rief takes many forms, but in David Plante’s The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief, it appears to assume no form at all. While it proceeds roughly chronologically, The Pure Lover often hops between places (and, occasionally, between times as well). Yet in its fragments, it takes on the character of the devastation Plante must have felt on losing his lifelong partner, Nikos Stangos, and the futility of “moving on” from that which is too devastating to bear. Plante and Stangos met as expats edging into the literary scene of early ’60s London, and spent the next forty years together before Stangos’ death from cancer. (A memorable, but not-quite-picked-up, thread involves the poet Stephen Spender, who was an idol of one man and possibly a lover of the other.) The Pure Lover begins with Stangos’ tumultuous childhood in Greece during the time of “The Catastrophe,” as a royal family-planned invasion of two of the country’s neighbors ended in humiliating defeat, and follows him to America, where he attended Denison College, and might even have crossed paths with Plante in Boston, en route to multiple degrees. Stangos worked in publishing, and was well known as a translator, particularly of fellow Greek expat Constantine Cavafy. He kept his own poetry private, as Plante racked up publications across several genres. After his lover’s death, he discovered a cache of poetry, some of it about their life together. The sensation of being in pieces, as the short paragraphs and passages of The Pure Lover are, is evident throughout the book in form, and somewhat in narrative as well. While Plante’s ordeal is unimaginable, his chosen form examines his relationship with Stangos at practically a molecular level, resembling the tiny bits of information leaked out over the course of a life that never quite fit together to become a full depiction of a person. Stangos’ portrait is not nearly complete in The Pure Lover, but Plante passes through some startlingly intimate times in order to construct it, and the result is beautiful and heartbreaking. Publisher: Beacon Press. Publication Date: September 2, 2009. Pages: 128. Price: $23. Format: Hardcover Original. ISBN-13: 978-0-807-072-981
