This past winter I did something I always said I would never do- I joined a book club. I already knew about a third of the members, and altogether this is a most insightful and engaged group of intelligent readers who are accomplished women, each in her own right. There is at least one writer in the mix as well. These are my notes on our first few selections as well as my experience of the club, which I've shared with them because, when we read each book, of course we discuss and rate it. In fact, we rate it twice on our 1-10 scale (once before and once after discussion) and keep the history of those numbers. I'll catch upon our readings in this one long post and then blog books separately in the future.
First we read two light comedies, the second a sequel to the first, by Graeme Simsion: The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect. These were fun explorations of first person narration (mainly) by a scientist afflicted with Asperger's Syndrome, or at least, so we are told and so he occasionally observes in himself. He is "lovable/annoying" (on the analogy of cute/ugly) and his journey into a capacity for relationship is touching and the humor used to spin out the tale saves it from sentimentality partly because the hero and narrator, Don Tillman, eschews the emotional side of life and presents a more authentic version of himself than most of the other characters.However, we first see Rosie in the gender-biased mode of many of his fellow scientists and so her scientific career comes to us as a surprise in spite or ourselves. However, she is not all heart and he all head and this at least avoids the stereotypes of some romantic comedy and has a touch of the Beatrice and Benedick about it and perhaps even Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy.
For the next book I suggested Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore. This book left most of the group cold, and yet I still regard it as a brilliant novel, its narrative a metaphor for the mental version of wandering, of being lost, and a microcosm both of British post-colonial society in the years after the war and of the mental state of women at that time. However, the favorite book of the group up to now was Tolstory's Anna Karenina, so it may be that with a few Russian ex-pats in our group, the level of knowledge about that society must be greater than knowledge of Britain. In any case, Americans, for their part, often seem not at all happy with tales of those who are seeming failures or passive in the face of overwhelming rejection and hardship, even if they later on regain their footing. That was Fitzgerald's life when she lived on a houseboat and was not living up to her literary promise as she cared for children alone while her husband careened about and drank. This autobiographical component made a great difference to me and I would want my own story to end with the kind of quiet triumph that Penelope Knox Fitzgerald realized in her real life.
Next for the book club was Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. This was a good choice, although the constantly shifting narrative perspectives and time periods out of sequence bothered some in our group. The prose is luminous. There is a wealth of detail, thought the eyes of children about the German invasion of France in WWII. We follow two sets of families in alternate story lines- a blind girl who is French and a boy who builds radios, a natural engineer. The blind girl likes nature and he likes mechanics. Their stories do not come together for quite some while. Themes of light and dark- the visible and invisible, the natural creation and destruction- in short, the human world of art and war (mining, diamonds- there is a search for a lost one by Nazis and with which the girl's father, a gem curator, is involved) move throughout the descriptions. We do not now if these characters can create ripples of change in a chaotic world. Some may object to the plight of a young German whose conscience troubles him as he watches Jewish friends mistreated and then "disappeared" -but not enough to desert the army. However,such a fate would end with as much death all around as we know resulted. Marie-Laure knows this about her German friend as well as her Uncle Étienne: she realizes that light bursts over foxholes in WWI caused his PTSD:
This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light
you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to
its mark.
Next up in a separate post: Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
First we read two light comedies, the second a sequel to the first, by Graeme Simsion: The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect. These were fun explorations of first person narration (mainly) by a scientist afflicted with Asperger's Syndrome, or at least, so we are told and so he occasionally observes in himself. He is "lovable/annoying" (on the analogy of cute/ugly) and his journey into a capacity for relationship is touching and the humor used to spin out the tale saves it from sentimentality partly because the hero and narrator, Don Tillman, eschews the emotional side of life and presents a more authentic version of himself than most of the other characters.However, we first see Rosie in the gender-biased mode of many of his fellow scientists and so her scientific career comes to us as a surprise in spite or ourselves. However, she is not all heart and he all head and this at least avoids the stereotypes of some romantic comedy and has a touch of the Beatrice and Benedick about it and perhaps even Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy.
For the next book I suggested Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore. This book left most of the group cold, and yet I still regard it as a brilliant novel, its narrative a metaphor for the mental version of wandering, of being lost, and a microcosm both of British post-colonial society in the years after the war and of the mental state of women at that time. However, the favorite book of the group up to now was Tolstory's Anna Karenina, so it may be that with a few Russian ex-pats in our group, the level of knowledge about that society must be greater than knowledge of Britain. In any case, Americans, for their part, often seem not at all happy with tales of those who are seeming failures or passive in the face of overwhelming rejection and hardship, even if they later on regain their footing. That was Fitzgerald's life when she lived on a houseboat and was not living up to her literary promise as she cared for children alone while her husband careened about and drank. This autobiographical component made a great difference to me and I would want my own story to end with the kind of quiet triumph that Penelope Knox Fitzgerald realized in her real life.
Next for the book club was Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. This was a good choice, although the constantly shifting narrative perspectives and time periods out of sequence bothered some in our group. The prose is luminous. There is a wealth of detail, thought the eyes of children about the German invasion of France in WWII. We follow two sets of families in alternate story lines- a blind girl who is French and a boy who builds radios, a natural engineer. The blind girl likes nature and he likes mechanics. Their stories do not come together for quite some while. Themes of light and dark- the visible and invisible, the natural creation and destruction- in short, the human world of art and war (mining, diamonds- there is a search for a lost one by Nazis and with which the girl's father, a gem curator, is involved) move throughout the descriptions. We do not now if these characters can create ripples of change in a chaotic world. Some may object to the plight of a young German whose conscience troubles him as he watches Jewish friends mistreated and then "disappeared" -but not enough to desert the army. However,such a fate would end with as much death all around as we know resulted. Marie-Laure knows this about her German friend as well as her Uncle Étienne: she realizes that light bursts over foxholes in WWI caused his PTSD:
This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light
you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to
its mark.
Next up in a separate post: Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
