Madly

by William Benton

Book Overview

Love, with its fear, exhilaration and transcendence, is perhaps the most enduring subject in the literature of the world.

About 11 o'clock on a late August night in Manhattan, Bill stops by his local video store, and in the nearly vacant shop meets an exotic stranger looking for advice on which movie to rent. In their fragmented and awkward first conversation, they exchange phone numbers and she rides away on her bicycle with a copy of Jules...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1593760833
• ISBN13: 9781593760830
• Release Date: July 2005
• Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A book that will last.

If you have truly loved someone in your life you will love this book. If you haven't, you must read this book.

Living poetically: life in fragments

This is quite a remarkable book, and I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention. As others have noted, it is the account of an affair between a fairly accomplished middle aged professional New Yorker poet and a beautiful and very confused young Russian woman with poetic ambitions and immense but undisciplined talent. What makes it remarkable is that it is told as it is experienced and as all such matters can only be experienced, in a series of reflections and fragmented recollections, brilliantly written in such a way as to yield maximum insight with the minimum of words: in that sense even the most prosaic passages border on poetry, without being in any way pretentious. In addition, since some of their most significant acts of coming together involve translating Russian poetry (mostly Pasternak) and writing original poems, the story is interspersed with their works, all quite stunning and suggestive. The book shows that and why poetry is perhaps most fitting as an evocation of the kind of unity we bring to our lives: a poem is always a kind of fragment, that invokes a larger set of meanings than it can explicitly announce, and yet it can be in its own way and on its own terms complete. We are not unities, we are never simply whole, and yet we strive to bring the fragments of our selves and our lives (the multiple obsessions and fragmented concerns that drive us in incompatible ways) into coherence and that drive towards coherence, towards articulation of ourselves is akin to the urge to poetry. What is most intriguing in this story is the way in which the urge to fragmentation, the inability and unwillingness to pin herself down exhibited by Irena, is shown in the story to be not merely a flaw or disease or the result of damage (even if it is partly the result of a troubled childhood). While the story takes the perspective of Bill, and from his perspective the task is to bring unity to her life (in a way analogous to his efforts to bring her poetry to coherence through editing, raising the question: is life capable of such editing?), to find a voice that can overcome the dispersion of her life, the story also reveals indirectly that this is in part his own issue and concern and that it stems from his own need. In some sense, Irena does not need him and the wholeness and healing he aims to impose as much as he needs her to be whole. The novel hints that one of the reasons poetry speaks so directly to our lives is that wholeness is not our native state: we do not come whole and every unity we generate for ourselves is artificial (well, a poetic creation, which is the giving birth to something as if natural), and what counts as "madness" may just as much be the "divine madness" that Plato held to be the inspiration for poetry (and that we can ignore or seek to bring to an untroubled unity only at the cost of the vitality of our inspiration).

Zen in the Art of Loving

The Wikipedia defines the word "koan" as follows: "A koan (pronounced /ko.an/) is a story, dialog, question, or statement in the history and lore of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet that may be accessible to intuition." In *Madly: A Novel*, William Benton creates a love story in which the protagonist, Bill, meets Irina shortly after his wife Irene, dies of cancer. Although his wife was unable to love him after the death of their son Daniel in a car accident, he staunchly remains with her until the relationship became impossible. And he is unable to love again until after his wife Irene dies. Bill's passionately sexual and romantic love affair with Irina can be interpreted on innumerable levels: psychological, literary, poetic, philosophical. It is an extended meditatiion on the complexities of the love relationship on both the literal and the symbolic level. Irina and Bill shortly after their meeting decide to translate a number of poems by Pasternak as Irina, from Moscow, like Bill, is in love with poetry. In many ways both Bill and Irina's psychological difficulties and committments to an artistic and bohemian lifestyle make day to day living almost impossibly difficult- yet their struggle to accomplsh a successful and meaningful relaitonship is both touching and fascinating. Their many Pasternak translations also track in a profound and moving way, the vicissitudes of their relationship. Numerous contemporary poets are mentioned : TS Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Carlos Williams, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, HD. Djuna Barnes is also mentioned, and the main character, Bill, (known to Iriina as Zaichik) writes a play in which Chekhov, Gogol and Pasternak have speaking parts. The Pasternak translations which appear throughout the book are presented unabridged, and although I cannot vouch for their accuracy, they are enchanting to read and contemplate as their movement and interpretations become a resonant allegory for the relationship in all its complex layers and meanings. One also can't help but think about the film *Dr Zhivago* concerning the passionate love affair that Pasternak was writing about in these poems. I must mention that I enjoyed and admired this book far more than the sentimentalized film of long ago. This is novel to brood by in the best possible sense of that word. You might not recall all the details of the story someday, but you probably won't forget the many things the book caused you to consider and remember. This is the rarest of novels: not only is it a page turner on a sensual and narrative level- but a thought turner on a psychological and philsophical level, a novel that becomes a meditation, a provocative koan concerning sex, love, poetry and human destiny.

A beautiful and original book

The jacket copy on William Benton's novel MADLY describes the meeting of Bill and Irina - an incident in a New York video store - in a way that suggests that the book will unfold along the normal lines of a plot-driven novel. In fact, MADLY is much better than that. It is a novel of incidents, but one whose connections are woven together by a heightened use and fusion of language, which creates its own structure, its own delicate and unexpected scaffolding. " It isn't that facts have to be assembled or dramatized, but that truths have to be faced. Not plot, but destiny." The book is "about" a love affair between Bill, a New York writer, and Irina, a beautiful but unbalanced Russian woman. "She was a tower girl, like Herodiade, standing at the barred window with fierce eyes. An allure reigned, defying any lover not to be overcome by its perfection - and therefore despised." He is forty-nine and she is twenty-five when they meet. Yet their age difference is only a minor piece of the kaleidoscopic struggle that confronts them. They negotiate a world of mirrors, where love and sex exist in stark contention. Through their lives a complex portrait emerges of loss and impossibility that for all its particularity resonates deeply with our own lives. Benton tells the story in first person (the narrator has the same given name as the author's). The novel moves along a precarious line, but holds its fictional edge. An inordinate reality exists, of tenderness and despair, in almost every syllable of this beautiful and original book.