of an unnecessary love obsession, If you are the author, please stop reading! Suffice it to say, I don't think you're a bad person or a bad writer, but I did not like this book and was not kind to it.
Please turn back now.
If you're looking for an honest, if ornery, opinion about this book, I say: what a waste of time,
SPOILERS: Claire Marvel is an art student whose father is diagnosed with cancer not long after she meets Julian Rose, She goes to France and her father dies, She marries someone else. Claire has an affair with Julian, She gets pregnant, miscarries a couple times, leaves her husband and its believed she kills herself,
ANOTHER SPOILER: it was an accident, she was totally gonna get her act together and get back together with the nice guy,
Thats really most of what we learn about Claire in this book, named for her, But shes a illusion chased by a butterfly catcher, when in fact it is she who should have been the narrator of this tepid tale of banality,
NOT A SPOILER: But then we could not have been shocked with the reveal that this is just the cruel hand that fate deals us! I was so angry when I finished this book.
I need to stop reading contemporary books that
go for cheap thrills, Blah blah blah. Had great hopes based on the review of a GR friend that i have never met and I rarely disagree with but this was so average, . . NEXT This is my favorite book, and has been since the first time I read it maybeoryears ago, The characters are well developed, and the plot is as rich as it is wonderfully frustrating, Each time I read this book once every year or two, I attach a different meaning to it, as I find a different way to relate to the characters, primarily Claire.
The language is beautiful without being esoteric, although in order to enjoy the full experience of the novel, your vocabulary should be fairly advanced,
Slow start but what an ending. Moving. Will read again. This was a simply story told with enthralling details and all too real emotion, It was a lot more to digest than I had expected, and that's a good thing, I wasn't sure about the writing style early on as it seemed more flowery than necessary at times, but as the story went on I rather enjoyed the artistic quality of the book and came across some very beautiful passages.
I think this was supposed to be some type of love story, but the characters were too stupid to figure out how to be together, They made me want to pull my hair out, This was possibly the best book recommended to me by GoodReads to date, I don't usually enjoy anything labeled under the Romance genre but every once in awhile I find an author that can convey an intelligent message that makes it worthwhile reading.
I believe this came to me under Literary Fiction, In "Claire Marvel," Schwartz shows how truly complex human emotions can be, . . "choices made, inexplicable mistakes" simple maybe, but definitely life changing, Each sentence in this beautifully crafted novel resonates with such strong feelings that I was totally enthralled from beginning to end with this sad but beautiful love story.
I loved the feeling I had while reading this novel, thanks to the author's beautiful prose, That being said, I was frustrated with Julian that he didn't have more confidence in himself in his relationship with Claire, He never stepped up to the plate when she needed him to be bold, He stayed perpetually on the sidelines, When Claire's father got cancer and then died, Julian felt he'd be intruding, didn't know if he would be overreaching, by attending the funeral, So he didn't go. And he was not attuned to his professor's alltooobvious attraction to Claire what happened in my eyes was a foregone conclusion, Julian was too enamored of his egotistic professor even though he didn't agree with him politically,
There were so many missed opportunities in Julian and Claire's relationship, Though Julian loved Claire with every ounce of his being or so he said, he just couldn't muster up the courage to show her how much he cared.
And her love for him seemed evertentative too, It came as a surprise how much feeling each of them eventually revealed they had for one another, The reader was never sure exactly how Claire felt about Julian through most of the book, so no wonder Julian never felt secure in her love for him.
I loved the story nevertheless, especially the descriptions of the encounters and the landscape in France, I felt like I was right there, and I loved how it felt, Prachtig geschreven! I didn't necessarily like the story, however I loved Schwartz's writing, The character of Claire was a bit too much to believe in, but I found I was rooting for these two crazy kids, Another reader's review of the book was "Story of an unnecessary love obsession, " I might have thought that about this book had I not just come off the heels of reading Love in the Time of Cholera, and I found this love storytimes more palatable than that one.
Forgive me, Mr. Marquez! The writer's ability to see in your mind what he describes in words is amazing, He does more than turn a phrase he colors it and hands it to you! I loved this book and want more, . . i got more from this book than i'd expected, at first there was nostalgia to hold onto, of cafe pamplona and casablanca and the fogg where i did meet someone that changed everything, yes, this was all very labial, as my boyfriend put it, but i enjoyed living through these moments and recalling these places nonetheless, and i even relished schwartz's portrait of the relationship between professors and student, master and slave, it almost made up for the time i'd felt used, to know this was a tradition,
but the problem with claire marvel was claire marvel, she was never credible, nothing to hold onto, she was just a shadow the author so loved this metaphor and she never came to life on the page, even as i know people who remind me of her.
and perhaps the problem is that schwartz was too ambitious, to attempt to capture someone who couldn't be, to make tangible someone eternally ephemeral, without her, this is a strong comingofage story, but with her, this is a mediocre attempt at light, A simple but haunting love story I thought this was a great novel, I'm not always a fan of things written in the first person particularly love stories, but I think that Burnham Schwartz did a great job of illuminating Julian's love and awe, and respect for Claire.
It was a swift read, though I really wanted to linger on a lot of the descriptive passages, A few years back I read Jonathan Burnham Schwartzs devastating novel Reservation Road and was really impressed, So I was really looking forward to reading Claire Marvel, The books opening lines: “There was before her and now there is after her and that is the difference in my life” promised great things but Im not sure Schwartz actually delivers.
The book is narrated by Julian Rose, a grad student at Harvard who meets and falls immediately in love with Claire Marvel during a rainstorm, The book traces their relationship through all the requisite romantic obstacles and I suppose I can fairly say that the only thing that prevents this book from being totally been there, done that is the quality of Schwartzs prose.
As Julian chases and abandons and chases and abandons the love of his life we are never really certain of her and, in fact, even though the book is named after her we really come to know very little about Claire as a person.
Members of my book club loved this bookbut I found it somehow unsatisfying,
C'était Claire,
Prachtig boek dat je laat wegdromen naar de Franse Lot, maar je ook met de neus op de feiten drukt,
Een oproep om eerlijk te zijn tegenover jezelf, je vrienden en geliefden Ik beleefde mooie uurtjes met 'Claire Marvel', een roman van de Amerikaanse schrijver John Burnham Schwartz uit.
Het verhaal
Twee jonge mensen, de politicoloog Julian Rose en de kunsthistorica Claire Marvel ontmoeten elkaar bij toeval: in de stromende regen biedt zij hem een plekje onder haar paraplu aan.
Al snel worden de twee vrienden, Ze hebben beiden een bijzondere relatie met hun vader, De vader van Julian is door zijn vrouw verlaten en hangt sindsdien een beetje rond, terwijl hij wanhopig probeert te begrijpen wat er toch gebeurd is, De vader van Claire is stervende als hij haar vraagt om naar de plek te gaan in ZuidFrankrijk waar hij zoveel goede herinneringen aan heeft, Julian gaat met
haar mee, wat een nieuwe fase in hun vriendschap inluidt, De verlegen Julian merkt dat hij zeer verliefd is op Claire, maar zij prefereert zijn erudiete docent, Daarom 'vlucht' Julian naar New York, waar hij opgroeide, om les te gaan geven aan de middelbare school waar hij zelf opgezeten heeft, Pas als hij Claire jaren later weer tegenkomt, beseft hij dat hij eigenlijk altijd op haar gewacht heeft, Dan verdwijnt ze weer uit zijn leven, Het boek krijgt een indrukwekkende ontknoping in ZuidFrankrijk,
Eigenlijk een simpel liefdesverhaal, maar het is geen suf boeketboekje, nee, in tegendeel, het is juist mooi, Eén minpuntje: het gaat hier en daar wel behoorlijk ver in het opnemen van allerlei politicologische beschouwingen waarvoor je behoorlijk ingevoerd moet zijn in de Amerikaanse politieke geschiedenis en de verhoudingen binnen de Amerikaanse politiek.
Maar voor de lezers die momenteel de verkiezingsstrijd volgen is dit vast geen probleem,
Rain the size of Tic Tacs was pelting me water was leakingout of my hair and down the back of my neck, I rubbed a sopping shirtsleeve across my face,
She'd sat beside his rented hospital bed in the living room of the Stamford house, se later told me, jotting down his memories, And what surprised her was how fresh it all still was to him, particular and distinct, As though is wasn't the past that had gotten abstracted and fragmented by life, but rather the present,
From a onelane paved road we followed a dirt path in the direction of the ruin, The land here was desiccated and unforgiving, savage with stone,
THE BEST love story I've ever read, . . well actually in a tie with Nicholas Sparks' "The Notebook, " Unlike that wonderfully sappy novel, the blueprint for which EVERY SINGLE BOOK he's written since has followed, this one is a heartbreaker from the first meeting of the male and female characters.
Schwartz's writing style is second to none when bringing you into the lives of his characters, None of the characters in this book will you take a liking to, If you are like me you will often times yell out loud at them for being so sophomoric and mentally impotent, That is what makes this book so wonderful, as the chapters roll on you can't put damned things down to avoid the inevitable train wreck at the end.
The story wraps up beautifully and you find yourself in limbo for a bit trying to sort things out inside yourself,
If you want a true love story, not the fairy tale crap, pick this book up and give it a try: I thought this was a love story but it was more of a tragedy.
It's really a book about not being able to let someone go, even if they have chosen to be with someone else, Really, let go and move on! I read this at the recommendation of my aunt, I don't know what I was expecting exactly maybe a more typical, cookiecutter type of novel/love story, but I was suprised by what I found, The only phrase that really comes to mind is 'haunting prose', This is definitely a book to reread every now amp then one of those books that each time you read it you are going to get something different, something more, out of it.
A young man and woman meet, love each other, and are consumed, Its a story as old as romance itself, but in this enthralling novel John Burnham Schwartz tells it with heartstopping new immediacy, In the middle of a rainstorm Julian Rose, a selfeffacing Harvard graduate student, takes refuge beneath a girls yellow umbrella, The girl, the woman, is Claire Marvel, lovely, mercurial, mired in family tragedy, She is the last person someone like Julian should fall in love with, But he does.
What ensues is a great and difficult passion strewn with obstaclesnot least those arising from Claire and Julians disparate characters, And as these young people find and lose each other, then seek each other anew, Schwartz places romantic love within an entire continuum of attachments that require the full reserves of our openness and courage.
From the Trade Paperback edition, .