Book club choices for the first quarter of 2011

The book club has selected the first quarter of books for 2011:

January: We/
Мы by Yevgeni Zamyatin
February: Summerhouse later/
Sommerhaus, später by Judith Hermann
March: Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas/
Johan Padan a la descoverta de le Americhe by Dario Fo
April: Rosie Carpe by Marie NDiaye

December Book Club Choice

The book club will no longer be voting on a book every month. Rather each person will be choosing a book and the rest of us will read it. December's book will be The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. This novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2008. It was reviewed in the NYT.

Tediousness is boring. Tediousness is. Tedious.

Lyricism can be beautiful and in the case of Nothing, by Janne Teller it is the only thing the book has going for it.

"A plum tree has many branches. So many endless branches. All too many endless branches" (p. 12). The plum tree is where Pierre Anthon sat once he decided not to go to school anymore. From one of its branches he would call out to the kids who continued going to school and tell them that their actions were meaningless.

In an effort to fight the idea that they led meaningless existences Pierre's classmates band together to identify and stockpile all the meaningful items in their lives. Since they fail to identify for themselves what they find most meaningful, their classmates choose the item. Told through the eyes of a narrator who remains nameless for most of the book, this choosing escalates up until the end with what in reality would be shattering consequences.

Unfortunately, the plotline appears to be cribbed from some after-school TV special about the perils of teenage peer pressure. If it were not a book club selection I would not have finished it. However, if one likes Nihilistic philosophy or is a depressed teenager without a television I might recommend it.

Wildly inventive book blurbs

What is a reader supposed to think when the back of a book such as Kafka on the Shore states that it is "A magnificently bewildering achievement...Brilliantly conceived, bold in its surreal scope, sexy and driven by a snappy plot...exuberant storytelling" (Independent on Sunday). Or that it is "Addictive" (multiple blurbs). Addiction is defined as "The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something" (theFreedictionary). Sexy implies that there is some type of sexually attractive person or activity in the book. However, what these two words mean in book blurbs is quite different than what their dictionary definitions, and of the two only addictive might apply to this novel by Haruki Murakami.

The premise is that the fifteen year Kafka is trying to escape an Oedipal prophesy, passed on him by his father, and ends up in a library with helpful, but unusual employees. There are many incidents, some of which involve sex, but none of which could be described as particularly sexy. They are perhaps sad, violent, or disturbing, though.

Another narrative thread follows a rather simple elderly man, Nakata, who has the unusual skill of speaking with cats, and by this means locating the occasional stray feline. The paths of Kafka and Nakata never actually cross, but their stories are intertwined with each other.

The end of the book is quite open to interpretation. There are unanswered questions, and the reader must be willing to either tolerate ambiguity or form hypotheses that are satisfactory.

Multigenerational dramas

Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende is an interesting book, but like all books about multiple generations of characters it is lengthy. Unfortunately, it is also part of a trilogy, with Portrait in Sepia, and The House of the Spirits being the missing books. So, I cannot give a complete review of the entire plotline. However, I can safely classify the book as bildungsroman/romance light.

This novel is a story about Eliza Sommers, who adopted by a British family living in Chile, grows up sheltered in a multicultural household. Historical detail is vividly provided and the cultural attitudes of the British are painted over the Chilean background. Eliza grows up and falls in love with a young Chilean man. The novel moves from romance to adventure as Eliza follows her love to the gold rush in California. On the ship she stows away with the help of a Chinese doctor (to whom Allende has already introduced the reader, through extended flashbacks and descriptions of mainland China and Hong Kong) and with his help searches California for her love. Disguising herself as a boy she searches until her love has become more of a talisman than a memory. Finally, she returns to San Francisco and assists the doctor with his work. The book ends with the long-delayed acknowledgement of love between the doctor and Eliza.

Though this is a good story, the fact that there is no resolution after 399 pages and additional books that continue the story is discouraging. One has to be really interested in the characters to continue. If your not interested in multigenerational stories this is not the book for you.

"Crapula"

The Year of the Hare/Jäniksen vuosi by the Finnish author Arto Paasilinna was published in Finnish in 1975. The English translation did not come out until 1995. It was favorably reviewed by the NYT. It is an interesting premise - a man, Vatanen, who is having a midlife crisis, nurtures a young leveret back to health, and spends the year traveling around the country with said leveret.

At times the book is quite funny, unfortunately somethings fail to translate. The translator, Herbert Lomas, no doubt did a great job, but the combination of twenty years between publication and translation, plus the challenge of translating humor makes the book less amusing than one might expect. The vocabulary choices were sometimes quite odd too. For instance one chapter is titled 'crapula.' Which comes from Latin and means very drunk. It is not a very common word in American English and sounds very much like crapola - rubbish.

Now that I have criticized it, it was selected for inclusion in UNESCO's collection of representative works.

There are also some very dark moments where Vatanen is very cruel, and others where he is treated cruelly. Knowing that it is a funny book in Finnish makes me suspect that these moments are not intended to come out as cruel and unpleasant. Despite these defects, the book is interesting and readable.

November book club choices

Only three books were suggested for November:

A Complicated Kindness
Lucky You
Madeleine is Sleeping

A Complicated Kindness was selected.

October book club choices

The October book choices were:

1. Nothing (Intet)
2. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Or: how violence develops and where it can
lead
3. The Yiddish Policemen's Union
4. The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Nothing (Intet in Danish) received the most votes.

August book club choices

The book choices for August were all quite unique.

1. How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall
2. Go Down Moses, William Faulkner
3. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
4. Kafka on the Shore/海辺のカフカ, Haruki Murakami
5. Trials and Tribulations. A Berlin Novel/Irrungen, Wirrungen, Theodor Fontane
6. Jubilee, Margaret Walker

Kafka on the Shore was selected.

The Shipping News

This 336 page novel by Annie Proulx is lengthy considering its content. Quoyle (like coil) the main character has reached his mid-thirties without having much of a direction, friends, or love in his life. When his father dies and his wife leaves him Quoyle finds himself at a loss about what to do. His aunt suggests returning to the family home in Newfoundland and he acquiesces.

In Newfoundland Quoyle builds a new life. Though stumbling through life as a not so successful newspaper man in New Jersey he finds that his skill is more than adequate at the small town paper in Newfoundland. He also finds love and friendship.

All in all, this is a pretty good story about a person returning to their roots and finding happiness. However, there is a lot of dark foreshadowing throughout the book which leads the reader to expect darker events which do not occur. Perhaps that is why the end was disappointing, or it might have been the Lazarus moment, but the ending is unexpectedly cheerful.

July Book Club choices

The book club choices were made from four previously proposed books plus three more new ones.

1. Divided sky/Der geteilte Himmel, by Christa Wolf
2. Five hours with Mario/Cinco Horas Con Mario, by Miguel Delibes
3. The Stone Raft/A Jangada de Pedra, by José Saramago
4. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
5. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
6. Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende
7. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
8. The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck

Daughter of Fortune was selected to be read.

May book club choices

1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carrol
2. Shiver, Maggie Stiefvater
3. The Year of the Hare/Jäniksen vuosi, Arto Paasilinna
4. The Memory Artists, by Jeffrey Moore
5. The Stone Raft/A Jangada de Pedra, José Saramago
6. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
7. The Testament, John Grisham

The Year of the Hare/Jäniksen vuosi was the book we chose to read this month.

Book club nominations for April 2010

In order to start a book club I asked potential participants to suggest books they were interested in reading. These are the books:

1. Divided sky/Der geteilte Himmel by Christa Wolf
2. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
3. Thanks for the memories by Cecelia Ahern
4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
5. 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life by Cami Walker
6. Five hours with Mario/Cinco Horas Con Mario by Miguel Delibes
7. Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney

I find it amazing that so much variety can exist between seven books!

Fall already!

The Fall of Atlantis is an interesting, although flawed book. The flaw is found in the failure to create a coherent world. There are many hints at the structure of the story-world in which this book takes place, but there is a lack of actual description on the part of the author, Marion Zimmer Bradley. Rituals, phrases, and hierarchies are described, without explanation for the naive reader.

The main characters are two sisters, Domaris and Deoris, who are priestesses of an unnamed religion. The religion which predates all future religions, perhaps. The (mainland) temple in which they live encapsulates the action of the story, with Atlantis lurking in the background. Atlantis, always out of focus, is a somewhat unorthodox colony where a new temple has recently emerged. The narrative thread begins when Domaris and Deoris are teenagers, and follows their diverging paths. Domaris accepts the world as it is and follows the path of the light. Deoris, on the other hand, is rebellious and rejects the light to follow the path of certain darkness. Bradley manages to portray the "good" and "bad" sides well; however, showing how cruel and inhuman the "good" can be and how accepting and kind the "bad" can be. To state the focus shortly the overarching theme is the complexity of loving relationships.

"Seraphita"

This story about Seraphita/Seraphitus draws the reader in with well-drawn descriptions of the Norwegian fjords, icy hills, and vast spaces. However, the only thing that compelled me to keep reading past the remarkable setting was the intriguing ambiguity about whether the main character was Seraphita or Seraphitus. Honoré de Balzac wrote this among some ninety other novels

Unfortunately, the main point of the whole story was religious awakening. There was extensive discussion of Swedenborg, who apparently founded yet another Christian sect. So unless one is very interested in obscure Christian sects, or is willing to skip large sections of boring text this book might be avoided.

"Venetia"

This novel by Benjamin Disreali is surprisingly quite interesting. Admittedly I only downloaded it to my Kindle because it was free. I must confess that I was hazy about exactly who Disreali was. A philosopher? He was in fact a British Prime Minister for roughly seven years, and the only Jewish PM.

Apparently, he wrote novels to get himself out of debt. This must be a purely British idea. Charles Dickens also seemed to do well writing. Writing novels in the modern day seems unlikely to get one out of debt. I can imagine the disbelief of a credit card company if someone were to say "Just wait till my new novel comes out! I will earn so much I will be able to pay all my bills!"

The novel Venetia is not the most famous. According to the Wikipedia entry it is "a minor novel" which mangles the histories of both Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley However, I was surprised by how good the writing was. It describes the life history of Venetia from her isolated childhood to her introduction to the king and queen and beyond! Unlike most romantic stories about how young Victorian women end up getting married, it is her relationship with her mother which is most central (and her absent father). That relationship which often appears to be both unhealthy and controlling is very very well described. Venetia's descents into illness which are in direct response to the control exercised by her mother are also insightful. The relationship between Venetia and her childhood friend, Plantagenet provides the romance.

I almost quit reading near the end as I expected the ending to be predictable, but there is a twist at the end which makes this book hard to categorize as a romance.