The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief-Fast Shipping

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“A wrenching and boldly intimate lament.”—Philip Roth

“The Pure Lover leaves one exalted. . . . A lovely book, joyful, plangent and true.”—Washington Post

David Plante first met Nikos Stangos in London in 1965. He was a young American—raw, an aspiring writer, in love with a fantasy of Greece half classical and half inspired with the eroticism of Cavafy. Nikos was Greek, a poet, an aesthete and intellectual, a leftist, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of his country: a man of great sophistication and few pretensions. Nikos was pure. They spent the next forty years together. And then Nikos died of brain cancer.

In The Pure Lover Plante tells us, in vivid fragments that like the pieces of a mosaic come together into a glimmering whole, the story of his beloved, of their life together, and of its end. And in this telling he shows us the nature of grief: its passion, its centrality, its vanity, its willfulness, the threat and the lure of its overwhelming force. And the griever’s fear that when it fades, the lost lover will finally, really, be lost.

The Pure Lover is a book of unusual intimacy, a lament that will speak to all who have known deep love and deep grief.