The Pure Lover: A Memoir 

of Grief 

by David Plante

"All feeling and all thought, all are absent in your absence, so why, why is such total absence of thought and feeling so potent a presence -- yours?" (p 113)

The Pure Lover is a beautiful and profluent portrait - memoir of a life and living together. David Plante first met Nikos in London while he was still an aspiring young American writer. Nikos was a Greek poet, intellectual and survivor of the war. It was 1965 and a life together was about to begin. In his memoir Plante uses fragments of their life together to create a mosaic of what was a beautiful duumvirate.  A short book of fleeting flinders, it is told with piquant prose about time together and time past.


The Pure Lover by David Plante. Beacon Press, Boston. 2009


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