June 16: The Light of Evening

by Edna O'Brien

Discussion leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman

Plot Summary: From her Dublin hospital bed, an ailing elderly woman recalls the important events and people of her life, from her emigration to America in the 1920s, to her Irish marriage, to motherhood, as she awaits a visit from her estranged daughter, Eleanora. (NoveList database)

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Biography of Edna O'Brien

Reviews for this title:

Publishers Weekly Review: /* Starred Review */ In her 20th work of fiction, O'Brien meditates with haunting lyricism on the lure of home and the compulsion to leave. Dilly, 78 and widowed, lies in a Catholic hospital in rural Ireland waiting for her elder daughter, Eleanora, to arrive at her bedside. In gorgeous stream-of-consciousness from the masterful O'Brien (Lantern Slides), Dilly recalls her early years as well as decades of misunderstanding and conflict with Eleanora. Dilly's past unfolds in fits and starts: she leaves her mother behind in a small village in Ireland to seek a better life in 1920s Brooklyn, returning after a failed affair and the death of her brother, Michael. She promptly marries the rich Cornelius; they settle at Rusheen, his dilapidated family estate, and have two children. For Eleanora's story, O'Brien shifts to the third person: the daughter moves to England, marries an older novelist and begins a successful career as a writer before divorcing him and embarking on a series of affairs with married men, a life that Dilly both envies and scorns. The award-winning O'Brien evokes the cruelty of estrangement while allowing her characters to remain sympathetic and giving them real voice. (Oct.) --Staff (Reviewed June 26, 2006) (Publishers Weekly, vol 253, issue 26, p26)

Library Journal Review: A celebrated Irish author with 18 works of fiction (e.g., Night; Lantern Slides) to her credit, O'Brien here weaves strands of an Irish countrywoman's life, most compellingly when following Dilly's temporary immigration to New York. There, readers encounter a dazzling comic passage paying homage to James Joyce's famous Christmas dinner scene in the short story ???The Dead.??? The book's second half takes a semiautobiographical turn, following Dilly's daughter Eleanora from her rural Irish childhood, through her disastrous marriage to a foreigner of whom her family disapproves, and eventually to her development into a controversial writer who lives abroad but never leaves the subject of her Irish homeland far behind. Past and present interweave, as letters and journal entries detail an intricate Celtic knot of a mother/daughter relationship, relaying love, worry, disappointment, and agonizing miscomprehensions. But while the author writes lyrically with great narrative skill and the psychological acuity her fans expect, this tale of the convoluted bonds between mother and daughter is ultimately a bit too long and overwrought to match the best of her work. For larger collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/06.]???Laurie Sullivan, Sage Group International, Nashville --Laurie Sullivan (Reviewed August 15, 2006) (Library Journal, vol 131, issue 13, p72)

Kirkus Reviews A novel of powerful, complicated emotions and rapturous writing suffers from its plot's soap-opera sentimentality.O'Brien (Wild Decembers, 2000, etc.) shows how much of herself she has invested in this material in the book's dedication: "For My Mother and My Motherland." Languishing on her deathbed from a disease she has done her best to deny, Delia "Dilly" Macready comes to terms with her life in general and her relationship with her daughter in particular. That daughter, Eleanora, is a novelist who long ago departed her native Ireland for London, where she has become successful and notorious by writing books that scandalize those she left behind, blurring the lines between life and art, memory and invention. Thus the novel encourages the reader to identify Eleanora with the London-based author, whose work has generated controversy in her homeland (and who drops the third-person references to the "E" character for the first-person "I" in the novel's final stages). Yet the story belongs to Dilly, and only she comes fully alive within these pages. The richest section recounts Eleanora's young adulthood in America, after she had left her mother for the promise of a new world, only to find that her nationality and inexperience have consigned her to maid's work. It is there that she meets the man she will love for the rest of her life, though circumstances and miscommunication have her return home and marry a dutiful Irishman. Her two children are even less lucky in love, as Eleanora, whose true passion is literature, marries and divorces an older, domineering man with no redeeming qualities (leaving the reader to wonder what she ever saw in him), and her henpecked brother and shrewish wife scheme to inherit Dilly's once prosperous property.Through the twists of blood ties, O'Brien explores the profound ambivalence of the mother-daughter relationship, but the land and the climate seem more fully developed as characters than do many of the one-dimensional humans. (Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2006)

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Monday, May 5: The Death of Vishnu

by Manil Suri

Discussion leader: Ellen Getreu

As Vishnu lies dying on the staircase he inhabits, his neighbors argue over who will pay for an ambulance. Each neighbor has his or her own drama: Mr. Jalal is searching for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja longs for the wife he lost; and Kavita Asrani is planning to elope. This story becomes a metaphor for the social and religious divisions of contemporary India, and Vishnu's ascent of the staircase parallels the soul's progress through the various stages of existence.

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Glossary of Indian terms (copyright from the 2008 Harper First Perennial edition)

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Reviews for this Title:
Booklist Review:

Suri, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, has entered the realm of literature with assurance, agile humor, and an impressive breadth of social and religious concerns. His first novel, set in Bombay, the city of his birth, conjures a beehive-busy microcosm within the walls of an apartment building. Two Hindu families bicker about water and ghee; a Muslim household is pitched into confusion when its mild-mannered patriarch turns fanatic in his pursuit of enlightenment; a Hindu girl and Muslim boy imagine that they’re in love; and Vishnu, the drunk who sleeps on the first-floor landing, drifts peacefully toward death. As he lies dreaming about love, his childhood, and his divine namesake, his neighbors fret over their tired marriages, knotty questions of status and faith, and responsibility for Vishnu. The gospel of the movies is just as influential as the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita in Suri’s tenderly comic, wryly metaphysical, and hugely entertaining tale, in which profound longings for romance and deliverance shape even the most modest (perhaps the most precious) of lives. (Reviewed November 15, 2000) -- Donna Seaman

Publishers Weekly Review: Visualizing a village, a hotel or an apartment building as a microcosm of society is not a new concept to writers, but few have invested their fiction with such luminous language, insight into character and grasp of cultural construct as Suri does in his debut. The inhabitants of a small apartment building in Bombay are motivated by concerns ranging from social status to spiritual transcendence while their alcoholic houseboy, Vishnu, lies dying on the staircase landing. During a span of 24 hours, Vishnu's body becomes the fulcrum for a series of crises, some tragic, some farcical, that reflect both the folly and nobility of human conduct. To the perpetually quarreling first-floor tenants, Mrs. Pathak and Mrs. Asrani, Vishnu is a recipient of grudging charity and casual calumny; each justifies her refusal to pay for his hospitalization. Though locked in perpetual bickering, the women are united in their prejudice against their upstairs neighbors, the Jahals, who are Muslims. While Mr. Jahal seeks to test his intellectual agnosticism by seeking spiritual enlightenment, his son, Samil, and the Asranis' spoiled, willful daughter, Kavita, prepare to defy their families by running away together. On the third floor, reclusive widower Vinod Taneja still mourns his young wife, Sheetal; their story of tentative love blossoming into deep devotion and truncated by early death is an exquisite cameo of a marital relationship. Interspersed are Vishnu's lyrically rendered thoughts as his soul leaves his body and begins a slow ascent of the apartment stairs, rising through the stages of existence as he relives memories of his gentle mother and his passion for the prostitute Padmina. Suril has a discerning eye for human foibles, an empathetic knowledge of domestic interaction and an instinctive understanding of the caste-nuanced traditions of Indian society. The excesses of life in that country--the oppressive heat, the mixture of superstitions and religious fanaticism, the social cruelty--permeate the atmospheric narrative. By turns charming and funny, searing and poignant, dramatic and farcical, this fluid novel is an irresistible blend of realism, mysticism and religious metaphor, a parable of the universal conditions of human life. Agent, Nicole Aragi. (Jan.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal Review: The lives and loves of residents of an apartment house in Bombay unfold as Vishnu, a drunk, lies dying on the steps that serve as his home. As his neighbors argue over the cost of an ambulance, the sick man drifts in and out of consciousness, reflecting on the meaning of his life. The well-developed and often humorous characters who make up the world of the building include the Pathaks and Asranis, whose difficult wives begrudgingly share a kitchen; the Asranis' lovesick teenaged daughter, Kavita, who plans to run away with her Muslim boyfriend; and Mr. Taneja, who still mourns the loss of his spouse years earlier. This nicely paced narrative is full of Hindu mythology, and, as Vishnu nears death, the belief that he might be a god causes a disturbing confrontation. The author of this radiant first novel is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. Recommended for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/00.]--Cathleen A. Towey, Port Washington P.L., NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews Indian-born Suri's imaginative first novel, set in and near a volatile Bombay apartment building, employs the figure of a drunken handyman as the catalyst for a linked series of charmingly improbable seriocomic catastrophes.The eponymous Vishnu lies crumpled in a stuporous heap on a landing just outside his door. Scandalized neighbors throw covers over his offending carcass, checking occasionally for a pulse, or telltale snores. The life of the building at first proceeds pretty much as always: fastidious Mrs. Asrani and stolid Mrs. Pathak bicker over privileges abused in their communal kitchen, while their weary husbands attempt to keep the peace. Snooty Mrs. Jaiswal disapproves of everybody; reclusive widower Mr. Taneja warily emerges from his shell; devout Mrs. Jalal fears for her unbeliever husband Ahmed's soul—and really despairs when Ahmed envisions Vishnu in the figure of his namesake deity ("with fire and smoke, and more heads than I could count"). Furthermore, the Jalals' gorgeous daughter Kavati plans to elude an arranged marriage by eloping with the Asranis' prematurely jaded son Salim—unless she becomes a film star instead. Meanwhile, Vishnu's disorderly dreams revisit his chaotic past (notably his obsession with Padmini, a dictatorial prostitute with expensive tastes), and extend to a delirium presumably derived from half-overheard conversations: he decides he has become the god Vishnu. This transformation creates insoluble problems when his neighbors finally call an ambulance to remove him, and the slumberer "becomes" the last of Vishnu's traditional avatars: Kalki the destroyer. Suri plots it all beautifully, and his suggestible characters' varied eccentricities and delusions are often very funny indeed. But the crazy-quilt inner life of (the mortal) Vishnu seems essentially unrelated to their lives, as if it belongs to another novel that Suri hasn't yet written.An amalgam of early Naipaul and R.K. Narayan, with just a whiff of Kosinski's Being There. A highly likable, if oddly conceived and assembled, debut novel. (Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2000)

Monday, April 7: Aloft

by Chang-rae Lee

Discussion leader: Edna Ritzenberg

A visit from his daughter and her fiancé from Oregon prompts Jerry Battle to reassess his life, his relationships, and his disengagement from those around him, as he reflects on his success and his love of flying solo.

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Long Island Reads is an Island-wide reading initiative. Each Spring, people in Nassau and Suffolk come together to read the same book, participate in discussions of the selection, and enjoy related events in public libraries. The program takes place in April; many events take place during National Library Week

Long Island Reads is an Island-wide reading initiative sponsored by the Nassau Library System and Suffolk Cooperative Library System

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Reviews for this Title:

Booklist Review: At 59, Jerry Battle takes great comfort in the orderliness of the aerial view as he flies his small plane above Long Island, where his Italian American family has run a landscape business for generations, and the fact is, Jerry is always somewhat airborne. He suppresses his feelings, avoids confrontation, and, although he's physically present for his still-virile elderly father and his adult children, he is always out of reach. But gravity is a relentless force, and over the course of just a few months, Jerry is pulled inexorably into a snarl of family catastrophes, reaping the consequences of his indifference toward the family business, his inability to come to terms with his wife's death, and his failure to ask the woman he loves, Rita, to marry him, even though she essentially raised his son, Jack, whose questionable financial shenanigans will destroy the family business, and his daughter, Theresa, whose progressive views evaporate in the face of her cruel fate: she's diagnosed with cancer at the same time she gets pregnant. Lee follows the stunning A Gesture Life (1999) with a brilliant and candid parsing of the dynamics of a family of mixed heritage--Jerry's wife was Korean, as is Theresa's intended, and Rita is Puerto Rican--while simultaneously offering a ribald look at male sexuality, a charming celebration of the solace of good food, and a sagacious and bitingly funny critique of our times. There is no escape, Lee reminds us, no rising above. We have no choice but to cope with fleshy, chaotic, and bittersweet life right here on earth. -- Donna Seaman (BookList, 12-01-2003, p627)
Publishers Weekly Review: /* Starred Review */ Lee's third novel (after Native Speaker and A Gesture Life) approaches the problems of race and belonging in America from a new angle—the perspective of Jerry Battle, the semiretired patriarch of a well-off (and mostly white) Long Island family. Sensitive but emotionally detached, Jerry escapes by flying solo in his small plane even as he ponders his responsibilities to his loved ones: his irascible father, Hank, stewing in a retirement home; his son, Jack, rashly expanding the family landscaping business; Jerry's graduate student daughter, Theresa, engaged to Asian-American writer Paul and pregnant but ominously secretive; and Jerry's long-time Puerto Rican girlfriend, Rita, who has grown tired of two decades of aloofness and left him for a wealthy lawyer. Jack and Theresa's mother was Jerry's Korean-American wife, Daisy, who drowned in the swimming pool after a struggle with mental illness when Jack and Theresa were children, and Theresa's angry postcolonial take on ethnicity and exploitation is met by Jerry's slightly bewildered efforts to understand his place in a new America. Jerry's efforts to win back Rita, Theresa's failing health and Hank's rebellion against his confinement push the meandering narrative along, but the novel's real substance comes from the rich, circuitous paths of Jerry's thoughts—about family history and contemporary culture—as his family draws closer in a period of escalating crisis. Lee's poetic prose sits well in the mouth of this aging Italian-American whose sentences turn unexpected corners. Though it sometimes seems that Lee may be trying to embody too many aspects of 21st-century American life in these individuals, Jerry's humble and skeptical voice and Lee's genuine compassion for his compromised characters makes for a truly moving story about a modern family. Agent, Amanda Urban. Foreign rights sold in France, Germany, Holland and the U.K. (Mar.) — Staff (Reviewed March 1, 2004) (Publishers Weekly, vol 251, issue 9, p51)
Library Journal Review: In his third novel (after Native Speaker and A Gesture Life), Lee applies his remarkable storytelling skills to create a monstrous first-person narrator. Not that retired Long Island businessman and part-time travel agent Jerry Battle is a murderer, sexual predator, or any sort of criminal according to law. However, his defect is both serious and destructive: he is an emotional miser, distancing himself from others and keeping himself above the risks of emotional involvement. Not completely without insight, Jerry recognizes the irony and symbolism of his favorite pastime, soaring solo in his private plane—but only in clear weather. He could not be less prepared when virtually every element of his personal life goes haywire simultaneously: his longtime lover walks out, his dad disappears from an assisted-living home, his son dangerously overextends the family landscaping firm, and his pregnant daughter contracts a terminal illness. Jerry's graceless yet sometimes endearing attempts to cope with these disasters (and their attendant reminders of the bizarre death, decades before, of his beautiful Korean American wife) round out a masterly portrait of a disaffected personality. Unfortunately, the other characters, seen solely from Jerry's self-absorbed viewpoint, are often little more than two-dimensional foils for Jerry's worries and obsessions. Still, Lee's radiant writing style will please fans of his earlier fiction, and the plot will interest readers who liked Louis Begley's About Schmidt. Recommended for larger collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/03.]—Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA (Reviewed February 1, 2004) (Library Journal, vol 129, issue 2, p124)
Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ An introspective widower rises above his "habit/condition of disbelieving the Real"—in this generously ruminative third novel.Its predecessors (Native Speaker, 1995; A Gesture Life, 1999) explored the comedy and pathos of assimilation into American culture with a compassionate precision here lavished on almost-60 Jerry Battle (born "Battaglia"), whom we first meet "aloft," in the small private plane to which he retreats from quotidian pressures. Not unlike the transplanted Asians of Lee's earlier books, he's an ingredient in a rich multiethnic mix. Since the drowning death (in the family pool) of his Korean-American wife Daisy 20 years earlier, Jerry has had a gratifying affair with Puerto Rican beauty Rita Reyes, now his ex—and maintained close if wary relationships with his son Jack (who runs, and has significantly expanded the Battles' landscaping business) and daughter Theresa, a literature professor engaged to, and pregnant by, Asian-American writer Paul Pyun. What energizes Lee's very deliberately paced fiction is the accretion of detail with which his closely observed characters' shared and separate experiences and worlds are created. We feel we know everything about decent, caring Jerry (still hungry for life—and quite reminiscent of several John Updike narrators), gutsy Theresa (whose serious illness threatens her pregnancy and her life), Paul's quiet strength, Rita's spirited independence, Jack's frustrating combination of profligacy and resilience, and—in a triumphant characterization—Jerry's ornery octogenarian father Hank, too alive to be contained by the assisted living center where he reluctantly resides or by Jerry's disapproving concern. Aloft's muted conclusion contrasts tellingly with its opening image, as Jerry hunkers down in the hole dug for a new pool, at peace with his "finally examined and thus remorseful life . . . [and resolved that] I'll go solo no more, no more."Beautiful writing, richly drawn characters, and a powerful sense of life enduring in spite of all. A fine and very moving performance. (Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2003)
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Book Discussion Guide - Aloft

March 3: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon
Discussion leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman

For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, once again history threatens to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown. A gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption.

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Reviews:

Booklist Review: /*Starred Review*/ Like Haruki Murakami in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991), Chabon plays with the conventions of the Chandlerian private-eye novel, but that's only one ingredient in an epic-scale alternate-history saga of Jewish life since World War II. The premise draws on an obscure historical fact: FDR once proposed that Alaska, not Israel, become the homeland for Jews after the war. In Chabon's telling, that's exactly what happened, except, inevitably, it hasn't gone as planned: the U.S. government now has enacted a policy that will evict all Jews without proper papers from Sitka, the center of Jewish Alaska. In the midst of this nightmare, browbeaten police detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy who happens to be the disgraced son of Sitka's most powerful rabbi. No one wants this case solved, from Landsman's boss (his ex-wife, Bina) to the FBI, but our Yiddish Marlowe keeps digging, uncovering apocalypse in the making. Chabon manipulates his bulging plot masterfully, but what makes the novel soar is its humor and humanity. Even without grasping all the Yiddish wordplay that seasons the delectable prose, readers will fall headlong into the alternate universe of Chabon's Sitka, where black humor is a kind of antifreeze necessary to support life. And when Meyer, in the end, must «weigh the fates of the Jews, of the Arabs, of the whole unblessed and homeless planet» against a promise made to a grieving mother, it's clear that this parallel world smells a lot like home. Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ran the book-award table in 2000, and this one just may be its equal. -- Bill Ott (Reviewed 03-01-2007) (Booklist, vol 103, number 13, p38)

Publishers Weekly Review: Reviewed by Jess Walter They are the "frozen Chosen," two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon's ambitious and entertaining new novel. It is -- deep breath now -- a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it's no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here.The novel begins the same way that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against America -- with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt's plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book's timeless refrain: "It's a strange time to be a Jew."Into this world arrives Chabon's Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon's "Alyeska" is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.Eventually, however, Chabon's homage to noir feels heavy-handed, with too many scenes of snappy tough-guy banter and too much of the kind of elaborate thriller plotting that requires long explanations and offscreen conspiracies.Chabon can certainly write noir???or whatever else he wants; his recent Sherlock Holmes novel, The Final Solution, was lovely, even if the New York Times Book Review sniffed its surprise that the mystery novel would "appeal to the real writer." Should any other snobs mistake Chabon for anything less than a real writer, this book offers new evidence of his peerless storytelling and style. Characters have skin "as pale as a page of commentary" and rough voices "like an onion rolling in a bucket." It's a solid performance that would have been even better with a little more Yiddish and a little less police. (May)Jess Walter was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for The Zero and the winner of the 2006 Edgar Award for best novel for Citizen Vince.Staff (Reviewed March 5, 2007) (Publishers Weekly, vol 254, issue 10, p34) --

Library Journal Review: /* Starred Review */ What's washed-up cop Meyer Landsman to do when a heroin-addicted, chess-crazed denizen of the dump where he lives gets plugged in the head? He's going to find the killer, and to that end he calls in his partner (and cousin) Berko Shemets, a bear of a man who's also half-Tlingit because, you see, this is Alaska? In this wildly inventive blackest of black comedies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) imagines that after World War II Roosevelt decreed the yet-to-be-50th state the homeland of the Jews. Years have passed, and the Jews have settled in very nicely, thank you, re-creating the aura of the Mitteleuropa they've lost though the black-hatted, ultra-orthodox Bobovers turn out to be real thugs. The meddling of our two boys leads them straight to powerful and dangerous Bobover leader Rebbe Gold and eventually to a plot aimed at the reclamation of Israel. It also leads them into plenty of hot water with the top brass, including their new boss???Meyer's ex-wife, Bina. Raucous, acidulous, decidedly impolite, yet stylistically arresting, this book is bloody brilliant???and if it's way over the top, that's what makes Chabon such a great writer. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal --Barbara Hoffert (Reviewed March 1, 2007) (Library Journal, vol 132, issue 4, p68) 1/07.]

Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ Imagine a mutant strain of Dashiell Hammett crossed with Isaac Bashevis Singer, as one of the most imaginative contemporary novelists extends his fascination with classic pulp. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, 2000, etc.) returns with an alternate-history novel that succeeds as both a hardboiled detective story and a softhearted romance. In the aftermath of World War II, a Jewish homeland has been established in Alaska rather than Israel. Amid the mean streets of Sitka, the major city, Detective Meyer Landsman lives in a seedy flophouse, where alcohol has dulled his investigative instincts. His marriage to his beloved Bina couldn't survive an aborted pregnancy, after tests showed the possibility of birth defects. He also hasn't gotten over the death of his younger sister, a pilot whose plane crashed. He finds his sense of mission renewed when there's a murder in the hotel where he lives. The deceased was a heroin-addicted chess player, his slaying seemingly without motive. There's an urgency to Landsman's investigation, because the Promised Land established by the Alaskan Settlement Act is only a 50-year rental, with Jews expected to go elsewhere when the "Reversion" takes place two months hence. Thus, Landsman must solve the case before he loses his job and his home, a challenge complicated by the reappearance of his ex-wife, appointed chief of police during this transition before the Reversion. In her attempts to leave a clean slate, will she help her former husband or thwart him? Adding to the intrigue are a cult of extremists led by a gangster rabbi, a possibility that the death of Landsman's sister wasn't an accident and a conspiracy led by the U.S. government. "These are strange times to be a Jew," say various characters, like a Greek chorus, though the novel suggests that all times are strange times to be a Jew. A page-turning noir, with a twist of Yiddish, that satisfies on many levels.
(Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2007)

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Small Island: a novel / by Andrea Levy

Discussion leader: Edna Ritzenberg

Set mainly in the British Empire of 1948, this story of emigration, loss, and love follows four characters -- two Jamaican and two Britons, struggling to find peace in postwar England. Levy captures the struggle between class, race, and sex with humor and tenderness, with a backdrop of bombed out houses and post-wartime conditions.


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Reviews

The New York Times, April 3, 2007 (requires free login)

Amazon.com Andrea Levy's award-winning novel, Small Island, deftly brings two bleak families into crisp focus. First a Jamaican family, including the well-intentioned Gilbert, who can never manage to say or do exactly the right thing; Romeo Michael, who leaves a wake of women in his path; and finally, Hortense, whose primness belies her huge ambition to become English in every way possible. The other unhappy family is English, starting with Queenie, who escapes the drudgery of being a butcher's daughter only to marry a dull banker. As the chapters reverse chronology and the two groups collide and finally mesh, the book unfolds through time like a photo album, and Levy captures the struggle between class, race, and sex with a humor and tenderness that is both authentic and bracing. The book is cinematic in the best way--lighting up London's bombed-out houses and wartime existence with clarity and verve while never losing her character's voice or story. --Meg Halverson --This text refers to the Paperback edition. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. After winning the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Levy's captivating fourth novel sweeps into a U.S. edition with much-deserved literary fanfare. Set mainly in the British Empire of 1948, this story of emigration, loss and love follows four characters—two Jamaicans and two Britons—as they struggle to find peace in postwar England. After serving in the RAF, Jamaican Gilbert Joseph finds life in his native country has become too small for him. But in order to return to England, he must marry Hortense Roberts—she's got enough money for his passage—and then set up house for them in London. The pair move in with Queenie Bligh, whose husband, Bernard, hasn't returned from his wartime post in India. But when does Bernard turn up, he is not pleased to find black immigrants living in his house. This deceptively simple plot poises the characters over a yawning abyss of colonialism, racism, war and the everyday pain that people inflict on one another. Levy allows readers to see events from each of the four character's' point of view, lightly demonstrating both the subjectivity of truth and the rationalizing lies that people tell themselves when they are doing wrong. None of the characters is perfectly sympathetic, but all are achingly human. When Gilbert realizes that his pride in the British Empire is not reciprocated, he wonders, "How come England did not know me?" His question haunts the story as it moves back and forth in time and space to show how the people of two small islands become inextricably bound together. Agent, David Grossman. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. From School Library Journal Adult/High School–This novel examines class, race, and prejudice in London in 1948, when a new multiracial England began to form. Through four principal narrators comprising two married couples, the author brings to life the dreams and fears of a generation. Gilbert, a Jamaican newlywed who served in the RAF during World War II, hopes for a prosperous future in London, though his experience of racial discrimination tells him this won't be achieved easily. His young wife, Hortense, is more naive. Arriving from the colonies prepared to take up a teaching career, she is soon in despair over rude rejections and her struggle to make herself understood, literally and figuratively, by white working-class neighbors who don't seem to comprehend the pristine English she learned on her home island. Even the small comforts provided by their affable landlady are soured when Queenie's long-missing husband returns and is less than pleased to meet the black boarders. As these mismatched pairs relate their sides of the story, the author's linguistic skill pitches their voices perfectly within time and place. Though none of the characters is very likable, all are nuanced personalities who make the book intriguing and believable throughout, even a final plot twist involving a coincidence of Dickensian proportions. Affecting, funny, and sad, this is a masterful depiction of a society on the verge of major changes.–Starr E. Smith, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. From The New Yorker In the shabby remnants of post-blitz London, three near-strangers find themselves in a single house. Queenie Bligh is a spirited Yorkshirewoman waiting for her husband to return from the war and taking in tenants to make ends meet. Gilbert Joseph, a Jamaican R.A.F. veteran, is struggling to establish himself in England, a country that he'd been taught was his motherland but which regards him as an interloper; his bride, Hortense, has just arrived in London and is bewildered that her education and class can't transcend the color of her skin. The narrative voice jumps between the characters, a technique that embeds familiar cultural observations in closely observed and surprising lives. If the plot sometimes verges on the operatic, Levy's writing deftly illuminates the complex and contradictory motives behind each character's behavior. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Paperback edition. From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Following the quiet but critical success of Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994), Never Far From Nowhere (1996) and Fruit of the Lemon (1999), British novelist Andrea Levy's fourth book, Small Island -- the first to be published in the United States -- is a breakthrough of sorts. Each predecessor has drawn to varying degrees upon Levy's experiences growing up in London as the daughter of first-generation, postwar Jamaican immigrants, and has mined the complicated landscape of what it means to be black and British both before and after the vogues for "Cool Britannia" and all things multicultural. Yet her early books went unheralded by the sort of media hype and glossy fanfare that greeted Zadie Smith's clever first novel, White Teeth, in 2000 and, to a lesser degree, Hari Kunzru's masterful debut, The Impressionist, in 2002. Small Island represents an arrival (or is it a "departure"?) of a particular kind, then; despite being, and I would add very much mistakenly, omitted from the Man Booker long list in 2004, the novel has since been showered with a dazzling array of literary accolades -- the Orange Prize (over the likes of Margaret Atwood and Rose Tremain), the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and most recently the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, which places Levy in the esteemed company of such former winners as Nobel laureates V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. Prize-winning is an arbitrary sport, but the recognition bestowed upon Levy's work is a testament to her talents -- her formidable craft and staying power in an otherwise faddish business. Small Island is free of the prosaic affectations that are often the hallmark of celebrated authorship; there are no postmodern pyrotechnics or other gimmicky hoops to jump through. Rather, Levy tells a good story, and she tells it well -- using narrative voices across time and space as she revisits the conventions of the historical novel and imagines the hopes and pains of the immigrant's saga anew. Levy's novel is no mere flight of fantasy, for it is rooted in the past and mired in the complicated stuff of empire. At the same time the memorable characters are radically unhinged from any sense of national fixity as their lives become intermeshed in strangely unexpected yet predictable ways. Set intermittently in postwar London, the narrative centers on the interactions between two couples, the determined Jamaican newlyweds Hortense and Gilbert Joseph, and the quintessentially English Queenie (named for Victoria, former Empress of India) and her phenomenally dull husband, Bernard Bligh. Gilbert, whom Queenie had known when he was an R.A.F serviceman during the war, takes up residence in her Earls Court rooming house as she awaits Bernard's delayed return from an overseas posting. While Gilbert's good fortune in finding Queenie again hints at the possibility of stabilized race relations, albeit ones tinged with well-meaning faux-pas and unintended prejudices, Hortense's arrival sets in motion the events and reflections that will culminate in the forging of a postcolonial portrait that is at once familial and historical. Although the main action of Small Island takes place over a few weeks, Levy splits the novel into "Before" and "1948," the latter moment denoting a powerful geopolitical watershed. The year marked the docking of SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury and the disembarkation of 492 Caribbean subjects on the not-so-welcoming shores of the mother country, forever changing that nation's singular sense of itself. As well, 1948 witnessed the momentous aftermath of Indian independence and partition -- the imperial map coming apart at the seams. One particularly successful aspect of the novel is Levy's ability to reflect upon this larger picture while paying close attention to the intricacies of her characters' quotidian experiences with a wry and penetrating humor. The idea of smallness in the title thus speaks to the complicated ways in which the world begins to contract for all concerned. "Small island" is a playful, belittling aspersion Jamaicans like to cast upon their smaller West Indian neighbors. Yet when Gilbert returns home after his duty abroad, his horizons perceptibly broadened, he discovers with alarm that the "island of Jamaica was no universe." Similarly, Bernard's tragicomic arrival back in London prompts his curmudgeonly surprise that "England had shrunk. It was smaller than the place I'd left." His vehement distaste for the presence of "darkies" in his house further heightens the provincialism and vulgar racisms that we've seen as Gilbert and Hortense -- for all their cosmopolitan aspirations, middle-class sensibilities, and colonial learning -- struggle against the daily inequities of institutionalized discrimination. Small Island's temporal dynamics and the artfully choreographed connections among the various first-person voices propel the reader forward through differing perspectives and revelations. One possible flaw is that the novel turns on a huge coincidence, which some readers may find too forced, too sentimentally contrived. Granted, this is a well-worn device with its near-Dickensian reliance on the mechanics of plot, but how better, perhaps, to imagine and unpack the complex interlocutions of a wide world writ small? Reviewed by Louise Bernard Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. From Bookmarks Magazine Levy, the child of parents who sailed from the Caribbean in the first wave of postwar immigration, fictionalizes the immigrant experience in her fourth novel. Relying on memoirs and oral histories, she describes in heartwrenching detail the lives of four individuals in 1948 England. Her plain, humorous style underscores the gravity and immediacy of her themes. She pens deep, convincing characters-Queenie speaks like a true Londoner; Bernard sounds like he served in India. The couples’ interactions are often predictable-Levy “manoeuvred her characters into the right place at the right time”-and the range of viewpoints sometimes disorients. Yet, these flaws barely diminish the power of this frank representation of the racism and disappointment of the era. “This is,” The Guardian concludes, “Andrea Levy’s big book.” Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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	2. Awards (Best Fiction) - Adult -> Best Fiction -> Literary -> Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbread Book Award) -> Novel category
	3. Awards (Best Fiction) - Adult -> Best Fiction -> Literary -> Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction
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ISBNs Associated with this Title:
	0755307496 1417685891 : Glued Binding 0312424671 : Paperback

Playing for Pizza

Grisham takes fictional Browns QB to Italy
Thursday, October 25, 2007 4:12 AM
By Gary Budzak
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

(Doubleday, $21.95) by John Grisham
Former Cleveland Browns quarterbacks Charlie Frye and Rick Dockery can relate: One bad game, and the Browns say bye-bye.
Frye was the Browns' starter going into this season, but a bad first half in a loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers got him dealt to the Seattle Seahawks days later. Dockery was mopping up in the American Football Conference championship game against the Denver Broncos and somehow gave the game away. Next stop for Dockery: the Parma Panthers -- in Italy, not Ohio.
Frye is real, of course, and Dockery is a figment of John Grisham's imagination. He stars in the latest Grisham novel, Playing for Pizza -- a departure from the author's usual legal thrillers.
Dockery's sudden departure echoes that of Frye. Had the Browns management read Grisham's galleys?
Dockery, a journeyman player, played so badly that he needs not only a job but a way out of town for his safety -- not to mention a paternity issue. His agent suggests Italy, where at least Dockery would still be able to play football.
The Italians play the American form of the game,
although their best teams probably couldn't beat Mount Union College. Each team is allowed three American ringers, and Dockery is wanted despite his bungling against the Broncos.
Dockery's new coach is American, but his teammates are mostly Italian. A running back called Franco (after Steelers great Franco Harris) shows Dockery highlights of his running. Dockery asks whether the film is in slow motion.
In addition to assimilating with the Panthers, fish-out-of-water Dockery also has to adjust to Italian culture: driving a stick-shift car, parking in tiny spots and pacing himself during multicourse dinners. Can an American jock learn to appreciate real Parmesan cheese, Italian opera and the architecture and history of castles and cathedrals? Will he end his one-night stands and find a mate? And will he finally be a game winner?
Grisham hung out with and used the real Parma Panthers to legitimize and add passion to his page turner. Readers care about Dockery and root for him and the Panthers. If only Charlie Frye could have similar luck with the Seahawks.
Among the penalties, however, is a plotline that sends a Cleveland sportswriter to cover Dockery's games in Italy. In these crunch times for newspapers, a freelancer in Italy would e-mail a story to the paper,
if the paper bothered covering it at all.
But that minor complaint isn't enough to keep the highly readable story out of the end zone.
gbudzak@dispatch.com