ISBN: 1400061695
List Price: $23.95
Amazon Price: $15.57
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 2
Reviews:
Summary: No heart to lose.
It was a strategic error to begin this story so many years after the big betrayal. Interesting people would have moved on by this time. Furthermore, if you are going to rehash this old story about a sophisticated villain seducing a young bride, you at least have to let the reader in on the seduction. Mira's attraction to Zenin before she even gets off the airplane is difficult to understand. A young woman would find an old lecher like Zenin ridiculous, not romantic. There are no hearts lost in any event, because Mira is never depicted as being particularly in love with or sexually attracted to Nick. I think maybe Andrea Lee needs to get out of the library and experience a little lust first hand before she starts trying to write about sexual desire.
Summary: Thoroughly uninteresting characters in a silly wish-fantasy
Incredibly, some Harvard people are actually able to get over the experience and their solipsistic, navel-gazing selves. For others, alas, particularly certain authors, having gotten into Harvard seems to be the crowning achievement of their lives and, by their tragic lights, an overarching definition of identity. Such people cannot bring themselves to leave Harvard in mind or spirit, for what would then be left of them? Andrea Lee's latest offering suffers from just this affliction. Yes, it is a tale of innocents abroad, expat ennui and, of course, personal betrayal, but the fundamental problem with this story is that it never really leaves the Harvard Yard. In its insipid wish-fantasy, the clichés proliferate. A young black American woman commits adultery in luxurious, chic venues with a crude but wealthy European man. This threadbare dynamic - the quivering dusky maiden and the priapic European conquistador - has been acted out since first contact eons ago. What, after all, is there left to say? What indeed was there to say in the first instance? It is an old story, older than Caesar and Cleopatra. But Lost Hearts walks hard along the neck of puerility - a tiresome display of the kinds of fanciful notions that might be dreamed up by some Seven Sisters girl heading into a junior year abroad, visions dancing in her head of private jets and leviathan yachts plying the blue Mediterranean, peopled with princes, counts and captains of industry. Zenin, the self-made Italian lothario who injects the initial drop of poison between the two young Americans, Nick and Mira, is the caricature, indeed, the burlesque, of the parvenu, and a patently ridiculous construct. No European upstart with money and a little power in this world would waste five Euros or ten minutes on an unimportant little American colored girl, no matter where she went to school or what her pretensions might be. He would be after bigger game, a worthier trophy - someone with an old pedigree and a shortage of ready cash, or a brainless supermodel. The author is also obsessed with brand-names and obviously feels the need to show how worldly and sophisticated she is, incessantly and annoyingly name-dropping every chic hotel, restaurant, menu, vacation venue, et al, that she has ever seen or heard of; people are constantly jetting into or out of exotic climes; all of which clutters up and disrupts the flow of the story. The other major flaw in Lost Hearts is that none of these characters is the least bit interesting, except perhaps the idealistic, cuckolded WASP hubby from Harvard. Yet we learn nothing about his motivation in bucking his "shabby genteel" New England family to marry a black woman; he is merely another cardboard prop designed as a set-up for the principal voice of the story. Mira, the black female protagonist, is so self-involved that she seems to be having an extended private conversation with herself. How many times does the reader need to be told that Nick is blond with blue eyes? Or that the daughter of this union is so much more beautiful and voluptuous than her mother? Or that some minor (and thoroughly irrelevant) character went to Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Dartmouth or Deerfield or St. George's? Who cares? How does this advance the story? Take Toni Morrison's THE BLUEST EYE, fast-forward little Pecola to Harvard and adulthood, and substitute the premise that happiness and personal fulfillment can be found only by running off to Europe and a fantasy life of shallow, designer-label, faux glamour. Except that it does not work this way, because at the end of her journey, Pecola would only find her worst nemesis: herself. And so it is with this tired, overcooked tale.
Andrea Lee writes beautiful descriptive prose and is enormously talented. But she has a tin ear for dialogue, and is in desperate need of a center of gravity for her work, of themes and characters worthy of her talent. Black-American-ladies-who-lunch-with-European-men is the central theme of nearly all of her work thus far, and to that extent marks her as a literary one-trick pony. And that trick quickly wears thin.
Zadie Smith, on the other hand, the heralded and much-praised black British author of WHITE TEETH and ON BEAUTY, is the modern master of the intersection of race, class, cultures and values. She is simply brilliant and well worth the time invested in her work.
Summary: Could have been better
The story is told from three point of views. Mira who enters into an affair with Zenin not because she was disatified with her new husband nick but just because. Zenin dealing with old age and still finds it amusing to call on mira years after their affair has ended. And Nick the victim in all this who comes to term with his ex-wife adultery when he should have let it go years ago.the story was a bit confusing.
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