Love, etc.

by Bel Kaufman

this book is about how people fall out of love and into love and about the joy, the despair, the poetry and the passion...

Genres: Fiction

410 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Bel Kaufman (b. 1911) was a bestselling writer, dedicated teacher, and lecturer best known for her novel Up the Down Staircase (1965), a classic portrayal of life in the New York public school system. Kaufman was born in Berlin, the daughter of Russian parents and granddaughter of celebrated Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem. Her family moved to Odessa when she was three, and Russian is her native language. The family also lived in Moscow before immigrating to New York City when Kaufman was twelve. There, she graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College and with high honors from Columbia University. Kaufman then worked as a high school teacher in the city for three decades. The success of Up the Down Staircase launched her second career as a sought-after speaker for events around the country. Kaufman is also the author of Love, Etc. (1979), a powerful, haunting, and poignant novel rendering life as fiction.

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bel Kaufman's book Up The Down Staircase was one of my formative reading experiences. I couldn't believe she had another novel that I'd never read. Love, Etc. wasn't terrible, but it was much too structurally complex for the subject matter. Two divorced writers correspond about their lives. One of them is dating an emotionally abusive con artist while she tries to write a novel that fictionalizes her own traumatic divorce. I don't know--maybe some of the problem is trying to understand something written in a particular milieu that's in that hidden time period of my own childhood? New York in the 1960s and 1970s seems like it must have been the most sexually conservative and most weirdly libertine environment.

I'll tell you what. It makes you want to write Bel Kaufman a letter, because her letters are wonderful. As weird and uncomfortable as this book was to read, I wish I had a correspondent like her, with the little snippets of sardonic rhyme and the lovely joking. Oh wait, I do have people like that. I think I need to go write them email.

[Clara Prizont · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a brilliant book. I was in between 3 & 4 stars.

Like most long books, it's too long. There was a long boring part that could have been omitted. Another count against the book was Bel Kaufman's style. It was riveting in Up the Down Staircase and disjointed here.

What I enjoyed....it was brilliant. The author uses literary devices cleverly and throughout the various narratives in the book is telling the story of her life. The first page made me re-fall in love with Kaufman (I met her in previous book) and that love kept me reading through. I thought it was clever how she separated her identity into three personas--protagonist, protagonist's fictional creation, and protagonist's correspondent & friend.