The Cloister
“A sweeping, beautifully crafted book — perhaps his best yet.” The Wall Street Journal
Available in print, audio and digital.
When Father Michael Kavanaugh, a priest from a nearby parish, takes accidental refuge in The Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s monastery-like center for medieval art, he encounters a mysterious French museum docent, Rachel Vedette. Both of them harbor troubling personal histories and, sensing a kindred spirit in Michael, Rachel slowly divulges hers. Her late father, Saul, was a Sorbonne professor engaged in an unlikely study of the great twelfth-century French Catholic thinker Peter Abelard, progenitor of the Sorbonne itself. With Rachel’s help as fellow researcher, Saul had revealed an Abélard whose positive regard for Jews and Judaism was as profound as it was forbidden. But the German occupation of Paris had begun, and with the Nazis closing in, this new interpretation placed Saul and his daughter in grave jeopardy.
Braided together with this twentieth-century drama is the Medieval story Saul uncovered. Abélard came to his rare magnanimity when he fell in love with his most brilliant pupil, the passionate and principled young noblewoman, Héloïse. He became the most provocative thinker in Europe, and she its greatest Abbess. The first moderns, they stood alone together at a great fork in the road of history, when Christendom took the wrong turn that led ultimately to the Holocaust.
As Rachel finds solace in The Cloisters after the horrors of Paris, her surprising new friendship with the sincere young priest provides an unexpected lens through which to view the epic of Abélard and Héloïse, offering a path to recovery. Kavanaugh, too, gains new perspective and glimpses the life he might have had outside the Church. Spanning centuries and continents, The Cloister is the compelling story of four characters ahead of their time, questioning faith, identity, and love against the backdrop of historical upheaval.
Reviews for The Cloister
The New York Times
“Not many books about New York begin in the 12th century, but James Carroll’s latest novel, The Cloister, plausibly links the indelible 900-year-old love affair between Abélard and Héloïse to a chance encounter in Washington Heights between a conflicted parish priest and a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe…Their awkward convergence becomes an incandescent, allegorical outgrowth of the agonizing introspection that Abélard and Héloïse undergo in their search for self-awareness.” Read Full Review
The Wall Street Journal
“In The Cloister, Mr. Carroll, the author of Warburg in Rome (2014) and other novels, as well as Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a History (2001), has produced a sweeping, beautifully crafted book — perhaps his best yet — that draws readers into the inner sanctum of Christianity, with its shameful contradictions but also its enduring possibilities. He conveys a vital lesson about religiously inspired violence and the prospect for peace but avoids being heavy-handed, instead toggling lightly between two fraught moments in history. He weaves together a complex story of spiritual traditions and their lasting political legacies.” Read Full Review
The National Review
“A priest wracked with doubt is familiar territory for Carroll. He was ordained in 1969 and served as the Catholic chaplain at Boston University until 1974, when his anti-war sentiment and ambitions as a writer increasingly placed him at odds with the Church. His career has been prolific and diverse. After a dozen novels and eight works of nonfiction, including his National Book Award–winning memoir, he is in subject and sense one of our most consistently Catholic writers — with his focus often on the life and inspiration of Jesus, placed against ecclesiastical fallings.” Read Full Review
The Christian Science Monitor
“James Carroll’s latest novel vibrates with deep compassion and religious intensity.” Read Full Review
The Cloister named a best book of March 2018.
Kirkus Reviews
“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.”
“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 Abélard and Héloïse, 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
“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
“James Carroll is an elegiac artist, a writer of great inclusiveness and tender sensibility. He invariably endows his subjects with deep humanity and understanding. And here, in his new look at the tragic story of Abélard and Héloïse, he gives this medieval love affair a truly contemporary relevance.” Robert Brustein, author of Winter Passages
“This is a wonderful novel, and it’s wonder-filled. James Carroll brings the twelfth-century lovers Abélard and Héloïse 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 We 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