Last Time They Met, The/ Unabridged

Rating:
Summary: mixed feelings
Review: The book had a slow start with lots of tedious detail about the hotel room that Linda is staying in during a literary convention in Toronto. During the convention, she encounters her first love, Thomas (another poet at the convention.) Gradually, you are made aware of the history between these lovers that spans over three decades. As they become reaquainted with eachother, the reader gains interest in their history as tidbits are slowly revealed. (Patience is required during this first chapter.)
The second chapter goes back about 26 years. The two lovers accidentally bump into eachother at a market in Africa. Both are married when they meet. However, their connection is undeniable and they have an affair whose climax is tragic. As a reader, you know Thomas and Linda are doomed. But you can't help being swept away in their obsession.
The last chapter goes back to when both met for the first time at the age of seventeen. You get the butterflies of young love when reading this. You learn Linda's dark secret. Then, you learn the tragic reason why they couldn't be together. The last page takes your breath away. I don't want to give it away. But I was stunned.
This book made my heart hurt. It is full of mourning and regret. The ending was shocking. But in retrospect, I felt mislead

Rating:
Summary: Luminous, haunting, and provocative questions about love
Review: The Last Time They Met blew me away when I listened to the audioversion. Shreve evokes a whole time and place around the idea of a sacred first love. Thomas and Linda, are like twin souls, separated and in a compulsive drive to merge together. Shreve's tone, timing, tempo, and narrative style sinks the reader into a world of a special and provocative enduring intimacy. In fact, reading this book made me visit Boston because the air of the city streets seemed to seep out of the book. Shreve is a master of economy, choice, and description. The characters are 3-dimensional and her writing prompts rich visual scenes while reading or listening to the story.

Thomas and Linda live eras of their lives in stolen moments. In section one, both are 52 and in Toronto where they are full of nostalgia and recollection. A touching scene is written while they talk on a Ferry to Toronto Island from the downtown Harborfront. This interaction ends in a promising possibility between two weary souls circa 2001 who have hurt so much without each other. Section Two finds Thomas and Linda at 26 in Kenya. This time they are in the realm of the forbidden keeping second choice spouses at bay. Heartache ends this sequence of their lives in the 70's era where Carter is about to fall defeated against Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Section Three is their love at its most joyful and inspiring. Thomas and Linda are blossoming 17-year-old poets in Boston who meet at the edge of a pier. Orphaned Linda has just come home to Massachussetts after being sentenced to a home for wayward girls. Blue blood Thomas is the handsome, pedigreed, cocky, hockey-playing son of a Boston brahmin family on Allerton Hill. Somehow these two connect and their ensuing romance plays out like a Greek tragedy meets Boston Public.

Shreve write a multi-layered kind of romance. I loved it because (A) I am a romantic at heart; (B) It reminded me of my own Thomas; and (C) I do believe that our first loves leave a mark on our souls that no other love can erase. Romantic regret if a tricky topic to write about. Shreve achieves to unfold fiction on this exact theme while holding true to her literary prose. This is not a book of overt nostalgia, melancholy sentimentality, or obsessive yearnings. The Last Time They Met is a testament to the potent power of a true love, first love, and life-long love. We are awakened by the fire of a first love but as years go by we forget to the point of amnesia. This book does justice to honor the alchemical transformation that love brings to our lives.

I read this book after listening to the abridged edition on audio. The first time you read The Last Time They Met, you may find yourself having a good cry for the bittersweet love between Thomas and Linda.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing ending
Review: I won't spoil the ending for those who have not yet read the book (beware: some other reviewers do give it away), but suffice to say it was extremely disappointing. This was the first Anita Shreve book I read and had been looking forward to it based on her reviews. The book was about two star crossed lovers who meet again. Much is hinted at what happened when they were kids, but is not revealed until the final chapters. On the final page, the story is wrapped up in a way that made my jaw drop. I actually had to read it twice to make sure I hadn't mistaken it. It made the whole rest of the book, which I had enjoyed up until that time, seem like a total waste of time.

Rating:
Summary: Worth it
Review: I just finished this book. My first Anita Shreve. Worthwhile and meaningful. I loved it.

Rating:
Summary: d isappointed
Review: I found this book to be too contrived. As Shreve kept shifting back and forth in time she kept hinting about deep secrets that would be revealed as the book evolved. The anticipated hidden facts were really not worth waiting for. I found the characters selfish and self-involved. The fact that they were "artistic" and thus more sensitive (for themselves) allowed them to hurt others. The ending disproved the entire premise of this book.

Rating:
Summary: The Height of Confusion
Review: The novel introduces us to two lovers whose lives are far from ordinary: we have to begin with, two poets, one a beautiful female, the other a dashing male. The male, Thomas is married, unhappily,and the female, Linda, is widowed. We are told with endless description,although it is well-done, about the times (three) they meet beginning when Linda was seventeen. Linda, of course, was abused sexually,so that supposedly makes her sensitive-it's a modern, overdone theme. Thomas has a scar which Linda fingers lovingly during their love scenes.
The love scenes can be read by thirteen-year-olds with impunity, which makes them only tantalizing and frustrating to the adult readers.
Speaking of frustrating, the reader awaits anxiously and interestingly, after plodding through scenes in Kenya and tedious teenage sex, to reach the last chapter where it is hoped the author will explain the unknowns-the automobile accident; Linda's abuse; the hope that the lovers will have a life together; only to read an ending that not only fails to be a denouement; but, instead, kills off Linda when she was seventeen and proceeds to list all of the events that could have occurred in her life if she had not died at a young age. Thomas, of course, kills himself. Thus, everything that happened in the beginning of the book didn't happen? If the reader was supposed to read another of Shreve's books first, for explanation, he should have been made aware,somehow, so that he may not have been caught in "The Height of Confusion."



Rating:
Summary: Brilliant plot and superb writing....
Review: I just finished this book and it's the 4th of Shreve's novels that I've read. All of them have been page turners, which I simply can't put down once I begin.
I'm blown away by the cleverness with which she weaved the entire plot! I can't ever remember reading a book where my jaw was actually hanging with the last few paragraphs. As soon as I began to read them, I understood and began shaking my head with the shock and surprise. Some readers have mentioned feeling "cheated" or that she used a "gimmick." I say this author has only proved once again why she is my favorite. This is brilliant writing at it's best and I'll be thinking about it for a long time. I didn't realize that "Weight of Water" was connected to this book and I now look forward to reading that one. But reading this one first in no way will diminish my feelings.
I've already read Shreve's latest, Light on Snow....another superb novel! I just hope she'll have another one out for her devoted readers before I finish the 5 or 6 already written that I'll be reading in the next couple months.....because if not, I just might have to start reading some of her books all over again. And with an author like Anita Shreve, I'm sure a second reading will bring me even more pleasure.

Rating:
Summary: Romeo and Juliet with a difference
Review: "The Last Time They Met" is about the endurance of first love, guilt, and dreams of what might have been. It's a hard book to review without revealing the ending, because so much of what the book is about changes suddenly in the last pages. A number of reviewers have complained about the author's abrupt switch of direction. To them, the ending was contrived and not much more believable than the infamous Bobby Ewing shower scene in "Dallas." I'm not one of these readers. The ending totally blind-sided me, hitting like a bolt out of the blue and transforming an ok-but-not-great book into something much better. As I write this, I'm still going back through the narrative in my mind, picking up various strands and seeing them in new ways, reinterpreting what I thought I knew.

The story focuses on a love affair between two poets, Linda Fallon and Thomas Janes. Most of the story is told through Linda's perspective. It begins when the two former lovers, now middle-aged and single, unexpectedly encounter each other at a literary meeting. The novel then backtracks to a time decades earlier when they carried on an adulterous love affair when both were in Africa. It finally concludes with a description of their earliest days as high school sweethearts. Looming over the story are the shadows of disastrous events--a teenage car accident in which a drunken Thomas was the driver, the death of his daughter by drowning, and an unthinkable act committed by Linda in Africa. As Shreve takes her readers back in time, it's obvious that the hand of fate will not let her lovers be, even though the form fate will take isn't altogether clear.

Shreve's prose is very deliberate, and her descriptions have an obsessive quality about them. At times this can make the book drag--the first part, for example starts verrry slowly--but overall it's highly effective. There's an emotional intensity to her writing that can be moving, but also suffocating at times. It's almost as if the characters are living in a dream. There are inconsistencies in Shreve's characterizations and places where you wonder why the characters acted the way they did. In the end, however, it all makes a tragic kind of sense.

"The Last Time We Met" is a truly moving book. It's not for those who want a cut-and-dried linear romance. But most people have elements of Thomas' and Linda's "might have been" story in their past. This is a book to reread in memory after the final paragraph.


Rating:
Summary: Cheap Trick
Review: The title of my review says it all, as far as I'm concerned. Totally unbelievable. You just do NOT do that to your readers. I went back and leafed through the book again to see if it worked, and it didn't. A real stretch.

I give it one star because there was some fine writing in the Africa section. Otherwise, if I'd not been on a Philippine island on vacation with little else to read, I might not have finished. And I felt cheated when I had.