When my friend suggested this book to me, I felt an irresistible tendency to read it. I was disappointed to know that Odyssey didn't have this book. What a shame! But, I was very lucky to get one of the only two remaining copies at Walden.
The first thing that attracted me was the name. A simple, yet profound one - Love Story! It felt a little strange too. How could one have chosen a generic name like "Love Story" to a novel? Imagine naming novels like "A Tragedy" or "A Comedy" !! But after reading the novel, I felt that the name was truly justified. Erich Segal must have pondered over a dozen names before coming up with this striking one!
This small and beautiful looking book - it has only 187 pages with not more than 25 lines per page of relatively big font - is the story of Oliver Barrett IV, a rich, ice-hockey jock from Harvard and Jennifer Cavilleri, a working-class beauty, studying music at Radcliffe.
This story is as simple as the title - A rich boy and a middle-class girl find themselves deeply in love with each other, get married without the approval of the boy's father, struggle through adversities before the boy gets a lucrative job. The sequence of events logically point to a happy ending. But that's not the case here because; a happy ending would have made this novel "any love story" not Erich Segal's "Love Story"!
Jenny dies young, at the age of just twenty-five, of leukemia. This is not something that comes as a big shock to the reader mid way through the novel. The author reveals the sad ending in the very first line of the novel: "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?" asks Oliver Barrett. So, you know what's going to happen. It's just a matter of when and how!
I don't like novels with tragic endings, much less those that declare, in the first line, that they are going to make you weep. Yet, I finished the novel in one go! I couldn't help but marvel the way Segal has deferred the tragedy till the very end and made this book an un-putdownable read with his exceptional skill and craft.
Though the reader knows that Jenny is going to die, he doesn't feel the pinch until towards the end of the novel because he is completely engrossed in the romance of Oliver and Jenny. The conversations are intelligent, witty and romantic. I ended up reading many lines twice, sometimes thrice!
As a reader, I was hovering around Harvard and Radcliffe, in spirit, following the two wherever they went....to the Midget Restaurant, the Dillon Field House, Briggs Hall, Paine Hall, so on and so forth…and finally to Mount Sinai Hospital !
Oliver Barrett III, Oliver's father and Phil Cavilleri, jenny's father are the other two prominent characters in the novel and were portrayed equally well by the author.
As I mentioned earlier, the author has handled the tragic part - since the revelation of the fact that Jenny has leukemia to her death - exceptionally well. He doesn't over burden the reader with too much drama or emotion, I mean, he doesn't make you bang your chest and weep. He sustains the subtle humor and romance, yet infuses the right amount of gravity and emotion in to the story that makes the reader cringe with an inexplicable pain deep inside.
The image of Oliver holding Jenny tightly in a hug, on the hospital bed, as she utters her last words, "Thanks, Ollie.” will linger in the memory of the reader for a long long time.
This, without doubt, is one of the best books I've read so far and I feel happy to have joined the club of more than 21 million admirers of this beautiful and touching Love Story!
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