In Pursuit of Love

Reviews

Bostridge elegantly and poignantly interweaves tales of amorous grief and mental illness. Why, Bostridge asks in this hypersensitive and utterly immersive book, are biographers drawn to certain stories? In what ways do the historical lives we explore reflect on our own unexamined existences?...In Pursuit of Love is not only a true and honest account of biographical obsession, but a tale of the uncanny in which the pursuer and persued become one. Mark Bostridge’s innovative biography…weaving episodes of his own emotional life into hers and producing something of haunting beauty and stylistic grace...a book full of pain and sadness, but one that is a melancholy pleasure to read. In this gloriously rich and capacious book, the biographer Mark Bostridge sets out to unravel the story of Adele, the promising girl who was born into republican France’s equivalent to a royal family yet spent most of her adult life being unravelled by love… What makes Bostridge’s offering so compelling is that much of his book is taken up with the process of writing a deeply researched non-fiction book. A compelling experiment in biography-cum-memoir, guided by the conviction that someone else’s life offers ‘a prism through which to revisit or examine parts of one’s own’. Just as she herself became a dedicated stalker, so Bostridge, following her trail a century later to Nova Scotia and the Caribbean, starts to assume a similar identity, creating a parallel drama for us out of moments of emotional vulnerability in his own life…Blurring the edges of biography and autobiography, Bostridge displays a profound empathy for Adele, even at her most baffling and elusive. A nuanced portrait of an enigmatic woman and a biographer in pursuit of her story. [Mark's] remarkable openness and vulnerability make his a compelling tale to follow. In Pursuit of Love is ostensibly about Victor Hugo’s troubled daughter Adèle, but it also affords fascinating insights into the biographer’s art and, to a surprising degree, into the life of Bostridge himself. It’s the saddest story ever told - and told so beautifully that you wish it would never end. The author’s search for the truth about Victor Hugo’s daughter carries him across oceans and into the darkest corners of his own past. It’s an unforgettable journey. A haunting and utterly engrossing book – not just a brilliant study of Adele Hugo’s obsessive and unrequited love, but full of revelations about the biographer himself, as he pursues the truth about her life, and finds in the process many parallel truths about his own. This excavation of a buried woman – covered by the sands of time, hearsay, rumours that attach to celebrity, and her own misinformation – sifts the very practice of biography. As a strange story of an obsession comes to light, Bostridge questions our reliance on documentation and challenges the illusion of objectivity with the biographer’s own obsessiveness as he finds touching parallels in his own life that bring him closer to elusive truth. Profound, shattering, and utterly immersive. Expand reviews