Endless Love audiobook

man, this book. this book! this is the second intense reading experience I've had in a row. do you like "intense reading experiences"... and by that I mean a narrative that unspools from one feverish narrator and that deals primarily with escalated, deeply emotional highs & lows? if you do, then this is your book. the book is all David Axelrod, all the time. that boy has the fever, for real.it doesn't start off in an escalated state. one of the most striking things about the novel is how much time it takes to get to that place. sure, David has just been released from the cushy mental institution Rockville for burning his girlfriend Jade's house down around her and her family... but he's a thoughtful lad. Endless Love spends much of its time in moody contemplation as David makes his way back into the world. we get a lot of David coolly dissecting his parents' failing marriage; a lot about his anomie and alienation; his quiet, sneaky yearning for the vanished Jade Butterfield and his hopeless longing for her family and his equally vanished place in that family; we watch him go through the motions of his life as he hunts for the Butterfields and we see how he muses on the impact of his literally burning love. the reader eventually comes to understand David inside and out - and we don't even meet the fascinating Jade until page 265. I'm not sure if Endless Love actually switches gears into something more heightened, if there is a part that I can put a finger on where the story (and the narrator) becomes something delirious. but we get there. one moment we are reading David's nonchalant but sympathetic description of his union job and his co-workers, his meetings with his parole officer, his sadness over his mother's bitter loneliness and his deep love for his unfaithful father, and that is this book; then we get to a place where he is suddenly lashing out against an obnoxious former classmate, inserting himself into unwelcoming lives, physically attacking his mother, smashing through windows, sleeping in an abandoned doghouse... and it is still somehow, incredibly, the same book.the prose is precise although the novel is dense with detail. it is a beautiful book with so much to say about life and how lives are lived and how deep connections are forged and broken. but I would not recommend it to lovers of romantic novels - there is very little of romance in it. there is love and eros and obsession and tragedy, but this is not really a page-turner, so to speak. my understanding is that many readers disliked the outwardly diffident but internally VERY INTENSE David. that surprised me when I read those reviews because David is completely sympathetic to me; I saw a lot of myself in him and I certainly understood the obsessive nature of his love, I've been there. he actually appeared fairly reasonable to me for much of the book - well, until he suddenly wasn't. but I always understood him. I also noticed that some reviewers hated how David's love for Jade was never really explained. why exactly was he in love with her? to me that is an unanswerable question and I'm surprised that some readers search for it. I can't explain why I love someone. I can explain the things I like and love about them, the details... but explain the love itself? who can do that? I think love is one of the unexplainable things in life. it can't be quantified. so... all of that, and the starkness of David's perspective, the overall contemplative melancholy of this thick book... I think Endless Love would be a real turn-off for readers looking for exciting descriptions of passion.but we do get that exciting description of passion. and how! it starts so softly. then over 20 pages of extended love scene. the most gruesomely erotic love scene I've ever read. blood everywhere, it's like a crime scene. sweat and semen and saliva and orifices dilating and bodies stuck together and menstrual blood all over the place. I have never read anything like this scene in my life. it is amazing and horrible. but mainly amazing.that love scene, singular as it may be, is not really what I take away from the book. for me, the beauty of Endless Love is how it so carefully and clearly and even delicately explores the difference between our private selves and our public selves, our internal and our external. you move too much in one direction and that becomes eccentricity or strangeness or even madness. you move too much in the other direction and, well, I suppose you become the consummate empty professional. I guess. I wouldn't know. the external is just a prop for me; I use it and look forward to discarding it whenever I can. I feel you, David Axelrod, I really do. “I don’t know why I call the people there crazy,” I said. “It’s not what they are. It’s a habit, a way of thinking about Rockville and keeping myself separate. You know what it is? All of us have two minds, a private one, which is usually strange, I guess, and symbolic, and a public one, a social one. Most of us stream back and forth between those two minds, drifting around in our private self and then coming forward into the public self whenever we need to. But sometimes you get a little slow making the transition, you drag out the private part of your life and people know you’re doing it. They almost always catch on, knowing that someone is standing before them thinking about things that can’t be shared, like the one monkey that knows where a fresh-water pond is. And sometimes the public mind is such a total bummer and the private self is alive with beauty and danger and secrets and things that don’t make any sense but that repeat and repeat and demand to be listened to, and you find it hard and harder to come forward. The pathway between those two states of mind suddenly seems very steep, a hell of a lot of work and not really worth it. Then I think it becomes a matter of what side of the great divide you get caught on. ____________YE OLDE PLACEHOLDER REVIEW(view spoiler)[Happy Valentine's Day, lovers! please don't read this book today.the novel is brilliant. amazing prose, characterization, amazing everything. review to come but for now here are some gifs.(view spoiler)[ (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>

Don't knock it 'til you've read it--the movie doesn't hold a candle to the book. Scott Spencer blew me away. Depicts first love, er,.. obsession, perfectly. I want to believe this book was a catharsis for him, and only those who have experienced loss of love, or have had a misunderstanding of mature love, can really be impacted by the book. He brings to the surface the insanity we have all experienced in relation to our first (and perhaps second? Third?!) loves. After reading the very last page, I wept like a mental patient for approximately a half an hour. In my world, it deserves to be on a special bookshelf all its own, with a museum-style spotlight shining on it, feather-dusted every day. Now that's a good book.

NO SPOILERS David Axelrod is in love. Deeply, deeply in love with Jade, a girl who lives in his neighborhood. He is 17 and she is 16. And her parents are hippies, so free and open that they welcome David into their home and into their hearts. He spends hours and hours there. Then he starts sleeping there. Then they buy him a double bed that he and Jade share. Isolated in this family environment and in their love for each other, Jade and David spend endless hours talking, making love, and staring at each other. Until one day, Jade's father makes a decision to be a little more father-like and throw David out of the house. It's not healthy for him and Jade to be spending so much time together. He forbids them from seeing each other for 30 days.So David sets fire to their house.Just a little fire, a 'manageable fire', a fire that can burn a bit so that David can appear at just the right time, happen to be walking along in the vicinity at just the right moment so that he can see the fire and help put it out. Save the family. See Jade again. Touch Jade again.Only fires have a way of getting out of control. Fires have a way of catching and burning and doing more damage more quickly than David had ever imagined.Scott Spencer puts us into the mind of a psychopath. Or...does love make psychopaths of us all?This review was spoiler-free - everything said in this review is explained in Chapter One.This is not a romance novel. This book is in turns gross, disturbing, frightening, touching, sad, and scary. It's an intense examination of love and madness and whether those two things are really the same thing.It reminded me a lot of Catcher in the Rye.The writing is beautiful. Here are some samples:SAMPLE ONE: "I know you," I said, and the statement took on a weight far greater than I expected, as if the simple claim had within it an emotional magnetism that attracted everything that was unknown, unspoken, everything that was vague and hoped for and dreaded as well. I told her that I knew her and the atmosphere between us became as charged as if I'd finally gotten the courage to lean over and kiss her. Yet I had no choice but to become more and more forward, like someone pursuing a ghost: either the vision would recede into light and dust or it would take on weight and substance.SAMPLE TWO: I was walking up Fifth Avenue to pass an hour or two before it was time to call Ann. Hugh was with his new lover remembering the things he'd been taught to want when he was young. Who knows how many people were out there with us? A million seems a fair guess. New York is the place in America where you're most likely to meet someone you know; it's our capital of surprise encounters. If you stay there long enough you might see everyone you ever knew. I'm thinking of a skeleton bent expectantly over a radar screen and Hugh and I are blips of light heading into each other's path with the blind imperiousness of comets. We are blind to the future. We can barely hold on to our strange versions of the past. We see only a little of what is directly before us. We know almost nothing. They only way we can stand it is not to care. I care and I can't stand it. I should just breathe in and out and be brave. But not knowing what is going to happen next and living with the hope that whatever it is it won't be too difficult to understand is like driving at top speed with the windshield completely painted over with a picture of where you used to live.P.S. I would never shelf this under a 'YA' heading.

Non è niente, se non due eguali“Non l'ho scritto e ancor meno letto/Il libro dell'essere mio, semicelato sempre/A chi in un bacio scorge/L'informe oscurità vorace di un abisso/ Come potei pensare che i brevi anni bastassero/ad affermare la realtà d'un amore senza fine?” Delmore SchwartzAmore e follia; amarsi alla follia. Quale amore giovane non è segnato dalla pazzia? Appena esplode, è un'ossessione oscura e incontrollabile, appena nasce, è un inabissarsi di corpi e sensazioni e energie. Intensamente indescrivibile, visceralmente intimo. David e Jade si esauriscono l'un altro, si alterano nell'attrazione e nella promiscuità. Vivono in una realtà che assume la forma di una malattia, una fame violenta, una inevitabile assolutezza che non si piega davanti ad alcuna costrizione. Unica dimensione possibile e concreta, il sé nell'altro, erotismo e desiderio. Candidato al National Book Award nel 1979, un libro scritto con maestria profonda che risplende in un primo capitolo sorprendente e furioso. Non temete sia inconcluso, l'infelicità dell'amore reciproco nulla toglie alla singolare e dissennata esperienza così verticalmente consumata.

This is either a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 star book. Seriously, I would understand any one of these ratings. It is about one young man's obsessive (to say the least) relationship with his high school girlfriend. I'd give a "1" for character likeability. Every character is seriously screwed up/deranged/sick in the head, with the possible exception of David's mother. I wish we saw a little more of his parents' relationship because, as Jewish Communists in the late 60s, they are pretty damn interesting. I'd give a "2" for sexual content. There are some gnarly scenes. Gnar-ly. And unless you like references to people getting so hot they are "dilated enough for a premature birth" (that's not even the worst of it - not by a long shot, not even the worst on that page) you might feel a little squeamish at times. I'm still reeling from one particular sex scene. I can't even type some of the stuff that was in there. But points for originality here. Lord knows I kept reading (jaw. on. floor.)I'd give a "3" to general plot. It held my attention but the angst got a little old after awhile (WHY did he love her so much??? WHY??) A "4" goes to the way the author showed how one person's obsessiveness can spiral out of control and affect multiple people. I also liked that it wasn't *just* Jade he pined over, but her whole jacked up family. I did wonder if the things that happened would've without David's involvement. The Butterfields were painted as uber-WASPy but they were sampling LSD as a family event so they weren't completely normal. Was he just a catalyst? Would there have been some other catalyst if not for him? And a "5" goes to the writing itself. Intense, unique descriptions. Sometimes a little too intense or unique (see above: sex scenes) but better than most anything I've read. I'm a little emotionally exhausted by this book. I find it easy to specify what makes a 1, 2, or 5 star book and often struggle when it's between a 3 and a 4. Ultimately I ask myself whether the work is easily replicated or somewhat simple. The answer here is a resounding no. So it's a four.

I have always loved this book. A nice primer on love and sex. It's a great portrait of obsession. Mesmerizing prose.I remember getting a scornful look from Mrs. Bendick for passing it around freshman English when we were supposed to be discussing the similarities/differences of "Romeo vs. Juliet" and "West Side Story." How could I not share that crazed, blood-soaked lovemaking scene with everyone? So much more interesting than Rita Moreno dancing on rooftops!I try to read it every couple of years. I also try to avoid the movie (and that horrible song) every day of my life.

I finished this book only moments ago. It feels like I sustained some kind of wound. The emotional intensity, made more acute after (sometimes long) periods of lull, replicate exactly the mania of obsessiveness. I was drawn in by the prose, which was just this side of popular fiction, having heady ideas and great turns of phrase, artful syntax, but so readable with nothing to break the story's spell. I was drawn in and kept there by the emotion, emotion associated with the unbridled highs of youth, but also of the unique and peculiar powers of first love: love spurred on by discovery, by the daunting chemicals released in the brain in contact with that love. Scott Spencer gave such a variety of tone, too, that when we finally get to the ending pages--after a denouement and a steep despairing tumble down a psychic cliff--we are weakened into a state of receptivity, so that we are living the events in Rockville, in Fox Run, as David Axelrod adrift in a sea of pathos. Until we arrive at the closing paragraph, a perfect exeunt, showing not only his preoccupation with Jade Butterfield, but also with himself. I was really caught up in this one, and it is a good reminder of the power of emotional resonance in a book and its ability to shape ones waking life, and think, What would I sacrifice in pursuit of intensity?

Quanto mi è piaciuto, quanto mi sono sentita risucchiata dalla storia, tirata dentro per i capelli, coinvolta dalla vicenda dell’amore adolescenziale di David per Jade, un amore che si trasforma in un folle motivo di vita che trascina David in un baratro di azioni drammatiche, distruttive ed autodistruttive, negli USA yuppie, psichedelici e alternativi a cavallo degli anni Settanta.Più di tutto ho amato la fisicità con cui è scritto il testo: sono continui i riferimenti al corpo, a come il corpo incarni l’emozione. L’autore plasma le emozioni nei corpi dei personaggi come uno scultore, non le descrive, le scolpisce nelle loro viscere. E il lettore le sente vibrare nelle proprie. Non mi ricordo di aver mai apprezzato le scene di sesso in un romanzo: o mi hanno lasciato indifferenti o le ho trovate inopportune. L’incontro fisico di David e Jade dopo anni di separazione è bellissimo, coinvolgente, raccontato in modo superbo perché l’autore entra quasi nell’anatomia dell’amore, nel suo essere inseparabile da carne, nervi, muscoli, umori fisici, volontà totale di sconfinare nel corpo dell’amato. Il racconto non sfugge mai di mano a Spencer: l’ossessione amorosa è raccontata nelle sue dinamiche, prive di senso di realtà, ma con una loro propria coerenza; la lingua e il pensiero di David, che è la voce narrante del romanzo, sono capaci di rappresentare soggettivamente il mondo interiore di questo giovane troppo innamorato, troppo ingenuo, troppo sconvolto da una specie di follia che rimane tuttavia sempre internamente lucida; coerente l’autore nel mantenere il focus incentrato sulle emozioni piuttosto che eccedere nell’intreccio narrativo; infine credibili i suoi eccentrici personaggi, nel contesto degli anni Settanta. Insomma mi è piaciuto tantissimo e mi è parso anche che la scrittura sia all’altezza di un romanzo che ambisce a dare corpo all’amore come illusoria aspirazione all’assoluto.

Favorite quotes from Endless Love: "I was totally victimized by the irrational navigation of my unconscious.""I was, I knew then, a member of a vast network of condemned men and women: romance had taken a wrong turn within me and led me into mayhem."My Two Cents: This is a classic book which has been reviewed by hundreds, if not thousands of readers and admired by the most credible book reviewers and magazines. So, instead of composing a traditional review, I'm choosing to blog about the impression that Endless Love made on me. I agree with the authors of "Read This Next," and recommend that everyone add this book to their "to-be-reads before I die list." Spencer smashes recent love stories making them look like romantic light and as shallow as a puddle in Arizona. The deeply passionate journey of David Axelrod epitomizes love at its most intense and insane. The descriptions grip at your guts and tingle all the way down through your toes. It's not an easy read, but the humanity and truthfulness of intimacy is so honest that it borders on perfection. Spencer is a master at constructing a genuine love scene with a rawness and tenderness that makes the heart ache with both madness and astonishment.

I read this book twice and each time it has gotten better. My ex tells me it is newer version of Wuthering Heights which is a book we both admire, I strongly disagree while conceding she does have a point. Jade is the love of David's life and losing her will cause him to burn down her house, and that is just the beginning of this wonderful book. Is it love or obession, what is the difference? Why is it that everyone connected to this sees it as something that dramatically changes their lives, but for David his love for Jade sends him to an insane asylum, and not just once. She even has to have him put out so he can be locked up. The Brooke Shields movie was supposedly based on this, and I think we can safely say that they didn't read this book. Like Wuthering Heights, this is an anti love story where passion becomes a deathbringer that causes nothing but destruction in its wake. This is great book from a wonderful author.

Dopo aver letto Stoner di John Williams non speravo di imbattermi in un altro romanzo così intenso.Sono stata smentita leggendolo.Un amore senza fine, sospeso nel tempo, congelato nel profondo del cuore, perché la vita deve andare avanti, nonostante tutto; perché ci sono eventi che separano ineluttabilmente il destino di due persone che si amano e non si può più tornare indietro e non c'è più unione, resta solo un vortice di follia che potrebbe completamente risucchiare uno dei due amanti, a meno che non si decida di chiudere quella porta aperta su un passato che non può più tornare.