The Pure Lover

“A wrenching and boldly intimate lament.”—Philip Roth

“The Pure Lover leaves one exalted. . . . A lovely book, joyful, plangent and true.”—Washington Post

David Plante first met Nikos Stangos in London in 1965. He was a young American—raw, an aspiring writer, in love with a fantasy of Greece half classical and half inspired with the eroticism of Cavafy. Nikos was Greek, a poet, an aesthete and intellectual, a leftist, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of his country: a man of great sophistication and few pretensions. Nikos was pure. They spent the next forty years together. And then Nikos died of brain cancer.

In The Pure Lover Plante tells us, in vivid fragments that like the pieces of a mosaic come together into a glimmering whole, the story of his beloved, of their life together, and of its end. And in this telling he shows us the nature of grief: its passion, its centrality, its vanity, its willfulness, the threat and the lure of its overwhelming force. And the griever’s fear that when it fades, the lost lover will finally, really, be lost.

The Pure Lover is a book of unusual intimacy, a lament that will speak to all who have known deep love and deep grief.“How a book can be at once so raw and so artful is a mystery; The Pure Lover joins a handful of necessary volumes that speak directly from grief’s wild, inconsolable center, and readers will find it bracing, unflinching, and honest to the core.”
—Mark Doty, author of Heaven’s Coast
 
 “A wrenching and boldly intimate lament.”
—Philip Roth

“The Pure Lover leaves one exalted . . . A lovely book, joyful, plangent and true.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“The Pure Lover is a short but moving elegy. . . . It’s a difficult subject, handled with lyricism, pain, indiscretion and love.”
—Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

“David Plante’s fine meditation on love and loss is the work of one who has been there and who knows that it is the dying who are losing all and that the grief we obtain is the survivor’s treasure.”
—Edward Albee
 
“Innovative and incantatory . . . Bracingly poignant . . . A cumulative portrait, taken in snapshots, of a long-term gay relationship that’s as valid a marriage as any other.”
—Jason Roush, The Gay and Lesbian Review
 
“A fierce encapsulation of grief, the fundamentally private wrought wrenchingly public. This sublime remembrance—more a compilation of memory fragments than a linear life story—evokes a whole man (in truth, two whole men).”
—Richard Labonte, Book Marks: Best of 2009

David Plante has published more than a dozen novels, including The Family, The Woods, and The Country, as well as the nonfiction books Difficult Women and American Ghosts. His work has appeared in many periodicals, including The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and has been nominated for a National Book Award. The Pure Lover was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Randy Shilts Publishing Triangle Award.