All for Love (Continents of Exile) - Hardcover

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 Robinson

'A story of pain and humiliation the like of which I have rarely encountered outside fiction. I kept thinking of Robert Graves and his muses...the book is remarkable. Mehta is a great stylist; combine this with a story of searing honesty and you have a book that demands an intense response' Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times 'Fascinating and revealing' Daily Telegraph 'This is a book about a man's love affairs. Mehta's unravelling of his inner conflicts is absorbing, moving, and ultimately uplifting' Scotland on Sunday 'Written with a calm lucidity...this is more than the story of an exceptionally brave and gifted blind man. It is a subtle examination of the relationship between thought and feeling, the crucial links between the ability to love and the ability to work' Sunday Telegraph