Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

Book Overview

With Borrowed Time and Becoming a Man-the 1992 National Book Award winner for nonfiction-this collection completes Paul Monette's autobiographical writing. Brimming with outrage yet tender, this is a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151000719
• ISBN13: 9780151000715
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

forceful and educated mind

[...] I recall being warmly introduced by a senior professor during that first cold semester to the Greeks. Among them, to Antigone, whose womanly defiance and conscience upset the tyrannical edict of Creon the king. She chose to bury her dead brother despite the injunction of the state, fully accepting her dim fate. The writer Paul Monette, in his essay "The Politics of Silence," recalls the words of the Chorus as Antigone goes to her death: Isn't man wonderful? He longed so much to speak his heart that he taught himself language, so that what was inside him could be spoken to the world. Monette's admiration of Antigone's courage is matched by his own brave belief in the Word--an inextricable link between language and power [...] --from "Recollections"

Magnificent and moving

This books represents one of the finest collections of essays I have ever read. Incredibly moving and filled with the intense passion of a man dying and yet gripped by life, this book has blown me away every time I've read it -- and that's been several times. I'm not sure which essay I like best but at the moment "My Priests" stands out, as it certainly ties in to certain news regarding the Catholic clergy. I wonder what Paul Monette would have had to say about it. Absolutely a must read for anyone with a feeling heart.

Easily Monette's best book

"Last Watch of the Night" gets unjustly forgotten in the light of Monette's more famous "Borrowed Time" and "Becoming a Man," but this collection of essays is a better book than either of them. This is what should have been up for the National Book Award, not "Becoming a Man."The flaws in the book: some of the essays, especially near the end, seem to drift, and are not particularly engaging. These include the soporific "Sleeping Under a Tree." Also, Monette's observations about graves of famous people in "3275" are not even close to as important and insightful as his look at his lovers' and friends' plots.However, the majority of the book shines true. Alternately bitter, angry, hopeful, and amazed, Monette's words have tremendous emotional force. He is at his best in "The Politics of Silence" and "My Priests," sometimes combining all these emotions in a single paragraph. He sees the dying all around, but can still find glimmers of hope in the conduct of those fighting AIDS. His depictions of the "last watch of the night," where he cares for his sick lover, are heart-breaking.Although Monette does tend to go off on rages or streaks of uncontained sentimentality, something which marred some otherwise stellar poetry in his book "Love Alone," most often he controls his use of language to the extent where he is able to use forceful emotional passages without drowning his readers. He does this especially well in his essay about his lover's dog, "Puck.""Last Watch of the Night" stands with his volume of poetry, "Love Alone" and non-fiction, "Borrowed Time," as essential texts of both Paul Monette and the AIDS crisis.

Words to *live* by!

Despite and perhaps *because* of the fact that this book is written by someone in the midst of a life or death struggle with AIDS, this book is one of the most moving odes to *life* I have ever come across. From meditations on the importance (or lack thereof) of possessions to thoughts on death and dying, Monette presents a worldview, philosophy, and perspective that is rich and wise. The language he employs is beautiful, poetic, precise, serene... amazing. Some of the topics covered are disturbing and he does speak some angry words, but every one of them is just and every one of them is life-affirming.