With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, The New York Times have asked 20 authors, including Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu and Nigerian-born Chris Abani, to share what they’ve learned about love from literature.
Mengestu says that he’s never been into love poems, but that William Carlos Williams’ “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” has stayed with him because it shows the “oxymoronic blend of love’s harsh reality (it is where we fail the hardest) and the grace (it is where we are forgiven and are at our best) that comes with it”.
Abani reveals that he had an epiphany while rereading Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, realising “that I have always been more in love with my fantasies of the women I was with, and not with the beautiful and complicated human beings they actually were”. It is this ability of literature to offer us “brutal epiphanies into our own hearts” that enables it to teach us about love.
Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín, Ruth Ozeki, Khaled Hosseini and Jeanette Winterson are some of the other writers that shared literary insights on love:
DINAW MENGESTU: I was never into love poems, even as a young man prone to writing long, lyrical letters to girlfriends, or potential girlfriends, which was more often the case. The declarations of adoration, in any writer’s hand, struck me as overbearing and bordering on the sentimental. Perhaps it was inevitable that the love poem that has stayed with me the longest has to do with its inadequacy. William Carlos Williams’s “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” written to his wife of 40 years, is an apology, a plea for forgiveness for his failures as a husband. My favorite lines — “Let me, for I know / you take it hard, / with good reason, / give the steps / if it may be / by which you shall mount, / again to think well / of me” — are embedded with that oxymoronic blend of love’s harsh reality (it is where we fail the hardest) and the grace (it is where we are forgiven and are at our best) that comes with it.
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- The Secret History of Las Vegas by Chris Abani
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EAN: 9780143124955
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- All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu
EAN: 9780385349987
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