The Last Time They Met, by Anita Shreve

This is a book that will delight anyone who can appreciate a story about love. I was careful enough not to say this is a book about a love story because bad books about romance are a dime a dozen, if not cheaper. This Anita Shreve can write beautifully, there's no doubt. She's intelligent, and also expects her reader to be intelligent, but more than anything, she writes with feeling. She writes fiction with the weight of emotions that many who have lived a real life situation cannot commit to words. This is a really talented writer.

The story is this book is told in a very non-linear way. To begin with, it flows backwards in time, but even then, it doesn't go straight, with a rhythm that give space to memories, daydreams, reveries. The book is divided into three parts, according to three moments in the life of the main characters, going from most to least recent. Many reviews of this book will tell you to expect an unbelievable twist at the end that will have you wanting to go straight back to the beginning. I think this 'twist' is interesting and inspiring, all right, but I dare say that the strength of the book lies in its beautiful whole, in the range of its explorations of human emotions, rather than in a bit of surprise in the last paragraph. If it were only for this, the book would haven't had much value for me. After hearing people tell me so many times to expect to be shocked, I wasn't really surprised because I had already explored many possibilities for the end, including the actual one. Nevertheless, when the end came, this ending that I already had considered possible, I was shocked. I was upset. All these feelings came rushing in and lingered long after I had turned the last page.