Rating: 
Summary: Haunting Nostalgia
Review: Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain? ~Alan Lightman
Einstein's Dreams is a delicate taste of the banquet of intimacy in Reunion. I am never sure if Alan Lightman's books are novels or the deepest expressions of his romantic nature. After reading Einstein's Dreams I knew there was more to discover and here it is in all its intimate beauty.
The first few pages left me in a high state of amusement. How I understand that love of words as he wishes to be reading a book while lost in the world of a woman. Yet, what would the world be without romantic seduction and the seduction of words? In Reunion, the two dance together, intertwined in poetry and longing.
Detailed accounts of action and reaction fill the pages as Alan Lightman's mind breathes every nuance of life, every consideration. Amidst the contemplations, humor mingles with memories and astute observations. I kept thinking: "I feel all my life past was a beautiful prison from which I unwillingly escaped."
Alan Lightman revels in the sense of adventure he creates through imaginative descriptions of all that occurred or could have occurred. Are memories how we imagine life could have been or how life actually occurred?
Does it matter? Alan's recollections are worth reading twice. He creates ambience and nostalgia in one sentence. Nostalgia for rain drenched sidewalks I have never walked on and musty libraries I wish to visit or return to hours later in memory. His powers of observation flow into a complete unveiling of appearances and private passions.
Reunion is an escape into a world of imaginative observation. Even Alan Lightman's recollections of college and college roommates become an introduction to his main character's inclinations. We follow hearts through secret pains and pleasures. As Charles, a middle-aged professor, decides to attend his thirtieth college reunion, he remembers his senior year. He wanders with his twenty-two-year-old self in 1960 and the entire book become a journey to a past he so desperately wants to relive in memory.
I am so in love with the writing in this book, I hardly mind that a person named Charles wanders in the pages and is in love with a beautiful dancer. I want to know more about how Alan Lightman views the world. His characters seem to me a backdrop for his heart's revelations. This is an obsession with love and life itself and I love the way the writing style changes and keeps your full attention. At times you are reading a novel, at times a memory and at times you have become so seduced by sentence structure, you are lost in a world of words and you are in love.
~TheRebeccaReview.com
Author of Moonbeam Moths
Rating: 
Summary: Lyrical and mysterious...but lovely...
Review: Lightman is a much better writer than I might have imagined from his science background! He writes a sad story that most of us can relate to in someway or another. The story is not highly original at the end (the climax I mean), but still a sharp tale about lost loves. Sad but well worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Lyrical and mysterious...but lovely...
Review: Lightman is a much better writer than I might have imagined from his science background! He writes a sad story that most of us can relate to in someway or another. The story is not highly original at the end (the climax I mean), but still a sharp tale about lost loves. Sad but well worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Meeting up with yourself
Review: Not only does Charles attend his Reunion, he reunites with his younger self and essentially relives his youthful love affair. This is a wonderfully crafted small novel, deftly using point of view shifts (first person for the older Charles, third for the younger) to show the distance between the two, finally bringing the men together in the end as they reflect on the fate of the lovers.
Rating:
Summary: A Perfect Gem
Review: Reunion is a perfectly crafted meditation on the "branching channels" in our lives - those points arrived at unknowingly that determine our futures. For Charles, a "comfortable" small college professor, this meditation is triggered by the onset of his 30th college reunion. He imaginatively reconstructs the branch points in several classmates lives then is inexorably drawn into an extended reminiscence of his lost love Juliana. The story of the younger passionate Charles and the beautiful, unknowable Juliana gains teriffic momentum as they approach the branch in their channel. Lightman's writing style is succinct and fluid.
Rating: 
Summary: A two star book with a troubling section
Review: The novel is not much to consider. It seems too constructed and the technique of osciallating between first- and third-person narrative seems too gimmicky. But I have to take issue with a poem in the book supposedly written by the narrator in the late 1960s. It is way WAY too close to Michael Ondaatje's poem, "The Cinnamon Peeler" and Lightman owes an apology or an explanation.
Rating:
Summary: Love Lost
Review: The Reunion might be thought of as an elaboration of the climactic chapter of Good Benito, in which the irrationality of human existence is manifested as a woman obsessed with artistic expression, and with whom the hero is in turn obsessed, with tragic results.The choice of narrating most of the book as nostalgic revery from decades into the future risks making the hero's loss pathetic. Yet it also adds the half-expectation of a true reunion that never arrives, besides also allowing the contrast of the foolhardy passion of a youthful Charles, as a budding poet as helplessly compelled to pursue Juliana as she is compelled to dance, with the staid boredom of the middle-aged Charles, the tenured literature professor with anything but passion for his perfectly stable and "not unattractive" romantic partner. His unenviable end state is reflected in a dreadful former classmate, who has built a tremendously successful shoe business, but only by transforming himself from fully human to a mere shoe salesman. The unflattering suggestion is that Charles has strayed so far from the inspiration that led him into his career, his selling of poetry and literature classes has become nothing more than an equivalent of selling shoes. Something inside him recoiled from the harsh results of living life with the passion of poetry, but that withdrawal turned his capacity for feeling into a husk. Indeed, the complement to Good Benito might be extended. Whereas that earlier book explored the failures of life as a physics professor, Lightman's earlier profession, Reunion explores the failures of life as a literature professor, Lightman's current position, including a scathing portrayal of petty careerism involving Charles's antiheroic literary mentor and another protege. Perhaps, like Stephen King, Lightman feels driven to cast his fears into fables as a means of exorcising them. Like all Lightman, the style is somehow both subtle and operatic. He poses this specter: that which makes us human has little if anything to do with what makes life easier or more socially acceptable. Yet the hero is as apparently helpless to choosing a course among fates here as in The Diagnosis. What is left is the inevitability of loss. And Charles's loss, though stale with the passage of thirty years, is as poignant and palpable as his brief relationship with Juliana was torrentially glorious. There is the ring of truth in this exploration of yearning, joy, and regret.
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