Anyone who still believes Mr. Stoppard is a strictly cerebral dramatist need only check out this rich consideration of love, revolution and loud music.
When he delivers "Some Enchanted Evening" or "This Nearly Was Mine," it's not as a swoon-making blockbuster (though of course it is), but as a measured and honest consideration of love.
Landis, whose last novel ("Lying in Bed") was an ingenious, if somewhat discursive, consideration of love and obsession, has here written what looks at first glance like a chronological, factual account with hardly any invention.
Tributes to cafe life are almost as frequent in tango songs as heartfelt considerations of unrequited love.
And do not get into fights or yelling matches with them on this topic since it will make you seem immature and unworthy of their consideration of your love.
There was a wealth of US fiction, ranging from Annie Proulx's vast ecological saga about the environmental degradation of the last 300 years, Barkskins (Fourth Estate), to Elizabeth Strout's slim consideration of mother-love, My Name is Lucy Barton (Viking).
It is also, as Tolstoy's novel is, a consideration of the forms of love.
If you can come together and discuss your goals and viewpoints regarding finances before you actually get married -- now, out of love, consideration and affection, as opposed to later when things may eventually get out of hand -- you effectively minimize one of the most common reasons for divorce and one of the most difficult aspects of settling one.
The novel is less a snapshot of the way we live now than a consideration of the timeless consolations of love and art in the shadow of death, and its resolution — inevitable yet startling, like the slap of a wave — is a triumph.
Empathy helps us see each other as people in need of love and consideration, no matter what.
