From National Book Award-winning writer James Carroll comes a novel of the timeless love story of Peter Abelard and Héloïse, and its impact on a modern priest and a Holocaust survivor seeking sanctuary in Manhattan.Father Michael Kavanagh is shocked when he sees a friend from his seminary days at the altar of his humble parish in upper Manhattan—a friend who was forced to leave under scandalous … leave under scandalous circumstances. Compelled to reconsider the past, Father Kavanagh wanders into the medieval haven of the Cloisters and stumbles into a conversation with a lovely and intriguing docent, Rachel Vedette.
Having survived the Holocaust and escaped to America, Rachel remains obsessed with her late father’s greatest scholarly achievement: a study demonstrating the relationship between the famously discredited monk Peter Abelard and Jewish scholars. Feeling an odd connection with Father Kavanagh, Rachel shares with him the work that cost her father his life.
At the center of these interrelated stories is the classic romance between the great philosopher Abelard and his intellectual equal, Héloïse. For Rachel, Abelard is the key to understanding her people’s place in history. And for Father Kavanagh, the controversial theologian may be a doorway to understanding the life he himself might have had outside the Church.
more
James Carroll is first and foremost a story teller, writing novels that are thoroughly engaging to read. The Cloister, his newest novel, alternates the passionate love between Abelard and Héloise in medieval France with a 1950’s testing friendship between an Irish American priest in New York and Rachel, a French woman, who’s a docent at the Cloisters, a refugée from post WW II France. In each relationship the conversation between the two people centers around around God’s basic and eternal commitment to love for humans, always. Neither sin nor punishment is ever God’s agenda, but always God’s commitment to love for humans. The Church, Carroll insists allowed Abelard to be punished savagely not so much for loving Héloise, but for insisting that God’s foundation for all religion was love, not the power the Church wanted to forward in order to attack Jerusalem in the Crusades. Abelard’s great popularity had to be destroyed, Church thought, in order to carry out the Crusades. Rachel’s father was a Jewish scholar invested in translating Abelard in part at the time of WW II to make Judaism connected and integral to Christianity, and so Jews not enemies. Although these two plots go back and forth, the reader immediately cares about each of these four people, and more, Rachel’s father, the priest’s early seminary friend, and others. It’s one of those novels, that is hard to read on a train or subway, because readers are apt to end up at one end of the line or the other, wherever they’d meant to go. It’s fun to enter the Medieval world completely, and then to switch to an almost familiar world of The Cloisters in New York, the frightening world of Paris under the Nazi occupation.
It is also satisfying to read a fine novel on a large canvas with large ideas, and more to consider when the story is complete. Enjoy the size of the ideas, the warmth and reality of the people, the real settings, and the highly readable quality of this fine novel ! ! !
I didn’t find this an easy book to read because both stories are set against a Roman Catholic background, and I’m not well versed in that area. The characters aren’t particularly likable, although by the end of the book I was somewhat cheering for them. The ending was disappointing, but made sense. I would actually like to give this three and a half stars rather than four, but four it is.
I just finished James Carroll’s latest book, The Cloister. It is not the type of book I typically read. Nevertheless, I found the writing to be masterful, the characters to be engaging, deep, and realistic, and the intertwining stories to be poignant and thought-provoking. For anyone interested in exploring Catholicism and its effects on people, life, and history, this is a must-read.
Enlightening – Educational in a very story telling way. When you choose to read this work, be patient, be sure you understand what is going on, consider the period in history…..
Reading The Cloister completely captured me in it’s thrall !
Explained dichotomy of Jewish and Christian diversity better than anything else I have ever read. Too bad it wasn’t understood centuries earlier.
Deep
A wonderful weaving together of the story of Heloise and Abelard with that of post World War II characters in New York. Excellent historical fiction.
Interesting story and well developed characters