Evening

Rating:
Summary: For Anyone Who Has Loved and Lost
Review: In Evening, Minot offers a story that makes one think back and wonder about "the one who got away". She writes elegantly in a unique and enjoyable style that draws one into the story. So many things in the novel are left to one's imagination, due to the unreliable narrarator who is on pain medication (she is dying of cancer). The narrarators retrospective of her own life is haunting and dazzling. It is definately a powerful book and makes one cling to and examine life.

Rating:
Summary: Masterly
Review: A writing teacher recommended "Evening" to me. She said it was masterly. I ran out to buy it the next day.

Was it Masterly?
Yes.

Why?
I'll tell you.

Because I believe we all realy have one love...One true love...One love that will be etched in our hearts forever.
One love that we will remember, even on our death bed. At 65 we will recall our desires at 25.

As Ann Lord does in "Evening. A socialite, married three times, three children, a so-called full life, always the picture of health.......yet on her death bed who is she remembering?

Her first love, Harris.

She had only known him few days. Who cares.

"Do you know me?" She asks
"Yes." He answers. "I have always known you."

Ann drifts in and out of consciousness. Slips into the past and the present. There is no future. Her present life is white. White sheets, white walls, white nurses. But her past is colorful, green, with new beginnings. The past is worth remembering. Harris Arden is worth remembering.

"I haven't been sick a day in my life. I guess it was saved up for now." Ann says. "Pain is only born and produces nothing." The wheels are churning. The sharp black teeth are biting.

Morphine isn't enough. But the reviving of Harris Arden is. "So this is what love is for. So this is why arms were made. So this is why we have skin."

Susan Minot has taken the reader to the side of Ann's bed. And we sit there waiting. Listening. The doctor just told her she will not see the leaves change this year. Her kids hear her talking about some man they've never heard of.

"I'm going to have to go."
"Yes, I know."
I won't say good-bye."
"No, don't."
"Were you here all this time?"
"Yes."

Will the reader be?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Rating:
Summary: A challenging book
Review: I have several reactions to this book. The first is that the prose is beautifully evocative and Susan Minot has constructed a beautiful book. I also had the feeling, voiced by several other reviewers at least, that thee is a odd sort of flatness to the story and to the life of Ann Lord, who appears on the surface to have had so much. I think, however, that this may be intentional. As she approaches death, the layers are stripped away, and all of the possessions and relationships that she has had are stripped away. Who can say what would be left as the center point of consciousness for any of us at that point?

For Ann Lord, the weekend of her best friend's wedding, all those years ago, and her weekend affair with Harris Arden become the focal point. As I read the flashbacks to that weekend, I had a sense both of deep sadness and simultaneously a great excitement and sense of possibility. Both existed in that time, and both are carried forward in memory. I think the sense of being so alive and having the heights and depths of love and emotion and death all in that short compressed time is part of why all that returns to Ann Lord as she waits to die.

Many reviewers have been extremely critical of Harris Arden and questioned why such a cad has the significance that he does for Ann and how that relationship may actually diminish her in some way. He is certainly not a sympathetic character, either in his interactions with Ann or in his treatment of his fiancee. I also can only guess whether that weekend was an anomaly for him or whther such relationships were common for him. If it was as distinct and seperate a time for him, a moment out of the normal round of his life, I can have some empathy for him. I am unsure of that.

Rating:
Summary: Lovely, lovely, lovely writing
Review: A gorgeous novel. At first, a bit difficult to get into, due to the punctuation or rather the lack of it, and then as a reader you let go and tumble into the lyrical flow of her words and images. What she is attempting, the merging of the decades of a woman's life in the end-of-life consciousness that slips from one period to another, works beautifully. It's a powerful, literary novel, one that I will definitely recommend to my writing colleagues.

Rating:
Summary: A Provocative and Emotional Journey...
Review: I had been admiring *Evening* for several months when I finally purchased it last week. Within pages, I was already taken in by this provocative tale of lost love and healing. Susan Minot will be an author I look for every time I hit the bookstores.

In *Evening*, Ann Lord is close to the end of her life, bedridden with cancer and with all of her children surrounding her. The illness, leaving her in between consciousness and dreams, allows her to bring forth the memory of a single weekend that changed her life entirely. Ann attended the wedding of her bestfriend Lila and fell in love... with a man that could not be hers.

More than just a love story, Ann shows us her life, her three husbands, her five children and her spirituality. Ann's journey is not a smooth one. It's reality, and it's something that we can all relate to. It's a wonderful novel that may change how you perceive the people in your life. And it's a novel to savor. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Enhhh.....
Review: No doubt Minot is a good writer. But this story just doesn't satisfy. Maybe I'm just not a sophisticated enough reader to get it (actually, I am) or maybe there isn't much to get. My first clue that this wasn't working for me was the totally one-sided sexual experience Anne had with Arden on the first night. Yuck! If this is the love of your life shouldn't he be a less selfish lover? Too many loose ends, too hard to sink my teeth into.

Rating:
Summary: breathtaking
Review: I thought this book was heartrending, heartstopping, heart filling. It has perhaps the most lyrical description of making love that I have ever read, but mostly it's an exquisite detailing of the consciousness of a woman reviewing/ reliving her life in her last few days before dying. Beautifully written; brilliantly integrated, deeply moving.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and Evocative
Review: Ann Lord, a woman in her mid-sixties, lays dying of cancer in her home while her children from her three marriages and friends gather to wish her farewell. Susan Minot takes us into Ann's dying thoughts, her remembrances in a beautiful and evocative novel. Ann has married three times, had several children, had one die. She has lived what others would consider a privileged life, yet these dying thoughts reveal otherwise. Many many years before, prior to her marriages, she had a brief encounter with a man who she believes was her one true love. The memories of her life fade and blend in her mind, yet the weekend she was with Harris Arden remains clear in every detail. Ann does not come across as a warm and loving parent, or even a very good friend. She does come across as a human, a human with emotions that were stunted when the reality of her love for Harris and what will happen becomes clear to her. Evening is a beautifully written novel, full of evocative prose. I thoroughly enjoyed it. A word of caution, however. The Evening narrative jumps around in time without any concrete guidance. If novels like that bother you, think twice before picking this one up. Otherwise, enjoy the read. It's marvelous. Susan Minot is very talented and Evening is a beautiful novel.

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful tale, of a passionate, romantic weekend
Review: This was a good read, it is highly romantic and beautifully written. This is the story of a woman, Ann Lord, who is dying and through her morphine injections, recalls the most passionate, romantic weekend of her life, which occured when she was 25. I enjoyed this book, and it was a fairly quick read. I think it would have been more poignant to have read it during the summer months more than now (November) but it is still quite enjoyable. The writing style is a bit different, the conversations flow into each other, but once you get past the first chapter and understand the style, you understand and appreciate that Minot used this approach to really "bring" you into Ann Lords mind and memory. If you would like to be taken back to the 1950's to spend a beautiful summer weekend on an island off the coast of Maine, attend the wedding of your best friend, and fall in love, I highly suggest you let this book to take you there.

Rating:
Summary: I loved this book
Review: Having just finished this novel, I couldn't wait to log on and praise it. This is a marvelous book: compelling story and breathtaking technique, in my opinion a rare combination in contemporary novels. I was so moved by and engrossed in this novel that after turning the last page, I immediately went back and re-read it. Bravo Susan Minot, and thank you.