All for Love: A Personal History of Desire and Disappointment (Continents of exile) Book

All for Love, Ved Mehta's clear and precise account of his struggle to find love and the perfect relationship, is a curiously engrossing read. Mehta, made blind at the age of four by a bout of meningitis, grew up indulging in the fantasy that he could see, or at least that his blindness was no different to seeing. Having forgotten what it was to see he became "incapable of distinguishing between sight and the absence of sight". A successful writer for the New Yorker, Mehta endeavoured to fill the area of his life where he felt empty and inadequate and embarked on a series of painful relationships. There is something horribly self-indulgent about a book of this nature but any initial qualms about this give over to curiosity at Mehta's apparent keenness for environment and people, as though the reader too can get sucked into Mehta's fantasy of sight. His search for love, the clumsy relationships, the longing and the loss, is touching. Mehta writes with an almost clinical honesty, picking over his memories, old letters, analysing his mistakes, contextualising these episodes with his strange blind childhood. This tone can seem slightly cold but it manages to offset the indulgent passions of the young Ved Mehta nicely, and the clarity of hindsight is what drives this book beyond mere personal history. Mehta's discovery is that his search for love is a search for self-understanding and that only when this is reached can any happy relationship be forged. --Iain RobinsonRead More