His entry begins:I’m always reading several books at the same time, like most of us. Right now I’m reading Patrul Rinpoche’s Words Of My Perfect Teacher, Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, Ottessa Mossfegh’s Eileen (a pre-release copy, I’m reviewing it), and Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, as well as several others. (The ones I listed are the ones I’ve actually read from today). I love Tanizaki, because he understands that everything the artist should hold most dear is not true or false, black or white, on or off, but in the middle, in the murky, fascinating, elusive world of where real human thought and emotion actually takes place. Now that’s almost a cliché, but because we tend to slip into dogmatism so quickly and easily, because we are such natural hypocrites, because we are so quick to...[read on]About the book, from the publisher:
Is it possible to love well without lying? At least since Socrates’s discourse on love in Plato’s Symposium, philosophers have argued that love can lead us to the truth—about ourselves and the ones we love. But in the practical experience of erotic love—and perhaps especially in marriage—we find that love and lies often work hand in hand, andLearn more about Love and Lies at the Farrar, Straus and Giroux website.that it may be difficult to sustain long-term romantic love without deception, both of oneself and of others.
Drawing on contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis and cognitive neuroscience, his own personal experience, and such famed and diverse writers on love as Shakespeare, Stendhal, Proust, Adrienne Rich, and Raymond Carver, Clancy Martin—himself divorced twice and married three times—explores how love, truthfulness, and deception work together in contemporary life and society. He concludes that learning how to love and loving well inevitably requires lying, but also argues that the best love relationships draw us slowly and with difficulty toward honesty and trust.
Love and Lies is a relentlessly honest book about the difficulty of love, which is certain to both provoke and entertain.
The Page 69 Test: Clancy Martin's How to Sell.
Writers Read: Clancy Martin.
--Marshal Zeringue
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