Life After Marriage

Fülszöveg

A. Alvarez's The Savage God: A Study of Suicide changed the way people thought about suicide. Now, in Life After Marriage, Alvarez examines divorce, an experience laden with the same stigma, unhappiness, and feelings of private depression and public failure that accompany suicide. He had intended to write a book on divorce rather like the one on suicide: "a kind of cultural meditation, with some history and philosophy, but above all literary and personal." Alvarez collected a lot of data about divorce but in the end was unable to use it in any interesting way "Instead, I found myself fascinated by the people I talked to privately, without benefit of theories or statistics. Their confusions and contradictions seemed to say more about what really happens in divorce than all the figures and charts."
Alvarez writes of his own divorce, and the influence that Frieda and D. H. Lawrence's passionate relationship had on his perception of what marriage should be. He astounds us by tracing... Tovább

Fülszöveg

A. Alvarez's The Savage God: A Study of Suicide changed the way people thought about suicide. Now, in Life After Marriage, Alvarez examines divorce, an experience laden with the same stigma, unhappiness, and feelings of private depression and public failure that accompany suicide. He had intended to write a book on divorce rather like the one on suicide: "a kind of cultural meditation, with some history and philosophy, but above all literary and personal." Alvarez collected a lot of data about divorce but in the end was unable to use it in any interesting way "Instead, I found myself fascinated by the people I talked to privately, without benefit of theories or statistics. Their confusions and contradictions seemed to say more about what really happens in divorce than all the figures and charts."
Alvarez writes of his own divorce, and the influence that Frieda and D. H. Lawrence's passionate relationship had on his perception of what marriage should be. He astounds us by tracing the history of divorce and examining the destructive force the early church fathers exerted on marriage.
Alvarez covers a varied landscape of human experience. He describes the shock of divorce on proper Bostonians; the coldness of the modem Scandinavian "paperless marriage"; the pathos of a brilliant young professor who could succeed as a father but never as a husband; marriages based on mutual needs and dependencies; a divorce that occurs after thirty years of married life.
In his many astute observations about the trauma of divorce Alvarez considers the slow process of healing, the sudden need to cope
(continued on back flap) Vissza