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Saturday, December 19, 2015

The True History of the Kelly Gang: Discussion Notes

Ten of us gathered to discuss The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey. One member worked on the scarf she’s knitting for her daughter for Christmas.  Because of the scarf, she hadn’t finished the book—although her husband had read aloud a portion as she knit. From the book’s sponsor, we learned that Ned Kelly was a real person who really did fabricate for himself and his gang the armor that explains why Australia players donned armor in the recent Olympics.  Ned Kelly divides Aussies into those who revere him and those who despise him. Peter Carey, a native Australian, was living in New York when he attended a showing of artwork featuring Kelly. Influenced by the writings of Faulkner, Joyce, and a 58-page account written by Kelly himself, Carey sets out in this novel to tell the story from Ned’s point of view. The author grew up in a region where people talked like Kelly, which may explain his ability to relate almost the entire story in an ungrammatical, yet—most of us felt—lyrical and colorful voice. Our sponsor then played for us a rendering of Mick Jagger singing in the persona of Ned Kelly.

We found Ned’s childhood the most affecting part of the story. In an Oedipal element, he bears some responsibility at the age of 12 for his father’s death, and he forges such a strong bond with his mother, Ellen, that others accuse him of acting as though he were her lover. Ellen, is a strong and well-drawn character, who helps and hurts her son in equal measure. From her, he learns the old Irish stories. Family love and loyalty persist in the onslaught of prejudice, governmental injustice, and the pursuit by crooked men of the beautiful but what we would today label woefully codependent Ellen.

In his devotion to family, his work ethic, and his skills, Ned has the makings of an upstanding citizen. Because his mother apprentices him in his early teens to a robber, however, his short life consists instead of  aiding and abetting, serving prison sentences, committing murder, living on the run, robbing banks, and hanging by the neck until dead. Knowing this fate from the beginning doesn’t ruin the novel’s suspense. There are plenty of twists and much humor in this dark tale—and much noble behavior on the part of outlaws.


Our discussion turned to the “outlaws” in our own country and around the world, some of whom have had no more opportunity than Ned Kelly to live respectable lives. At evening’s end, a couple of members noted that the knitter wasn’t make much progress and, given the rapid approach of Christmas, suggested a faster method. The knitter explained, however, that since this was the only way she knew, she would just have to carry on as she had begun. Sort of like poor Ned Kelly.


B.B.

2015-2016 Book List

October

Days of Abandonment
Elena Ferrante
New Yorker Review



November

Artful
Ali Smith
NPR Review

artful-by-ali-smith.jpg
December

The True History of the Kelly Gang
Peter Carey



January 20, 2016

Offshore
Penelope Fitzgerald


February 24, 2016

A Perfect Spy
John le Carre



March 16, 2016

Signature of All Things
Elizabeth Gilbert




April 20, 2016

Mislaid
Nell Zink




May 18, 2016 

My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante



June 15, 2016

The Darling
Russell Banks




Saturday, November 21, 2015

Artful by Ali Smith: Discussion Notes

A book that made some readers feel ... "stupid".   And made one..feel "smart" and loving the intellectual challenge and opportunity to talk about her insights. What about the rest?  Some not taking the difficulty of reading the book personally, but feeling the need to dissect and analyze sections and references much as they did in literature classes back in the day. A number of absent members:  a statement about their feelings towards the book?  A coincidence?  AND  an absent, fluish sponsor missed for her insights.



A thought:  Meet for dinner before the next meeting to chat with the sponsor?  We aren't ready to give up the challenge.  K. Are you up for this?

What was (mostly) agreed upon...

The sections on loss of a life partner were brilliantly done and probably the best part of the book.
The book cannot be read once straight through and be fully understood; much as the author claims is true for all literature as it is true for music and other works of art. 
Being in the lecture hall hearing the "book" would have made it more understandable.  
A lot of the references were made to books that we have read in the group.
{Let's read, reread a classic every year...Oliver Twist?}
Love that the author played with words including the title "Artful." {Artful Dodger}




And the cover photo is not of the author, but of a Greek actor referenced in the book.  AHA!
And...
This book made for a good discussion due to variety of and strength of  reactions to it.

KK, sponsor,  response:

Although I would love to have dinner as suggested, I usually have clients just before book group so I can't do it. I can say that I too was challenged by her intellectual and academic references (I was probably familiar with about half the materials she referenced) but I found it fun and stimulating. I loved the ghost! Anyway, I was really bummed to miss out on the discussion because I suspected the discussion generated by the lectures was integral to the experience of reading the book; and it sounds like this is exactly what happened; I just wasn't there share in the experience!”





  

Monday, June 22, 2015

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Four intrepid travelers ventured into Manhattan for a book group discussion that started with a huge, loud vituperative argument between L.C. and this blogger over the choice of title.  Why does the hare and not the tiger  carry the title?  L.C. was certain that the amber eye is a symbol of...

Okay. Okay.  The screaming fight is pure fiction.  But the actual discussion was a good one.  (Just realized that the discussion of why the hare might have been a good addition.  Don't know why we didn't mention it.  In looking for ideas,  dug up the  fact that the original title was:  "Anna's Pocket" after the maid who rescued the netsuke from the Germans by putting them in her apron pocket.  )

The actual evening started with our viewing a talk by Edmund De Waal.  Here is link from R.K.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8wqJINrGj0

We continued the talk over delicious thin crust pizza and salad and wine served by R.K. And an amazing chocolate mousse for dessert.


    Edmund de Waal: A Garniture of Eight Vases
    De Waal Vases

Discussion themes included:

Interesting that the Ephrussi family went from merchants to art collectors to potter/artist/writers. Coincidence?  Or in the DNA?  Does longing for artistic ability start with collecting and evolve over generations into becoming an artist? Is artistic expression the ultimate goal of human evolution and intelligence?

That inheritance is more than the objects you inherit but the stories that go with them--it is these family stories that make you what you are.

That we missed R.M. Wish she was here to shed light on a potter's work and life.



That the book was well written and gripping tale filled with surprisingly sophisticated affairs and love stories and connections with famous writers and artists.

That having  money and possessions proves futile and meaningless.  In the end it did not protect the Ephrussi family from destruction.  But their art and the netsuke remain.

 Summer read recommendations will be posted.



Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Book Group Member Novel is Published



Purchase a copy

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki: Book Group Discussion

Missed the meeting. Thanks BB for the great post. 

Tsukuru Tazaki has never formed a lasting relationship since the breakup 16 years previously of his teenage group of five friends: three guys and two girls. The others all had last name that were colors but not he, thus "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki." He feels colorless in other ways as well, an "empty vessel." A new girlfriend, Sara, insists that for their relationship to go forward he must confront his former friends and get to the bottom of why they cruelly cut him off. And so begins his pilgrimage.

Most of us liked the book and found the story pulled us right along in spite of it's being more episodic than plotted. There are dreams and stories within the story, not all of which we grasped the importance of. Characters, too, as in a real pilgrimage, were sometimes picked up and dropped without our being sure of their significance. Sara seems more of a guide or even a therapist than a fleshed-out character. The simplicity of the language adds to the mythic feeling of the story.

One member commented that the book is spiritual. The rational is challenged by the intuitive, the dreamlike, the fanciful. The line is blurred  between what really happens and what is imagined. Another member's assertion that the novel has Catholic themes was met with general merriment. (Stoutly, she cited passages about the redemptive value of suffering, the social necessity for a victim, death of an old way of life leading to eventual resurrection, the existence of evil, and the life-sustaining value of hope.)

Tsukuru, whose name means "to build" or "to create," is an engineer who designs railroad stations. One member suggested that Tsukuru is a stand-in for the writer, his pilgrimage a depiction of the writing process. Several members felt a lack of resolution at story's end. What is the significance of vestigial fingers? Do Tsukuru's dreams include events that really happened? Has he committed an act of violence? What will become of Tsukuru and Sara?

Together, we puzzled out the book's cover--each of four colors like a finger in a hand, the thumb a railroad map incorporating all four colors--and found it so apt and clever we wondered if the author himself had had a "hand" in the design.

At meeting's end, BB held up a copy of the novel which she has just published through CreateSpace. "Lulu Goes to College" by Barbara McGillicuddy Bolton is available through Amazon.


Sunday, April 26, 2015

Discussion: Family Life by Akhil Sharma

I have a colleague, S., who recently worked with me on a school event.  Unlike many other helpers, well-meaning as they may be, S., didn't have to ask much of anything.  She put clues together and made decisions about where things belonged, how to set materials up, quickly and accurately.  Later after the event was over, I told her what a gift she had.  And she said something like this:  "When your parents are immigrants, and don't understand the culture or the language, you have to figure out things for yourself at a very young age. You have no one to ask questions of."

What has this to do with Family Life?  The main character, Ajay, really the author, came from India to the United States as a boy of 8; and like S. worked to  figure things out on his own. (And not only because his parents had trouble navigating a new culture, but also because they were absorbed by a horrific tragedy.)

In particular,  after reading a Hemingway bio, Ajay works on his own to figure out how to be a writer.  He goes on to  read one Hemingway critique after another to learn how he approached writing.  (Later on when he finally reads Hemingway, he  discovers that he likes reading the critiques more than the work itself.)  Similarly as described in his  New Yorker essay, Sharma, the author, describes how he meticulously analyzed famous writers' work to find out how to approach writing Family Life.  We read the essay aloud and spent a lot of time talking about  the arduous 12 1/2 year process during which he wrote 7000 pages in order to eventually arrive at the  224 page novel.

Sharma wonders in that essay, if it was the best way to have spent his time.  Most members felt glad that he had and that he had succeeded in creating a novel that as one member put it, paraphrased:  "I wanted to eat." (I like that image better than the more overused word-devour.) Well all, except one. (The dissenter just did not relate to the humor in this book; and she did not feel that Sharma was successful in overcoming the tediousness of the family's tragedy.) This novel, which to some should have been a memoir, was centered on horrific loss.  But yet, the book's humanity, truthfulness, exposition of interesting cultural differences, poignancy keeps you reading and as Sharma hopes,  it moves "like a rocket."

It is the ending that moves too fast for most of us.  And the last line that led to speculation.
Why now that he saw and felt that he would find happiness did he write:  "The happiness was almost heavy.  That was when I knew I had a problem."

Some thoughts:
When you are open to happiness., you are open to other feelings including despair.
When you find love with someone you are  vulnerable to their loss.

And from R. the sponsor who couldn't attend the meeting:

As for the last line in the novel...I think it refers to the feelings that he described in the interview. He feels SHAME that his own life is going well—when his brother's life is doomed. The happier he is—the greater the shame. I would be interested to hear what others think. 

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Next up. Family Life by Akhil Sharma

Telegraph Review

Author's Essay on Writing Novel

Image result for family life akhil sharma

DATE:  April 22, 2015

Turns Out That No One Needs To Be Afraid of James Joyce's Dubliners

It's Ulysses that is scary.  This collection of portraits was not difficult to read. Quite the contrary. But the panorama of Dublin that they created brought out a great discussion.   One member of Irish descent, felt disgust? shame? *at   the bleak  cast of manipulative, cheating, drinking, base characters. Save the husband in  "The Dead"; none of the characters grow in wisdom or spirituality.   Others felt that this collection, sequenced to mirror stages of a man's life, reflected universal themes.  And the bleakness reflects the human condition...not that of one place or time.  (Yet other books...Portnoy's Complaint and its portrait of Jews, for example, can be called universal but still sting a Jew.)

One member pointed out that they read much the way that a modern New Yorker short story reads. Joyce is the first modern writer.  And a great writer.

We wondered how a young man of 25 could have had the wisdom to write these stories...and wondered if perhaps it took someone that young to see the world in such bleak, conflicted way.  We questioned the symbol of snow because a writer (whose name I didn't write down)** suggested that a new writer analyze that in order to understand writing.  (A purifying, unifying, substance that falls on living and dead alike?)

And we wondered why did so many writers have to leave Ireland in order to write about it.  We pooh-poohed literary critics who saw incest, venereal disease, in every page of the stories. (Okay that is an exaggeration.) They interfered with instead of enlightening our reading.

From BB:
It wasn't just "disgust" and "shame" that this member of Irish descent felt but also anger and disappointment at the, for the most part, one-dimensional characters. The discussion calmed my defensive ire, however,and I have to agree that the stories are wonderfully crafted, especially "The Dead." It was Flannery O'Connor who advised a fledgling writer: "See how he makes the snow work in that story."

Speaking of the New Yorker and Irish writers, I'd recommend Colm Toibin's story "Sleep" in the March 23 issue. In it the imagination--secular rather than religious--yields such a bad trip that either the protagonist can no longer love or he needs to protect the one he loves from himself. 

Another recent New Yorker story to interest our members is Stephen King's excellent "A Death" in the March 9 issue.





Sunday, March 15, 2015

Who's Afraid of James Joyce?

Next up:  March 25, 2015 is The Dubliners

Some anxiety around reading this book...
Should there be?

Feel like you are back in high school?
Why not go all of the way back.
Here are the Spark Notes--this time in e-form.



(Actually I never used Spark Notes.
I should have especially when I didn't read the book.)

Don't have time to purchase...here is free e-version.



And a review

Slate Review

Thanks to R.K. a link to stories read aloud.
Audio stories

Saturday, February 28, 2015

Meeting Summary: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Sponsor's report was rather short, since Anthony Marra's bio is rather short--because Marra is incredibly young.  (No date of birth was  found in Wikipedia nor on his web page; only clue to his age was review that said he was not quite 30 in 2013.) Incredibly young?  It is hard to believe--incredible--that this first novel came from someone so young was the feeling of the book group.

Marra set out to write the novel he wanted to read--an English novel about the Chechen conflicts--but did not yet exist.  Why a novel? Perhaps because a novel can reach us on a more human level--emotional memory is stronger than our memory of factual reports?  We are a group of fairly politically savvy women--but none? few? of us had any deep understanding about what had happened in Chechnya  during the two conflicts. (Nor did any of us know about its long haunting history prior-- we did not know about the  mass deportation of the inhabitants of Chechnya to Siberia during Stalin's reign, for example.)  Where the nonfiction reports failed to grab us; the novel succeeded.  The brutality and horror and sheer stupidity became clear not as a long list of events, but as the background that affected the lives  of the main characters.

The writing and humor--yes humor--drew us in.  And as one member said, paraphrased...we learned to trust the writer and we were willing to continue on to read more and more about the insane devastation and dehumanization and exploitation of not only the Chechen people but the Russians directly involved in those events.

Just to inject some "criticism"... we read a quote from Dwight Garner's May 7, 2013 New York Times--Book of the Times.  (By the way ...it is a mostly positive review.)

He said that the crosscutting of stories and time confounded him and that he felt:  "...that I was reading a feat of editing as much as a feat of writing.  ...I admired this novel more than I warmed to it."  He also disliked the omniscient narrator who told the future of some of the characters.   Members disagreed; they felt that there was enough tension and that this devise helped make events more bearable and often added humor and a folkloric quality to the starkest portions of the novel.

Marra set out to make us cry and laugh on the same page and we mostly felt that his technique worked.  One nagging thought was expressed by a member--each character's humor had the same sarcastic tone.  But what a tone!

Many members are recommending the book to other friends and relatives.  (A few were sure that a film would be in the works, but speculated that the book would be better than the movie.)
If you haven't read it yet, do so.

YIKES:  The blog had 174 page views after I posted this entry.  An all time high.  From Russia! Am I paranoid?  Yes.

Next book is James Joyce's The Dubliners.  Some members had bad flashbacks to high school and college -- let's see if we can overcome our fears.  See you in March.