternoons stolen from the office of the magazine where they work. But now that the affair is over, Dinah, in an act of lingering... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394749855
• ISBN13: 9780394749853
• Release Date: March 1987
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 159 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.

Customer Reviews

a melancholy dream

I am only dropping a star because I couldn't get into this the first time I started it. This time around I couldn't put it down. I really enjoy Susanna Kaysen's writing style. This was a well told story, and just the right book to read if you want something to keep you company in a lost-in-a-daydream sort of way.

Obsession tells an intriguing tale

You loved him. You wanted to know everything about him. He loved you too...and then he didn't. Asa, As I Knew Him, is the story told by Dinah, still in love and still struggling to understand her failed love affair with Asa. Unable to share the details of his life, she creates her own history of him: how he grew up from privileged teenagerhood into the man "who was born to stomp on [her] heart." But Dinah is not pathetic or full of self-pity; her rendering of Asa is compelling and intelligent. Unrequited love is a topic that I usually skip over -- too often the author mistakes pathos for depth of feeling. Kaysen's heroine is utterly believable: I couldn't put the book down.