The Cloister

by James Carroll

Overview

From National Book Award-winning writer James Carroll comes a novel of the timeless love story of Peter Abelard and Héloïse, and its impact on a modern priest and a Holocaust survivor seeking sanctuary in Manhattan.

Father Michael Kavanagh is shocked when he sees a friend from his seminary days at the altar of his humble parish in upper Manhattan—a friend who was forced to leave under scandalous circumstances. Compelled to reconsider the past, Father Kavanagh wanders into the medieval haven of the Cloisters and stumbles into a conversation with a lovely and intriguing docent, Rachel Vedette.

Having survived the Holocaust and escaped to America, Rachel remains obsessed with her late father’s greatest scholarly achievement: a study demonstrating the relationship between the famously discredited monk Peter Abelard and Jewish scholars. Feeling an odd connection with Father Kavanagh, Rachel shares with him the work that cost her father his life.

At the center of these interrelated stories is the classic romance between the great philosopher Abelard and his intellectual equal, Héloïse. For Rachel, Abelard is the key to understanding her people’s place in history. And for Father Kavanagh, the controversial theologian may be a doorway to understanding the life he himself might have had outside the Church.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101971581
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/22/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	493,060
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

JAMES CARROLL is the author of twelve novels and eight works of nonfiction. He lives in Boston with his wife, the writer Alexandra Marshall.

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Cloister"
by .
Copyright © 2019 James Carroll.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

"In The Cloister, Carroll has produced a sweeping, beautifully crafted book—perhaps his best yet."
—Wall Street Journal

“The Cloister poetically pingpongs between Abélard’s abbey in Saint-Denis in the 1100s, elsewhere in France during and after World War II, and Upper Manhattan in the early 1950s . . . Carroll weaves a patchwork of disparate threads, threads unraveled from clerical vestments, that, when quilted together, spell out the single word that the book embodies . . . Incandescent.”
—New York Times

"A literary detective game . . . In pushing his readers—in both his fiction and nonfiction—to ponder tough religious topics . . . Carroll is continuing the important discussions made famous by Peter Abelard."
—New York Journal of Books

"With his familiar deftness and depth, James Carroll weaves a profound and compelling novel from diverse but overlapping narrative strands. From the conversations between a Catholic priest and a French Jewish woman in mid-twentieth century New York to the brutality of Nazi-occupied Paris to the great medieval love story of Abelard and Heloïse, The Cloister illuminates life's most vital questions and proposes inspiring, radical, and timely answers."
—Claire Messud, New York Times bestselling author of The Burning Girl and The Emperor’s Children

"James Carroll has written an enlightening, vitally important book, a necessity for our time."
— Maxine Hong Kingston, author of I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

“James Carroll’s latest novel vibrates with deep compassion and religious intensity.”
—Christian Science Monitor

"I didn’t know I needed this novel until I read it. As unflinching about the Holocaust as it is about the Crusades, The Cloister is a fearless exploration of the violent foundations on which our own historical inheritance rests. And like all the best fiction, it commandeers the reader’s heart."
—Rachel Kadish, author of The Weight of Ink

"Carroll is a gifted writer of historical fiction . . . The medieval lovers foreshadow how the modern friends also seek freedom from their institutions."
—National Review

"A sweeping, heartbreaking blend of history and fiction. . . [its] entwined stories move at an engrossing rhythm, making this a very magnetic, satisfying novel."
—Publishers Weekly

"Fascinating in its evocation of the twelfth-century Catholic Church in France, this lavishly detailed historical novel serves as an education in historical philosophy, a poignant tale of devoted love, and a portrait of a postwar human crisis influenced heavily by both . . . This is definitely a thought-provoking book."
—Booklist

"Carroll blends his well-aired interests in history, theology, and literary fiction in this deftly told story that partakes richly of all . . . A rich, literate tale well told."
—Kirkus Reviews

"A novel that shifts seamlessly between epic love story, the anatomy of a crisis of faith, family tragedy and trauma survival saga . . . Both moving and enlightening, The Cloister will engross readers."
—Shelf Awareness

"This is a wonderful novel, and it's wonder-filled. James Carroll brings the twelfth-century lovers, Abelard and Heloïse, blazingly back to life, and he does so through the medium of a New York priest and a Parisian Jew. The present and the past illuminate each other, and the startling mysteries of prejudice, brutality, and love are made doubly vivid here.  Like All the Light You Cannot See, The Cloister is a book of gravity and consequence that makes you need to turn and turn the page."
—Nicholas Delbanco, author of Curiouser and Curiouser: Essays

From the Publisher

01/29/2018
Carroll’s latest novel (after Warburg in Rome) is a sweeping, heartbreaking blend of history and fiction. In 1142 in the Duchy of Bourgogne, the aging Abbess Héloïse finds the dead body of her former lover, Peter Abelard. This story line is woven together with the 1950 story of Father Michael Kavanagh, a New York priest, and Rachel Vedette, a museum docent. They meet when he takes shelter from a rainstorm in the Cloisters at the top of Manhattan, where Rachel works. Over multiple meetings, the two build a rapport; back in the 12th century, Peter and Héloïse’s love story unfolds. Rachel and Michael are both haunted by people from their pasts—her now-dead father, whose life’s work was an unfinished book on Abelard, and his lost friend from seminary. As Michael discovers his friend’s secrets and Rachel deals with her complicated feelings about her father, Héloïse and Peter’s troubles escalate. The entwined stories move at an engrossing rhythm, making this a very magnetic, satisfying novel. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

02/01/2018
On a whim, Father Michael Kavanagh, a Catholic priest, stops by the Cloisters museum in upper Manhattan, troubled by an encounter at mass with a former friend. There he falls into conversation with Rachel, a museum docent. She's French, a Holocaust survivor reticent to talk about her past. She lends him her copy of the confessions of Abelard, the brilliant 12th-century philosopher whose forbidden love affair with his pupil, the equally brilliant Heloise, led to his emasculation and exile. Rachel's scholar father had been studying Abelard when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 and his academic life came to an abrupt end. Medieval and 20th-century narratives intertwine in this novel of ideas, foremost among them that people at the top often abuse their power over others. In passing, the book discusses one of history's great what-ifs: what if Abelard's plea to love the Jews had been taken seriously by his church, a question Carroll (Warburg in Rome) raised earlier in his nonfiction Constantine's Sword. VERDICT The connection between the moral dilemmas of the two ages is muddy, and the alternating narratives slow the momentum. Still, this is a book of heart, with serious questions asked about faith, obedience, and love. [See Prepub Alert, 9/25/17.]—David Keymer, Cleveland

Library Journal

2017-12-07
Of faith, doubt, and sorrow: Carroll (Warburg in Rome, 2014, etc.) delivers another religiously charged novel, and a fine one at that.Former priest Carroll blends his well-aired interests in history, theology, and literary fiction in this deftly told story that partakes richly of all. He opens with a familiar but entirely appropriate episode in church history and, as it happens, one of the world's great love stories: the doomed affair of Abelard and Heloïse, a story that Carroll complicates with a part that is less well known than Abelard's mutilation and Heloïse's cloistering, namely Abelard's defense of the Jews of Mainz. "Jews be damned," thunders an inquisitory abbot. "The battle now is for Peter's eternal salvation." Fast-forward to New York 800 years later, when a conflicted priest from a working-class parish decides to duck into a place not often visited by most working-class Catholics of Inwood, the Cloisters, its architectural elements "tastefully reassembled to evoke the high romance of Gothic revival that had so quickened the patrician imagination of the Gilded Age." There, Michael Kavanagh meets Rachel Vedette, an alluring docent who is whip-smart, deep in reflection on the apostate Simone Weil, and harboring a few secrets of her own having to do with the intersection of and conflicts between the Jewish and Christian worlds. As Rachel slowly unveils her story, Michael comes into conflict himself with the inquisitory Catholic hierarchy—and not just over intellectual matters and questions of faith. As he and Rachel recapitulate elements of that foundational Abelard and Heloïse tale, always close to the possibility of tragedy, Carroll brings in a range of issues: the place of excommunicants in a supposedly forgiving church ("In our day," one sagely remarks, "Abelard's misfortunes wouldn't have qualified as a priest's spiritual reading"), the trauma and terror of priestly sexual abuse, the soul-shattering Holocaust that has so recently ended.You don't have to be Catholic—or Jewish, for that matter—to appreciate Carroll's story, though it probably helps. A rich, literate tale well told.

Kirkus Reviews