The Cloister

The Cloister by James Carroll

     I finished this book a couple of weeks ago and can’t get it out of my mind. After thinking about it for a couple of weeks I don’t know how to tell you it’s worth every minute of your time and do that telling justice. Bear with me and then go buy the book.

     I had, somewhere in my life, heard the names Heloise and Abelard.  I knew theirs was a love story but that’s I all. I didn’t know their time, their story or their purpose.  I do now.

     The many layers of The Cloister include the story of a Catholic priest, Father Michael Kavanagh, a Holocaust survivor from France and museum guide, Rachel Vedette, and their crossed paths.  One day Fr. Kavanagh has a conversation with Rachel at The Cloisters.  He is there spontaneously one day while working through a chance encounter with a friend from another time, Runner Malloy. Neither Fr. Michael nor Rachel realize what that chance encounter would mean to their lives.  What is chance, anyway?

     Rachel’s father was a Medieval scholar and his life’s work was dedicated to bringing back the honor Abelard was denied in his own time. Abelard, a philosophy scholar and monk, was discredited for his relationship to the Jews and Rachel’s father worked his way minutely through Abelard’s writings hoping to reinstate his philosophy with the world. Rachel protected her father’s work with her life and after her conversations with Fr. Michael she trusts her father’s writings to him. Nothing sinister here. No car chases as she tries to get them back.

     Are you still with me?

     Heloise and Abelard’s story is one of those immortal love stories and we are told their story interspersed with Rachel and Fr. Michael’s.  It is a love story deeply felt.  It is also an affirmation of the Jews to their place in history.  In their place in philosophical thinking.

     The thinking in this novel is deep and intense and brain altering.  Yet it’s not so much so there is no audience for this story.  It’s the most thought provoking novel I’ve read in years.  I haven’t forgotten it, I will read it again (and maybe again) and think about it when I’m not reading it.  And, in my opinion,  that’s just about a perfect novel.