Still Love in Strange Places: A Memoir

by Beth Kephart

Book Overview

Beth Kephart met and fell in love with an artist from the jungle hills of El Salvador, a place of terrifying myths and frightening realities, of civil war and devastating earthquakes. She discovers love means having to take in a stranger and their history too.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393050742
• ISBN13: 9780393050745
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Extraordinary memoir that beckons you to come to El Salvador

Beth Kephart's Still Love In Strange Places is a poignant, loving tale of her learning to love the people, the land and the country she married into-El Salvador. It puts this extraordinary place, with a painfully sad history and a future that speaks or reemergence in a much bigger, more poetic context. I felt for her and the real people she brought to life. Makes you want to come here as I have just done. Mark Monchek

Find yourself a piece of grassy ground, lie back and read...

A favorite quote from the book:"Reading begins with the body, with settling in. Up, in the crook of a tree, or down, on the green grass below. On the floor beneath the ceiling fan, on the shore beside the receding sea, over a plate of clam linguini, in the bathtub, late at night. Reading begins with settling in, with the posture of surrender. Even the youngest children understand the high art of surrender. They cede to a bedtime story just as they finally cede to sleep, floating on the raft of words they hear their parents read. When we surrender to books we are made new. We are reinvented, we are fortified, we are blessed. New perspective seep into our politics and talk. Fresh sympathies arise. Raw memories are roused awake. Urgencies begin to clamor. Even our bodies change when we submit to books, when we allow ourselves to live them. Our hearts beat that much quicker or that much slower, our muscles lengthen our or tense, our stomachs turn, and just as suddenly, our stomachs grow pacified. Reading clams the anxious, heals the heartsick, distracts the oppressed, sustains the lonely. Reading is like singing. We can hardly live without it. In this confused, tormented, dangerous, exotic and terrifyingly beautiful world, books exist for many reasons: to defend, to protect, to complain, to berate, to rule, to prove, to instruct, to insist. Books can be manifestos and they can be screeds. They can oppose and impose, they can boast and promote, they can offend. But so many books, so much of the time, are created most simply and also most thrillingly because writers dare to dream and because readers dare to let thme. Because history can be entered into and because fantasy can enthrall and because the personal can be made to speak for every one of us."

Reflective and Multi-layered

Still Love in Strange Places takes readers on an exquisite journey to a foreign place (El Salvador) and also deep into the heart of a marriage, into questions of identity and place. Kephart is really asking the questions, To whom do memories and stories belong? and How are cultural legacies passed down to a child. A fascinating book.

Luminous gem

This was the most surprising and beautiful book I have read this year. It is a poem, a watercolor, a dream half-remembered upon waking, a world rebuilt. You will be swept away, and it will stay in your heart for a long time. In stunning words, Beth Kephart writes of a coffee farm where her husband grew up in the jungled hills of El Salvador. It is a farm inhabited by souls living, mythical and dead: here among the dusty roads, crowded graveyards, and lush coffee plantations we meet ghosts of 11th century Indians, Siguanaba (the witch who haunts the doomed) and especially Don Alberto, her husband's beloved and legendary grandfather, who founded the coffee farm and died there "anchored into the hands of those he loved and into the memories of others." This book is a testament to memory, and to the endurance of our deeds. It is a book about a beautiful and fecund land lacerated by earthquakes, snipers, and greed. It is a dramatic book by a brave woman about an exotic place, but it is a book that speaks to all of us about what holds the world together: memory, family, courage, love. Read it, and give it to the people who matter most to you. This is a brilliant work.

Mesmerizing! Wise, lovely, and astonishing.

Beth Kephart writes with enormous talent and careful lyricism about her discovery of El Salvador through the eyes of her husband, who will always be a native of that country although he lives in the USA. At first it is almost like entering a dream to be swept up in this unfolding tale, but the drama of a country as embattled as El Salvador--and the drama of the people who live there--make it far more urgent than any dream. And this book also slowly makes so clear the fact that when you love someone and commit youself to another person you are taking on that person's history and upbringing. This is a wonderful book.