This boldly contemporary love story combines sex and seriousness, physical lust and spiritual longing. Raymond and Hannah hook up at a party; a one-night stand expands into a weeklong passionate and surprisingly deep love affair. Then Hannah leaves for a year in Jerusalem. With six thousand miles separating their bodies, the energy of love and lust must be sublimated to the written word. While Hannah immerses herself in Torah and the Orthodox world of Jerusalem, Raymond remains in multicultural Toronto, working on his dissertation on Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Over the school year, Hannah's growing love for her Jewishness is more and more at odds with her love for a blond, blue-eyed WASP. And Raymond, pining in Toronto, seems to be living out his dissertation before he's even written it. Can this new love affair survive distance, cultural dissonance, and out-of-sync, late-night e-mails?
In this remarkable debut, carnal love confronts religion and culture, and modern passion finds its counterpoint in ancient texts.
Meeting as strangers at a party, Raymond and Hannah stumble into a one-night stand with unexpected consequences. Together, they share a single, magical week before Hannah leaves for Jerusalem, where she is to spend nine months at an orthodox yeshiva learning Torah among students who disapprove of intermarriage. Raymond, a graduate student researching love in Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, struggles with his loneliness and Hannah’s increasing religiosity. Unable to make a clean break, they’re forced to try their insoluble problems in the city without solution, Jerusalem.
Their passionate love affair limited to the confines of written correspondence when Hannah leaves to spend a year in Jerusalem, Raymond and Hannah find their relationship challenged by Hannah's immersion in the world of Orthodox Judaism and Raymond's ongoing writing of his dissertation from multicultural Toronto. A first novel. Original.STEPHEN MARCHE has published short fiction in various literary journals and was short-listed for the 2002 O. Henry Prize. This is his first novel. He lives in Toronto.
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