An interesting book that sidesteps the usual pitfalls of the 'doomed love affair' story by simply not telling it at all. What we get instead is much more interesting. Dinah and Asa's affair is over. Dinah is a Jewish woman raised by not-particularly-religious parents and Asa is a pedigreed Boston WASP , handsome and charming and soulless. It was part of Dinah's obsession that she find Asa's inner-quality, his dormant spirit and bring it out into the open. But she failed. The bulk of this book is her last attempt to grant him flesh and blood on paper.What really struck me at first was how unnostalgic this book was. Asa's story begins when he's 17 in 1955 and I braced myself for some dream-like 'better days' sentimentality or perhaps an overly gritty "this is how it really was" schtick. But Kaysen only (ha! "only") writes about his life and doesn't acknowledge any fads, even those of the 80s when this was written.Asa's parent's house had rooms that "even in mid-July, they maintained a dim, cool atmosphere perfumed with oils rubbed into wood, dust settled on books, and died-down fires of hard, slow-burning, sweet branches. It was a house that in no way admitted to the extreme seasonal changes of Massachusetts....Its furnishings suggested a permanent early winter, and in this it reflected the climate of the three people who moved across the parquet floors."Even better, Kaysen explores the sheltered and repressed Asa's inner reactions when he touches on a world outside his family's exclusive circles. For example, when he hears his friend Reuben and another boy joke about their outsider status as Jews at Andover Phillips Academy. His confusion and slow dawning comprehension of perspectives outside his experience is well done. I'm not sure if Dinah (or Kaysen) entirely succeeded in their task of giving back humanity to the shell Asa had made of himself, but it made for a captivating book. The conceit of the story within a story does succeed because of the careful but direct way in which she does it. Asa, As I Knew Him is very short, but I think exactly the right length. Kaysen knew her point had been made.
What do You think about Asa, As I Knew Him (1994)?
