All for Love

by Ved Mehta

Book Overview

Ved Mehta joined the staff of The New Yorker in the 1960s, blind since the age of four and already on his way to a career as a writer. In a series of four relationships he demanded that his lovers, like him, pretend he could see. With lyrical and stirring accuracy, Mehta revisits these love affairs today, tracing the links between his denial of his disability and the cruel transformations that each of his lovers underwent. "Poignant and occasionally...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560253215
• ISBN13: 9781560253211
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Nation Books
• Length: 345 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.9" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Loving "All for Love"

I loved this book. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to start it again. My college-age son is enjoying it too. It is a wonderful way for the two of us to connect. With elegance and humor, Mr. Mehta captures those all-too-familiar feelings of being uncontrollably drawn to someone long after good sense would tell you to move on. His courage and honesty in discussing his psychoanalysis make his childhood games of leaping from rooftop to rooftop, despite his blindness, seem tame in comparison. Ultimately, "All for Love" allows the reader to forgive himself or herself for lapses of judgment they may have made in their own romantic encounters. Read it!

Love Is All

Ved Mehta's remarkable "All For Love" might be called a memoir, a looking back upon a fumbling, yearning period in a complicated man's younger life. But the book inhabits both the past and the present, the author understanding at one and the same moment what he was and what he is. He looks at four long-ago love affairs, and through the inclusion of the women's love letters to him he lets us see who they were, to themselves as well as to him, at that time. He writes as a man from India assuming the role of a major New Yorker writer. Though he cannot see, he understands how everything looks. Emotionally, he seems to know what love did to him, and what he did to love. He was much helped, as he explains, by psychoanalysis; but his insights come through that painful and courageous reaching into the dark which is the only way to the light. This is a beautiful and courageous book by a writer who lives, within and without, in many dimensions. I was very moved by it and doubt there will ever be another book quite to match it.

From the Personal to the Universal

This book is above all a compelling read. It is the only memoir I have ever encountered which is not in the least self-serving, prideful, or rancorous. In fact it is excruciatingly objective. By describing in elegant, spare prose the particulars of four love affairs as he lived them at the time, he reveals something profound and universal about what it is to fall in love, and his very real blindness becomes a metaphor for the blindness that produces fantasy, misunderstanding and, alas, pain. This is a beautiful and wise book, as gripping as a novel, and utterly absorbing. I have recommended it to friends who then found they could not put the book down.