I think of Abraham’s descendants leaving the promised land and being forced into bondage. I don’t just want to be rescued I want to be taken someplace safe and good. Not just in “the heart,” but God standing on Fifth and Lothrop - God beyond the glass. If asked to choose, I want a God who is someplace. They seem quite concerned with the future of my faith, but they make the mistake of showing little interest in my present conditions. And I couldn’t tell her I had no desire to live forever.Īs someone who is made of more doubt than faith, I find that Christians tend to want to talk to me about salvation. For eternal life, God looks to the heart, she said. She motioned toward our fluorescent canopy and back to her chest. And I didn’t have the courage to say, I like my heart just fine. Until finally she said, That’s where you’re changed, pointing to her heart not mine. I, embarrassed (whether on my behalf or hers, I did not know), began alternating peeling my bare legs off of the plastic booth to fill in the silence between us. Why confined to a heart? She tried to defuse a look on her face by sipping on coffee that tasted like ash. I told her I wanted God out there doing something, nodding to the street beyond the glass window. She was gorgeous to me, even exposed to the fluorescent light rattling around us, but she spoke like the incarnation of a Hallmark card, which both aggravated and saddened me. I was in my first year at the University of Pittsburgh and she, her last. The Neversink Library champions books from around the world that have been overlooked, under appreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored.I was sitting in McDonald’s with my first Bible-study leader when I told her I didn’t want Jesus in my heart. In the tense environment of the wartime city, their love takes on a desperation transcending their youthfulness.Īnd as the badly-kept secret of their relationship unfolds, scandal descends, leading the story to a final, startling conclusion - and causing the book itself to become a scandal when it was first published in 1923, just before the author’s death at the age of 20. What seems to begin as a charming tale of puppy love quickly darkens, and they launch into a steamy affair. Set in Paris during the First World War, it tells the story of Francois, the 16-year-old narrator, who falls in love with Marthe, an older, married woman whose husband is off fighting at the front. Long unavailable in the U.S., it is here presented in a sparkling new translation. Hailed by Jean Cocteau as a “masterpiece,” and by the Guardian as “Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, avant la lettre,” this taut tale written by a teenager in the form of a frank “confession” is a gem of early twentieth century romanticism.
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