Book recommendation for Rohmer Fans

[Terry]

Just finished reading Eight White Nights, by Andre Aciman. Aciman
takes a Rohmerish plot and transport Paris into the Upper West Side,
where two young people meet at a Christmas party and form an instant
deep attraction. Over the next week they meet every night at a cinema
featuring a Rohmer festival. Like a Rohmer protagonist, the nameless
narrator here (nicknamed Oskar) analyzes his every encounter with
Clara - constantly thinking that he has blown it with his last line
and will never see her again, only to turn on his cell phone and find
that there were 10 missed calls. The book glosses lightly over the
cinema part (You know that the first film is Maud - appropriately
enough shown on Christmas night), but the book is thoroughly infused
with references to Rohmer's work. "You aren't going out in that
blizzard, are you?" Will these two ever stop their verbal sparring and
get together in the physical sense? Probably, but that is for you to
determine after reading the open-ended finish. Looking at the reviews
from actual readers, people tend to love this book or hate it. My
suspicion is that most Rohmerians will like it as much as I did.

[Shmuel Ben-Gad]

Thank you It sounds likethi sis based on his short story in the New Yorker osme yeas back (unless my memory deceives me).
I liked the sort story very much.

Shmuel Ben-Gad,
Gelman Library,
George Washington University.

"The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."
--Haldir of Lothlorien

[Linda Dyett]

By coincidence, I’ve come upon
another Rohmerian plot—or what
started out looking like a
Rohmerian plot—in a recent work of
fiction: Orhan Pamuk’s latest
novel, The Museum of Innocence.
The donnée, so to speak (to borrow
a term from Henry James), is
setting out with one love object
and getting waylaid with another—as
in The Bakery Girl of Monceau, My
Night at Maud’s, et al.

In Pamuk’s book, a man falls
obsessively in love with one girl
at the very time that he becomes
engaged to another—as if marital
love and passion were separate
things. But whereas Rohmer dwells
on self-deception and the foibles
of human nature, Pamuk allows his
protagonist to be clear-eyed, at
least about whom he
loves--regardless of his marriage
plans. Pamuk's concerns are with
the impact of Western notions of
romance and sex on traditional
Turkish society. One of his
characters (the protagonist’s
mother) goes so far as to say that
love is non-existent, or can only
be illusory, in a world where men
and women have constrained social
relations.

The Rohmer-Pamuk comparison
illuminates what I think was a
timely factor inspiring Rohmer’s
films—the sexual revolution of the
1960s and ‘70s, and what it
revealed about our notions of
choice-making in love. Pamuk seems
to be examining the same subject,
but in a very different cultural
milieu, one that’s painfully in the
process of change.

-----Original Message-----
From:
eric-rohmer-for-the-ages@googlegrou
ps.com
[mailto:eric-rohmer-for-the-ages@go
oglegroups.com] On Behalf Of Terry
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2010 10:07
AM
To: Eric Rohmer for the ages
Subject: Book recommendation for
Rohmer Fans

Just finished reading Eight White