Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5513236 in Books
• Published on: 1989-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This awkwardly written first novel explores the war between the sexes, heightened by vivid scenes of domestic violence. Justine, a young American ballet dancer, leaves her touring company and decamps to Oxford to be near Roy, her former philosopher professor. She is a sex junkie, turned on by Roy's sadistic violence. When Justine finds she is pregnant, they marry, Addie, their son, becomes the pivotal focus of their relationship. After Roy takes a position at Harvard, they move back to the States, but by then their marriage has further deteriorated. On vacation in the Caribbean, Justine falls in love with Moses, a simple local man for whom she abandons her family. Later, Justine, again pregnant, returns to Roy--whose eyes are filled with "passionate tenderness" at her homecoming, sparing the reader from a continuation of their emotionally charged saga.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Powerful love story
This is a powerful book, filled with intense passion and painful sexual experience. Justine, the narrator, searches for love in likely and unlikely places, all described in a prose style that is both clear and poetic. There is a strong sense of place - Oxford, Boston, the Caribbean - and an even stronger sense of the painful ties of women and men.

About Give My Heart Ease, Winner, New American Writing Award
A graphic but surprisingly moving first novel about a beautiful young woman caught up in a sadomasochistic love affair. Narrator Justine (cf. de Sade) Remarque is a 20-year-old American touring Europe with a ballet company when she meets Roy Sterner, an older philosophy teacher at Oxford. Their passion is instantaneous and violent: ""He kissed me really savagely, knocking my teeth together. I felt blood trickle into my mouth, but I wasn't sure whose."" After she becomes pregnant (Roy has burned her diaphragm), Justine marries him, and the two settle down to a life of routine abuse--reminiscent, on a milder scale, of the goings-on in Seven Days. But by the time Roy takes up a teaching post at Harvard (and their son, Addie, is born), Justine is tiring of her husband's relentless and single-minded sadism. So, to punish her further, he simply stops having sex with her at all. This state of affairs lasts for nearly four years, until a visit to the West Indies, when Justine--true to form--falls in love with a black charter-boat captain/dope-dealer named Moses, becomes pregnant by him, and leaves both Addle and Roy. But a few months with the callous Moses (he has a bad habit of selling her to his friends) is enough to make Justine long for Roy's tenderer mercies, and soon she returns to Harvard and husband. Andreacchi never really explains Justine's obsession with either Roy or rough sex, but the power and poetry of her writing make them believable. An unusual and sometimes potent debut.
- Kirkus Reviews, 1989