FEVER: A NOVEL, BY MARY BETH KEANE

Book Discussion Date and Time:

Monday, January 12, 2015, at 3:00 PM. (Please note that we are meeting at a later time this month.)

The story of Mary Mallon, known as "Typhoid Mary," who came to New York in 1883 and cooked for the wealthy families of Manhattan.

REQUEST A COPY OF THE BOOK 

North Brother Island, where Mary Mallon was isolated, as it looks today

The facts about Typhoid Mary from www.snopes.com 

THE CIRCLE: A NOVEL, BY DAVE EGGERS

Book Discussion schedule: Two sessions: (evening) Wednesday, December 10, 2014, at 7:00 P.M., and (afternoon) Monday, December 15, 2014, at 1:00 P.M.

Set in an undefined future time, The Circle is the story of Mae Holland, a young woman hired to work for the world’s most powerful internet company.... Mae can’t believe her luck, —even as her life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. (McSweeney's)

REQUEST A COPY OF THE BOOK

DOWNLOAD A READING GUIDE PREPARED BY THE STAFF 

Publishers Weekly:

/* Starred Review */ The latest offering from McSweeney's founder Eggers (A Hologram for the King) is a stunning work of terrifying plausibility, a cautionary tale of subversive power in the digital age suavely packaged as a Silicon Valley social satire. Set in the near future, it examines the inner workings of the Circle, an internet company that is both spiritual and literal successor to Facebook, Google, Twitter and more, as seen through the eyes of Mae Holland, a new hire who starts in customer service. As Mae is absorbed into the Circle's increasingly demanding multi- and social media experience, she plays an ever more pivotal role in the company's plans, which include preventing child abductions through microchips, reducing crime through omnipresent surveillance, and eliminating political corruption through transparency courtesy of personal cameras. Soon, she's not alone in asking what it will mean to "complete the Circle" as its ultimate goal comes into view; even her closest friends and family suspect the Circle is going too far in its desire to make the world a better, safer, more honest place. Eggers presents a Swiftian scenario so absurd in its logic and compelling in its motives that the worst thing possible will be for people to miss the joke. The plot moves at a casual, yet inexorable pace, sneaking up on the reader before delivering its warnings of the future, a worthy and entertaining read despite its slow burn. Agent: Andrew Wylie, The Wylie Agency. (Oct.) --Staff (Reviewed September 16, 2013) (Publishers Weekly, vol 260, issue 37, p)

Kirkus:

A massive feel-good technology firm takes an increasingly totalitarian shape in this cautionary tale from Eggers (A Hologram for the King, 2012, etc.). Twenty-four-year-old Mae feels like the luckiest person alive when she arrives to work at the Circle, a California company that's effectively a merger of Google, Facebook, Twitter and every other major social media tool. Though her job is customer-service drudgework, she's seduced by the massive campus and the new technologies that the "Circlers" are working on. Those typically involve increased opportunities for surveillance, like the minicameras the company wants to plant everywhere, or sophisticated data-mining tools that measure every aspect of human experience. (The number of screens at Mae's workstation comically proliferate as new monitoring methods emerge.) But who is Mae to complain when the tools reduce crime, politicians allow their every move to be recorded, and the campus cares for her every need, even providing health care for her ailing father? The novel reads breezily, but it's a polemic that's thick with flaws. Eggers has to intentionally make Mae a dim bulb in order for readers to suspend disbelief about the Circle's rapid expansion--the concept of privacy rights are hardly invoked until more than halfway through. And once they are invoked, the novel's tone is punishingly heavy-handed, particularly in the case of an ex of Mae's who wants to live off the grid and warns her of the dehumanizing consequences of the Circle's demand for transparency in all things. (Lest that point not be clear, a subplot involves a translucent shark that's terrifyingly omnivorous.) Eggers thoughtfully captured the alienation new technologies create in his previous novel, A Hologram for the King, but this lecture in novel form is flat-footed and simplistic. Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.(Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2013)

 

FLORA: A NOVEL, BY GAIL GODWIN

BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME: MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2014, AT 1:00 PM. 

Isolated in a decaying family home while her father performs secret work at the end of World War II, 10-year-old Helen, grieving the losses of her mother and grandmother, bonds with her sensitive young aunt while desperately clinging to the ghosts and stories of her childhood. (NovelistPlus)

REQUEST A COPY OF THE BOOK 

VIEW A READING GUIDE PREPARED BY THE STAFF 

BookList:

/* Starred Review */ Godwin, celebrated for her literary finesse, presents a classic southern tale galvanic with decorous yet stabbing sarcasm and jolting tragedy. Helen, a writer, looks back to the fateful summer of 1945, when she was a precocious, motherless 10-year-old trying to make sense of a complicated and unjust world. Young Helen lives on a hill in North Carolina in an old, rambling, haunted house that was once a sanatorium for folks she calls the Recoverers. Raised by her immaculately turned-out, tart-tongued, and stoic grandmother, whom she worships, Helen is bereft after Nonie’s sudden death. Worse yet, her father is summoned to work on the secret military project at Oak Ridge. He recruits a 22-year-old Alabaman cousin to stay in his place. Sweet, emotional, and seemingly guileless Flora is no match for feverishly imaginative, scheming, and condescending Helen. When a polio outbreak keeps them at home, and a war veteran begins delivering their groceries, tension builds. Godwin’s under-your-skin characters are perfectly realized, and the held-breath plot is consummately choreographed. But the wonder of this incisive novel of the endless repercussions of loss and remorse at the dawn of the atomic age is how subtly Godwin laces it with exquisite insights into secret family traumas, unspoken sexuality, class and racial divides, and the fallout of war while unveiling the incubating mind of a future writer. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Godwin is always in demand, and with early accolades for this tour de force from the likes of John Irving, requests will multiply. -- Seaman, Donna (Reviewed 02-15-2013) (Booklist, vol 109, number 12, p25)

Publishers Weekly:

/* Starred Review */ Narrator Helen Anstruther, “going on eleven,” is the relentlessly charismatic and wry star of this stirring and wondrous novel from Godwin (Unfinished Desires). In the summer of 1945, in the mountains of North Carolina, Helen is trying to make sense of the world since her beloved grandmother’s death. When her father leaves to do “secret work for World War II” in neighboring Tennessee, this becomes much more challenging, and Helen, motherless for years, is left in the care of 22-year-old Flora, a delicate and, Helen might say, hopelessly effusive relative. Helen has grown up in a rambling old house that once served as a home for convalescent tubercular or inebriate “Recoverers” under the care of Helen’s physician grandfather. For a precocious girl who has lost everyone who’s ever loved and known her, the house becomes a mesmerizing and steadfast companion. Though Flora initially appears to Helen as little more than a country bumpkin, their time together profoundly transforms them both. Godwin’s thoughtful portrayal of their boredom, desires, and the eventual heartbreak of their summer underscores the impossible position of children, who are powerless against the world and yet inherit responsibility for its agonies. Agent: Moses Cardona, John Hawkins & Associates. (May) --Staff (Reviewed February 11, 2013) (Publishers Weekly, vol 260, issue 06, p)

Library Journal:

/* Starred Review */ Ten-year-old Helen is a precocious, imaginative child who must spend the summer with her guardian, Flora, while her father is in Oak Ridge, TN, during the last months of World War II. Helen is a "haunted little girl" who lost her mother at age three and whose grandmother, who raised her, has just died. She and her late mother's cousin, 22-year-old Flora, are isolated in Helen's family house on a mountaintop, quarantined from the polio that threatens their community. Helen is resentful of her caretaker, Flora, who cries easily and appears to Helen to be unsophisticated. But Flora is singled-minded in her attempts to do right by Helen. The aftermath of that formative summer will steer the course of Helen's life and haunt her forever. VERDICT A superbly crafted, stunning novel by three-time National Book Award award finalist Godwin (A Mother and Two Daughters ), this is an unforgettable, heartbreaking tale of disappointment, love, and tragedy. Highly recommended.— Lisa Block, Atlanta --Lisa Block (Reviewed May 1, 2013) (Library Journal, vol 138, issue 8, p73)

Kirkus:

/* Starred Review */ Godwin (Unfinished Desires, 2009, etc.) examines the intricate bonds of family and the enduring scars inflicted by loss. In the summer of 1945, 10-year-old Helen Anstruther has just lost Nonie, the grandmother who raised her after her mother, Lisbeth, died when she was 3. Helen's father, the discontented, hard-drinking principal of the local high school in Mountain City, N.C., needs someone to stay with her while he does "more secret work for World War II" in Oak Ridge, Tenn. So he asks her mother's 22-year-old cousin, Flora, and, when one of Helen's best friends comes down with polio, insists that the pair remain at home to avoid the risk of infection. It's a bad idea: Weepy, unbuttoned Flora seems like a dumb hick to snobbish little Helen, who at first makes a thoroughly unappealing narrator. But as Godwin skillfully peels back layers of family history to suggest the secrets kept by both Nonie and Lisbeth (some are revealed; some are not), we see that Helen is mean because she's terrified. She's already lost her mother and grandmother, she's afraid her polio-stricken friend will die, and another close friend is about to move away--after delivering some home truths about how "you think you're better than other people." Helen got this trait from Nonie and both her parents, we realize, as Flora's comments gradually reveal how cruel Lisbeth was in her eagerness to leave behind her impoverished background. As usual with Godwin, the protagonists are surrounded by secondary characters just as fully and sensitively drawn, particularly Finn, the returned soldier whose attentions to Flora spark Helen's jealousy and prompt the novel's climax. Not all mistakes are reparable, we are reminded, but we learn what lessons we can and life goes on. Unsparing yet compassionate; a fine addition to Godwin's long list of first-rate fiction bringing 19th-century richness of detail and characterization to the ambiguities of modern life.(Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2013) 

 

THE DINNER: A NOVEL, BY HERMAN KOCH

Book Discussion date and time: Thursday,  October 23, 2014, at 1:00 PM.

REQUEST A COPY OF THE BOOK 

DOWNLOAD A DISCUSSION GUIDE PREPARED BY THE STAFF 

Meeting at an Amsterdam restaurant for dinner, two couples move from small talk to the wrenching shared challenge of their teenage sons' act of violence that has triggered a police investigation and revealed the extent to which each family will go to protect those they love.

BookList:

Already a runaway hit throughout Europe, boasting more than a million copies sold, Koch’s sixth novel arrives stateside, giving readers here a chance to mull over some rather meaty moral quandaries. But not so fast. First, Koch has a few false paths to lead us down. The story starts off casually and unassumingly with a dinner between two brothers, one running for prime minister of the Netherlands, along with their wives at one of Amsterdam’s finest establishments. The other brother, as narrator, sharply ridicules every absurd element of the night to great effect. But just as everything settles in, Koch pivots, and these pointed laughs quickly turn to discussion about their teenage boys and something they’ve done. And it’s at this point when readers will feel two distinct ideologies forming and will face the novel’s vital question: which position to side with? Koch’s organic style makes for a continuously engaging read that, if anything, leaves readers wanting more. Another 100 pages or so exploring these issues further would have been more than welcome, but what is here will no doubt stir some heady debates. -- Bayer, Casey (Reviewed 12-15-2012) (Booklist, vol 109, number 8, p17)

Publishers Weekly:

/* Starred Review */ This chilling novel starts out as a witty look at contemporary manners in the style of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage before turning into a take-no-prisoners psychological thriller. The Lohman brothers, unemployed teacher Paul and politician Serge, a candidate for prime minister, meet at an expensive Amsterdam restaurant, along with their respective spouses, Claire and Babette, to discuss a situation involving their respective 15-year-old sons, Michel and Rick. At first, the two couples discuss such pleasantries as wine and the new Woody Allen film. But during this five-course dinner, from aperitif to digestif, secrets come out that threaten relations between the two families. To say much more would spoil the breathtaking twists and turns of the plot, which slowly strips away layers of civility to expose the primal depths of supposedly model citizens, not to mention one character’s past history of mental illness and violence. With dark humor, Koch dramatizes the lengths to which people will go to preserve a comfortable way of life. Despite a few too-convenient contrivances, this is a cunningly crafted thriller that will never allow you to look at a serviette in the same way again. Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Feb.) --Staff (Reviewed November 12, 2012) (Publishers Weekly, vol 259, issue 46, p)

Library Journal:

Originally published in 2009, this best-selling Dutch novel is now available in English so the world can indulge in the dark comedy of award-winning author Koch (Save Us, Maria Montanelli ). At an upscale restaurant in the Netherlands, two couples have dinner and a much-needed conversation about their sons. Koch employs the narrative frame of a menu (aperitif, appetizer) to slowly unveil how these couples know each other and the rippling effect their children's actions have caused. By the time dessert is served, the reader knows that the two men are brothers, and the narrative takes on Tolstoyan overtones, with each unhappy family unhappy in its own way. In a single setting, Koch successfully deploys multiple narratives of a single event to effectively show that our construction of history, and constant attempts at overdetermining the future, is problematic. VERDICT A shocking, humorous, and entertaining novel that effectively uses a misanthropic narrator in leading us through a fancy dinner, with morally savage undertones. Recommend for fans of Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage and Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap . [See Prepub Alert, 8/27/12.]— Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH --Joshua Finnell (Reviewed January 1, 2013) (Library Journal, vol 138, issue 1, p81)

Kirkus:

A high-class meal provides an unlikely window into privilege, violence and madness. Paul, the narrator of this caustic tale, initially appears to be an accomplished man who's just slightly eccentric and prone to condescension: As he and his wife prepare for a pricey dinner with his brother and sister-in-law, he rhetorically rolls his eyes at wait staff, pop culture and especially his brother, a rising star in the Dutch political world. The mood is mysteriously tense in the opening chapters, as the foursome talk around each other, and Paul's contempt expands. The source of the anxiety soon becomes evident: Paul's teenage son, along with Paul's brother's children, was involved in a violent incident, and though the videos circulating on TV and YouTube are grainy, there's a high risk they'll be identified. The formality of the meal is undone by the parents' desperate effort to keep a lid on the potential scandal: Sections are primly titled "Aperitif," "Appetizer" and so on, but Koch deliberately sends the narrative off-menu as it becomes clear that Paul's anxiety is more than just a modest personality tic, and the foursome's high-toned concerns about justice and egalitarianism collapse into unseemly self-interest. The novel can be ineffectually on the nose when it comes to discussions of white guilt and class, the brothers' wives are thin characters, and scenes meant to underscore Paul's madness have an unrealistic vibe that show Koch isn't averse to a gratuitous, melodramatic shock or two. Even so, Koch's slow revelation of the central crisis is expertly paced, and he's opened up a serious question of what parents owe their children, and how much of their character is passed on to them. At its best, a chilling vision of the ugliness of keeping up appearances.(Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2012)

READING GUIDE FROM NOVELISTPLUS

The Dinner by Herman Koch

Summary

Note: Those who have not read this novel might want to avoid reading the summary and questions, since they necessarily reveal plot elements that the reader may prefer to encounter as surprises.

In The Dinner, two couples meet for a meal at a fashionable restaurant in Amsterdam to have a difficult conversation. Paul Lohman, who narrates the story, is dreading the appointment he and his wife, Claire, have with Paul’s brother, Serge, and Serge’s wife, Babette—Paul would prefer a simple plate of ribs at the cafe around the corner to the elaborate, multicourse meal his politician brother has suggested. But the couples need to talk, and Serge has suggested the restaurant.
As the meal progresses, Paul narrates it in obsessive detail, from the pretentious mannerisms of the maitre d’ who attends their table, to the pink champagne and olives served as an aperitif, to the absurdly small servings. Paul is aggressively critical of the pretentiousness of the restaurant, with its minute descriptions of every element of the food, and of Serge’s pretentiousness in selecting it.
As the dinner conversation meanders on, lapsing into polite small talk and awkward silences, Paul’s mind wanders. He fantasizes about his sister-in-law, wondering why she looked as if she’d been crying when Serge and Babette arrived; ponders his brother’s animalistic desires; and thinks about his teenage son, Michel, and the secret he and Michel share. He thinks about the disturbing video he found on Michel’s phone earlier that day and considers whether the girls who visit Michel are his girlfriends.
In the middle of the dinner, he realizes that he has picked up Michel’s phone rather than his own. Reviewing Michel’s messages, he discovers that Michel and Claire also have secrets—she has promised they will not be home before midnight, to allow Michel time, though she does not say for what, only that “you two have to do it tonight.” He is certain that the message is related to Michel’s recent behavior, but he does not know how. He and Michel meet in the park outside the restaurant to exchange phones, but Michel won’t tell him what’s going on.
As dessert is served, Serge introduces the reason for this uncomfortable meeting: Michel and Rick (Serge and Babette's son) have set fire to a homeless woman they found sleeping in front of an ATM machine. The crime has shocked the country, but police cannot identify the perpetrators from the fuzzy surveillance video they have. Only the boys’ parents know that Michel and Rick are the guilty parties. They have met this evening to decide how to handle what they refer to as “the incident.”
Paul, Claire, and Babette are all in favor of protecting the boys, preserving their futures, but Serge thinks they should come forward and plans to abandon his campaign for prime minister so that he can support Rick. When even Babette can’t dissuade her husband from what they all feel is a rash decision, Paul and Claire are pushed to action. Paul can’t do what he’d like to—he knows that the psychiatric diagnosis he received after his dismissal from the school would immediately make him a suspect—but Claire can, and will, to protect her son’s future.
Before the night is over, Serge is violently silenced, and the boys’ secret is saved, but the threat of their violence lingers.

Questions

This guide provides questions and answers, but they are not the only possible questions and answers. Readers bring their own personalities to books. Some readers see different things, some have different responses to characters, and some have different ideas about what the story means. The variety of possible answers is one of the reasons we find book discussions such a rewarding activity. These questions and answers should be used to begin a discussion, not to replace the readers’ own responses to the novel.

What is the significance of the novel’s setting?

The Dinner takes place during a dinner, but not just any dinner—this is a multicourse meal at a restaurant so trendy that most people wait months for reservations. In some ways it’s an odd choice: It’s a very public place for a very private conversation, a point reinforced by the intrusion of Serge’s public persona into events, first in his showy entrance into the restaurant and then in another diner’s request for a picture with him. And the parade of courses, from aperitif to appetizer to entree to dessert, disrupts the flow of conversation, eliminating any possibility of a serious, sustained discussion.
But a restaurant is not entirely a public space; in some ways, it can be seen as a collection of very private spaces, demarcated by the individual tables. A diner may leave briefly to use the restroom or step outside, but that places him in a public space. There is, simply, no real escape from the space of the table. The four participants are essentially trapped with each other in that bubble of privacy. That sense of entrapment raises the emotional stakes of the discussion, heightening the tension. It is that tension that leads to the violent denouement, the assault on Serge (which, ironically, takes place outside of the restaurant, at the cafe around the corner).
The restaurant setting also engages another set of contrasts that are thematically important to the novel. The restaurant is itself hyper-civilized. The mannered descriptions of the food, the fussy service, the fawning of the staff indicate a level of sophistication that suggests a kind of decadence—akin to Rome on the cusp of its fall. As the meal proceeds, the diners engage in the kind of polite small talk that usually accompanies such meals—discussions of the new Woody Allen film and summers in France.
But the couples have come to this icon of civilization to deal with an act of brutal cruelty. The sophistication and politesse of the setting masks a fundamental savagery, not only in the boys, but also in the adults discussing them. With the exception of Serge, the adults all try to render the crime abstract, obscuring the human life at its center. It’s not a murder, Claire insists, but “an accident . . . an unfortunate series of events” (p. 231); Babette calls the crime an “incident” that “we have to keep in perspective” (p. 233). The tragedy of the crime is not that an innocent woman was killed, or that homeless people have no safe place to sleep, but that the boys’ future may be ruined. It is an act of radical dehumanization, every bit as brutal as the murder itself.

How does Paul’s narrative voice affect the reader’s experience of the story?

First-person narrators, made untrustworthy by generations of unreliable narrators who implicate their readers in their own delusions and lies, are notoriously problematic for readers. Paul is, at first glance, not one of these. He is quite forthcoming with the facts of his son’s crime, as well as the details of his own violent past. He is candid about his distaste for the evening ahead, expressing a disdain for trendy haunts and his brother’s public persona that some might find refreshing—this is a man not swayed by the fickle tides of public approval. And many parents of teenagers will sympathize with his uncertainty about how much privacy to allow Michel. Even if there is something odd or awkward in his presentation, we’re naturally tempted to sympathize with Paul and his view of things.
Paul’s general misanthropy is pretty quickly revealed, however, and it builds through the narrative, from a source of discomfort to the reader to true horror. Beginning with his assertion that the evening with Serge and Babette will be “hell itself” (p. 6), readers gradually become aware that what seems like an off-putting disdain for people in general is in fact a murderous hatred—for the headmaster of the school where he taught, for Michel’s school principal, for the Dutch people as a whole, for his brother. Even before he reveals that he has been diagnosed with a mental illness, it becomes impossible for most readers to share his assessment of events.
But the reader has no escape, other than to close the book. The book is relentlessly first person, and it is central to Paul’s character that he is incapable of seeing events from any perspective but his own. No other perspective is available, so the reader is forced to see the action of the book through Paul’s eyes, however distasteful that view may be. It makes for a most uncomfortable experience, especially as events move toward a violent climax.

Why is Paul so repulsed by his brother?

Paul’s dislike of Serge is evident from the beginning of the novel; his distaste for Serge’s public persona, for what Paul sees as an ongoing performance, is undeniable. He is annoyed by Serge’s wine hobby and repulsed by his unthinking animal appetites, his methodical, efficient approach to eating: “And when we would finally find a place to eat, it was never a pretty sight. He would eat the way one fills the tank with gas: he would devour his cheese sandwich with white bread or his almond cake quickly and efficiently, to make sure the fuel reached his stomach as soon as possible” (p. 53). He imagines his brother in bed with Babette, sure “that he stuffs himself into a woman in the same way he stuffs a beef croquette into his mouth” (p. 54).
The basis of Paul’s disgust for his brother seems to be the evident gap between what he knows of Serge in private and Serge’s public persona. He is frankly amazed by the difference:

It is surprising and amazing to behold how my brother—the oaf, the lumpen boor who “has to eat now” and scarfs down his tournedos joylessly in three bites, the easily bored dullard whose eyes wander at every subject that doesn’t have to do with him—how this brother of mine on a podium and in the spotlights and on TV literally begins to shine—how, in other words, he becomes a politician with charisma. (p. 98)

Paul may be disgusted by his brother’s boorishness, but he is as much intrigued as disgusted by his duality, by his inauthenticity.
In reality, Paul’s dismissive disdain for Serge is an attempt to gloss over his own horror at Serge’s willingness to allow others to define him in this way. For Paul, “A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell; the actual evening is hell itself,” because “everything is a statement,” from what you choose to wear to whether you shave or not. “No matter what you do, you’re not free” (p. 6)—there is no escaping the judgment of others. If Paul feels himself trapped by the judgment of others, how much more so must Serge be? Worse, Serge actually embraces the power of others to define him, making a career of conforming to the expectations of his public. From Paul’s point of view, his brother has, in fact, embraced hell, making himself not only the subject of public scrutiny but a product of it.

Are Paul’s judgments of Serge and Babette accurate?

Paul dismisses Serge and Babette as examples of the worst kind of pretentiousness, motivated only by the exigencies of Serge’s political career and the currents of popular culture. Everything about them, from Serge’s wine hobby to the family’s adoption of an African boy, is inauthentic, merely part of an attempt to construct an image of Serge that will win him the next election. Their tastes are dull examples of Dutch parochialism, and Serge himself is basically stupid, driven alternately by his base appetites and by his political instincts, reveling in the petty advantages imparted by his status as a political celebrity, making a game of requesting same-day reservations at the most popular restaurants and enjoying the fuss that arises at his (inevitably late) arrival.
Paul seems to hint that if there is any hope for the couple, it resides in Babette, who is much smarter than her husband. It is she who lavishes love on Beau, their adopted son, and insists that Rick, the couple’s older son, treat him gently. Her wry skepticism about Serge’s sudden interest in wine connoisseurship suggests that she is at least aware of her husband’s fundamental shallowness. She cannot completely escape the taint of being Serge’s wife, but Paul is certain she is somehow better than Serge, providing a solid foundation for her husband’s crass ambitions.
Paul’s judgment of his brother pervades the novel from its first pages; it is, it must be admitted, supported by Paul’s depiction of his brother’s behavior at the dinner. Serge seems to be the stereotypical politician, his head populated only by talking points and slogans, his dreams only of the next election. His conversation is at times crude and his table manners perfunctory at best; his wife is clearly his “better half.” Readers are tempted to dismiss him, as Paul dismisses him, as a type incapable of real individuality. As a result, Serge’s emergence as the lone moral voice among the four is a bit jolting. Babette is firmly on Claire and Paul’s side, eager to dismiss “the incident” and move on with life—and all too willing to assent to an assault on Serge to stop him making the incident public.
Only Serge insists that some accounting must be made, that the boys must face some consequences for their cruel, violent behavior. Only Serge is willing to make the real sacrifices that come with parenthood, giving up his career to see his son through this difficult passage. Serge stands, in the end, as the single contradiction to Paul’s general indictment of humanity—he may, in fact, be driven by simple, animal appetites, but he is undeniably the most human character in the book. Only in Paul’s world can that essential humanity be so devalued.

What do Paul’s revelations regarding his own history mean for the story?

As the evening progresses, Paul loses track of the polite conversation swirling around him, instead lapsing into reminiscences. Over the course of the evening, he remembers a trip to Serge and Babette’s summer home in France, during which he imagines the French workmen of the region, who have already expressed their resentment of the Dutch visitors in graffiti, rising up and beating the smug, provincial Dutch visitors: “You could lure one of these Dutch pussies away from his home under the pretense that you knew where there was another, even cheaper winemaker, then pound him to a pulp in some cornfield. Not just slap him up against the side of the head—no, sterner stuff, baseball bats and flails” (p. 69). He recalls an incident when Michel was eight, during which he threatened to beat with a bicycle pump a shop keeper who yelled at the boy for kicking a soccer ball through his window, and a more recent encounter with Michel’s school principal, during which he beat the man violently. And he relates his own history, including a dismissal from his job as a history teacher and a consequent psychiatric evaluation that resulted in his being prescribed medication—medication he subsequently quit taking—to mitigate the symptoms of a genetic syndrome, an inheritable defect that produces his behavior.
These stories should offer some kind of reassurance. Re-situating Michel’s behavior in the context of his father’s history, they suggest a rational, scientific explanation for his horrific acts: he has inherited a genetic syndrome, a physiological defect. But that rational explanation offers no comfort. Even the fact that the condition could be treated is cold comfort, as Paul has already refused the medication that would render him “normal.” Rather than containing the threat of Michel’s and Paul’s violence, the heritability renders that threat more insidious, more pervasive. The sociopathic tendencies Paul and Michel exhibit are not unique to them, cannot be contained in their particular context or even within their individual persons. They are not a matter of choice or of moral judgment. They are, rather, part of the genetic inheritance of all humanity—we all carry the seeds of Michel’s (and Paul’s) violence within us.

Why is Paul so concerned with protecting his family’s happiness?

Paul is, from the beginning, concerned above all with keeping his family happy, or at least with maintaining the illusion of a happy family. As the evening begins, he introduces a line that will become a sort of mantra, a theme threading through the narrative. Quoting the first sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, he says, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (p. 6). For the rest of the novel, he strives to cling to the idea that his family belongs to the first category, the unremarkable, undifferentiated mass of happy families, that nothing that has happened has violated or reduced that happiness. Everything he does in reaction to Michel’s crime is directed at ensuring that “we would be able to go on living as a happy family” (p. 149).
His drive to preserve that happiness has a whiff of desperation about it; even looking at Michel’s phone, he worries that the action will create “a fissure that with the passing of time would expand into a substantial chasm. Our life as a happy family would never be the same” (p. 14). He regrets finding the incriminating videos on YouTube because they compromise his belief in that happiness: “I could have lived on a few more days, or maybe a few weeks or months, in my dreams about happy families” (p. 153). He even refuses to admit that the secrets he, Claire, and Michel have kept from each other could compromise their happy family: “Claire and I. Claire and Michel and I. We shared something. Something that hadn’t been there before. All right, we didn’t all share the same thing, but maybe that’s not necessary. You don’t have to know everything about each other. Secrets didn’t get in the way of happiness” (p. 289). At the end of the evening, faced with documentary evidence of the depth of Claire’s secrets—an amniotic fluid test she never told Paul she had—he turns away. “Do I need to know this? I thought. Do I want to know this? Will it make us happier as a family?” (p. 290). No, he decides, and returns the page of test results to the dresser drawer where he found it.
Clearly, this is not the certainty of a devoted family man; Paul’s vision of himself and Claire as “two parts of a happy family” (p. 288) is assiduously protected. But his investment in that vision has nothing to do with devotion to family. Rather, it is tied to his horror of judgment and the inescapability of the judgment of others. As he and Claire stroll to the cafe before meeting Paul and Babette for dinner, he contemplates the nature of happy families:

If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: that happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn’t have to be validated. . . . unhappy families—and within those families, in particular the unhappy husband and wife—can never get by on their own. The more validators, the merrier. Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can’t stand silence—especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone. (p. 6)

In other words, it is precisely the generic quality of happy families—Tolstoy’s idea that “happy families are all alike"—that Paul craves. Happy families are self-contained and undifferentiated; they require nothing from anyone. They are immune from the judgment of others. They are, in short, free, as Paul himself, ever conscious of the judgment of others, can never be.

What role do secrets and secrecy play in the novel?

The Dinner is riddled with secrets: secrets the characters keep from each other and from themselves, as well as secrets kept from readers. Claire and Paul are privy to different pieces of Michel’s crime at different times—Claire knows of the incineration of the homeless person at the ATM machine the night it happens, but it is Paul who discovers the videos on YouTube and on Michel’s phone—videos of that assault and others. And later, only Claire knows of Beau’s attempt to blackmail Rick and Michel with the threat to publicize all of the videos. Claire and Michel concoct the plan for Michel to handle Beau while Claire and Paul are at dinner with Beau’s parents, though it’s never revealed what exactly Michel is to do.
Paul keeps secrets on a grand scale, concealing key details of his story even from readers. He resorts frequently to a paranoid generality, refusing to give the name of the restaurant, for instance, “because next time it might be full of people who’ve come to see whether we’re there” (p. 3). He repeatedly refuses to name places or people and later, at a moment when the time is central to the plot, refuses to share this information: “I’m not going to say exactly what time it was. Exact times can turn on you later” (p. 249). It is an odd evasiveness, especially given his willingness to share truly incriminating, even horrifying details about Michel’s crime and about his own past. At times, it seems self-protective. Not supplying the name of the female student who reported his inappropriate comments on her paper to the school headmaster, for example, refuses her an identity, renders her abstract, less than human, and protects his sense of superiority. Not naming the restaurant protects him from the prying, judging eyes of others.
The Dinner could arguably be described as a crime story, in that it explores a horrific crime. But in most crime stories, the secrets are eventually aired to arrive at some kind of truth. The Dinner arrives at no such tidy conclusion. In the end, the secrets, large and small, remain. Paul claims never to look at the results of Claire’s amniocentesis. Michel never says exactly what happened to Beau while his parents were out to dinner. Claire and Paul never clear the air about who knew what about Michel’s crime and when, or what exactly happened to Serge at the cafe after the dinner. And the insidious evil of Michel’s crime—and his parents’ refusal to recognize it—goes unrecognized and unpunished.

About the Author

Before he became a writer, Herman Koch was a comedy actor and writer who appeared in radio comedy shows and acted on television in a satiric comedy sketch show he describes as similar to Monty Python's performances or The Office. Born in Arnhem, Netherlands, in September 1953, he moved with his family to Amsterdam when he was two years old. He now lives in Amsterdam with his wife, Amalia Rodriguez, and their son, Pablo.
Koch (whose name is pronounced similar to “Cook,” but with the final sound halfway between a hard k and an x) is the author of six novels and several collections of short stories, but The Dinner is the first of his works to be translated. The Dinner has, in fact, been a success on several counts: Translated into 21 languages, it has sold over a million copies across Europe. It was awarded the 2009 NS Audience Award and has been adapted for both theater and film. A Dutch movie is scheduled for release in late 2013.

Further Reading

William Landay, Defending Jacob (2012)
When a 14-year-old boy is found murdered, his body hidden in the woods around an upper-class Boston suburb, Assistant District Attorney Andy Barber vows to bring the killer to justice and allay the fears of the small community. But then evidence identifies Andy’s son Jacob as the killer. As Andy fights to defend his son, both Jacob’s secrets and his own are revealed, testing his marriage and forcing him to consider how far he will go to protect the child he loves.
Thomas H. Cook, The Last Talk with Lola Faye (2010)
Luke Paige is a disillusioned academic who feels intensely his failure to live up to what he saw as his early brilliance. Now middle-aged, he is on a book tour for another of his mediocre history books when he runs into Lola Faye Gilroy, the woman he believes set off a tragic chain of events that led to the murder of his father when he was in high school. He agrees to have a drink with Lola Faye, and his conversation with the woman he’d like to blame for his father’s death makes for chillingly compelling reading.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (2012)
When Amy Dunne disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, husband Nick is the prime suspect. In alternating first-person segments—from Nick’s point of view as he weathers the storm of attention around his wife’s disappearance and from Amy’s diary—the novel maps out what happens when soulmates turn toxic.
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991)
By day, Patrick Bateman is a Wall Street power broker, a wealthy, handsome star of Manhattan’s young elites. By night, he is a serial killer spiraling out of control, engaging in increasingly complex and extended sprees of rape, torture, and murder. The first person narrative forces the reader to see through Bateman’s eyes even as Bateman’s crimes are repulsive and cruel. The descriptions of Bateman’s violence are intense and graphic, but American Psycho is not a simple work of splatter horror. Rather, it’s an exploration of the empty savagery of capitalism.
Albert Camus, The Fall (1957)
Camus’s last complete work of fiction is a series of monologues by Jean-Baptiste Clamence, once a highly respected defense lawyer and now a regular patron of the seedy Amsterdam bar Mexico City. In meetings at the bar and in his rented room, Clamence tells an unnamed acquaintance how he fell from his former high status and how he came to be in possession of a famous fifteenth-century masterpiece. Set in Amsterdam against the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust, The Fall explores humanity’s propensity for evil in chillingly personal terms.

---

This Book Discussion Guide was developed by MaryAnne M. Gobble, who has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a freelance writer and editor living and working in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Her website address is http://maryannegobble.com

---

This material is copyrighted. Text may not be copied without the express written permission of the publisher except for the imprint of the video screen content or via the output options of the EBSCOhost software. Text is intended solely for the use of the individual user.

 READ CLAIRE MESSUD'S REVIEW IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

READ A REVIEW FROM THE OBSERVER

READ A REVIEW FROM THE WASHINGTON POST

National Book Awards, Long List for Nonfiction Announced

Fiction Long List Announced for National Book Awards

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, BY ANTHONY DOERR

BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME: MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2014 AT 1:00 PM

"From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work"--. (novelistplus) 
DOWNLOAD A DISCUSSION GUIDE PREPARED BY OUR STAFF 

Reviews

BookList:

/* Starred Review */ A novel to live in, learn from, and feel bereft over when the last page is turned, Doerr’s magnificently drawn story seems at once spacious and tightly composed. It rests, historically, during the occupation of France during WWII, but brief chapters told in alternating voices give the overall—and long— narrative a swift movement through time and events. We have two main characters, each one on opposite sides in the conflagration that is destroying Europe. Marie-Louise is a sightless girl who lived with her father in Paris before the occupation; he was a master locksmith for the Museum of Natural History. When German forces necessitate abandonment of the city, Marie-Louise’s father, taking with him the museum’s greatest treasure, removes himself and his daughter and eventually arrives at his uncle’s house in the coastal city of Saint-Malo. Young German soldier Werner is sent to Saint-Malo to track Resistance activity there, and eventually, and inevitably, Marie-Louise’s and Werner’s paths cross. It is through their individual and intertwined tales that Doerr masterfully and knowledgeably re-creates the deprived civilian conditions of war-torn France and the strictly controlled lives of the military occupiers.High-Demand Backstory: A multipronged marketing campaign will make the author’s many fans aware of his newest book, and extensive review coverage is bound to enlist many new fans. -- Hooper, Brad (Reviewed 04-15-2014) (Booklist, vol 110, number 16, p23)

Publishers Weekly:

/* Starred Review */ In 1944, the U.S. Air Force bombed the Nazi-occupied French coastal town of St. Malo. Doerr (Memory Wall ) starts his story just before the bombing, then goes back to 1934 to describe two childhoods: those of Werner and Marie-Laure. We meet Werner as a tow-headed German orphan whose math skills earn him a place in an elite Nazi training school—saving him from a life in the mines, but forcing him to continually choose between opportunity and morality. Marie-Laure is blind and grows up in Paris, where her father is a locksmith for the Museum of Natural History, until the fall of Paris forces them to St. Malo, the home of Marie-Laure’s eccentric great-uncle, who, along with his longtime housekeeper, joins the Resistance. Doerr throws in a possibly cursed sapphire and the Nazi gemologist searching for it, and weaves in radio, German propaganda, coded partisan messages, scientific facts, and Jules Verne. Eventually, the bombs fall, and the characters’ paths converge, before diverging in the long aftermath that is the rest of the 20th century. If a book’s success can be measured by its ability to move readers and the number of memorable characters it has, Story Prize–winner Doerr’s novel triumphs on both counts. Along the way, he convinces readers that new stories can still be told about this well-trod period, and that war—despite its desperation, cruelty, and harrowing moral choices—cannot negate the pleasures of the world. (May) --Staff (Reviewed February 17, 2014) (Publishers Weekly, vol 261, issue 07, p)

Library Journal:

/* Starred Review */ Shifting among multiple viewpoints but focusing mostly on blind French teenager Marie-Laure and Werner, a brilliant German soldier just a few years older than she, this novel has the physical and emotional heft of a masterpiece. The main protagonists are brave, sensitive, and intellectually curious, and in another time they might have been a couple. But they are on opposite sides of the horrors of World War II, and their fates ultimately collide in connection with the radio—a means of resistance for the Allies and just one more avenue of annihilation for the Nazis. Set mostly in the final year of the war but moving back to the 1930s and forward to the present, the novel presents two characters so interesting and sympathetic that readers will keep turning the pages hoping for an impossibly happy ending. Marie-Laure and Werner both suffer crushing losses and struggle to survive with dignity amid Hitler's swath of cruelty and destruction. VERDICT Doerr (The Shell Collector ) has received multiple honors for his fiction, including four O. Henry Prizes and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award. His latest is highly recommended for fans of Michael Ondaatje's similarly haunting The English Patient .— Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC --Evelyn Beck (Reviewed February 1, 2014) (Library Journal, vol 139, issue 2, p62)

Kirkus:

/* Starred Review */ Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect. In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She's taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure's father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children's House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he's put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she's broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure's father's having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major. Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.(Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2014)

Permalink

SWEET TOOTH, BY IAN McEWAN

BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME:  MONDAY SEPTEMBER 8, 2014 AT 1:00 PM.

Cambridge student Serena Frome's beauty and intelligence make her the ideal recruit for M15. The year is 1972. The Cold War is far from over. England's legendary intelligence agency is determined to manipulate the cultural conversation by funding writers whose politics align with those of the government. The operation is code named "Sweet Tooth." Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is the perfect candidate to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer named Tom Haley. At first, she loves the stories. Then she begins to love the man. How long can she conceal her undercover life? To answer that question, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage: trust no one. (Random House)

DOWNLOAD A DISCUSSION GUIDE PREPARED BY OUR STAFF

READ A REVIEW FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 

READ THE PUBLISHER'S GUIDE TO THIS BOOK 

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 LONGLIST ANNOUNCED

LONDON — Karen Joy Fowler and Joshua Ferris were among four American novelists who made it onto the 13-strong longlist of the 2014 Man Booker Prize, which for the first time is open to all novels originally written in English and published in Britain.  http://nyti.ms/1luyBOZ

I DO NOT COME TO YOU BY CHANCE, BY ADAOBI TRICIA NWAUBANI

BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME: TUESDAY, AUGUST12, 2014 AT 11:00 AM

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani was born in Enugu, Nigeria. She earned her very first income from winning a writing competition at the age of thirteen. As a teenager, she secretly dreamed of becoming a CIA or KGB spy. She ended up studying Psychology at the University of Ibadan instead. She lives in Abuja, Nigeria. I Do Not Come to You by Chance is her first novel. (Hyperion)

A deeply moving debut novel set amid the perilous world of Nigerian email scams, I Do Not Come to You by Chance tells the story of one young man and the family who loves him.
Being the opera of the family, Kingsley Ibe is entitled to certain privileges?a piece of meat in his egusi soup, a party to celebrate his graduation from university. As first son, he has responsibilities, too. But times are bad in Nigeria, and life is hard. Unable to find work, Kingsley cannot take on the duty of training his younger siblings, nor can he provide his parents with financial peace in their retirement. And then there is Ola. Dear, sweet Ola, the sugar in Kingsley?s tea. It does not seem to matter that he loves her deeply; he cannot afford her bride price.
It hasn?t always been like this. For much of his young life, Kingsley believed that education was everything, that through wisdom, all things were possible. Now he worries that without a ?long-leg??someone who knows someone who can help him?his degrees will do nothing but adorn the walls of his parents? low-rent house. And when a tragedy befalls his family, Kingsley learns the hardest lesson of all: education may be the language of success in Nigeria, but it?s money that does the talking.
Unconditional family support may be the way in Nigeria, but when Kingsley turns to his Uncle Boniface for help, he learns that charity may come with strings attached. Boniface?aka Cash Daddy?is an exuberant character who suffers from elephantiasis of the pocket. He?s also rumored to run a successful empire of email scams. But he can help. With Cash Daddy?s intervention, Kingsley and his family can be as safe as a tortoise in its shell. It?s up to Kingsley now to reconcile his passion for knowledge with his hunger for money, and to fully assume his role of first son. But can he do it without being drawn into this outlandish mileu? (Hyperion)

DOWNLOAD A READING GUIDE PREPARED BY THE STAFF

READ A REVIEW FROM THE WASHINGTON POST 

READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR 

READ THE AUTHOR'S NEWS ARTICLES ON THE GUARDIAN.COM 

READ THE AUTHOR'S OPINION ARTICLE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

VIEW A COLLEGE READING GUIDE FOR THE BOOK 

Looking Back at Nadine Gordimer's Life and Work

Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer who died on Sunday at 90, said “I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses — the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word.” (John Williams, New York Times) http://nyti.ms/1rbXWnW

Remembering Nadine Gordimer, a Lioness of Literary Activism

At 90 years of age, the South African writer Nadine Gordimer died Sunday, leaving behind a global legacy of both art and activism. “By the time she won the Nobel Prize in 1991, at age 68,” her obituary in The Mail and Guardian (South Africa) recalls, she had “10 novels, nearly 20 collections of stories or essays and innumerable pieces of journalism to her name.” (Jake Flanigin, New York Times)http://nyti.ms/1nsNHnU

New Wave of African Writers With an Internationalist Bent

Black literary writers with African roots (though some grew up elsewhere), mostly young cosmopolitans who write in English, are making a splash in the book world. Read this article for some excellent reading suggestions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/arts/new-wave-of-african-writers-with-an-internationalist-bent.html?ref=books

Best Boarding School Books

Here is an interesting list of books whose stories take place in boarding schools (not Hogwarts.)
http://publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/63026-10-best-boarding-school-books.html

Hemingway's Best Novels

Nancy W. Sindelar, author of Influencing Hemingway (Rowman & Littlefield), ranks Ernest Hemingway's fiction books.  http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/62748-best-hemingway-books.html

WILD: FROM LOST TO FIND ON THE PACIFIC COAST TRAIL, BY CHERYL STRAYED

 

Book Discussion date and time: Tuesday, July 22, 2014 at 11:00 AM. 

The inspiring memoir of a young woman who, reeling from personal catastrophe, set out alone to hike over a thousand miles from the Mohave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State. (An Oprah's Book Club pick.)

Reviews

DOWNLOAD A READER'S GUIDE PREPARED BY THE STAFF 

Publishers Weekly:

/* Starred Review */ In the summer of 1995, at age 26 and feeling at the end of her rope emotionally, Strayed resolved to hike solo the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,663-mile wilderness route stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian and traversing nine mountain ranges and three states. In this detailed, in-the-moment re-enactment, she delineates the travails and triumphs of those three grueling months. Living in Minneapolis, on the verge of divorcing her husband, Strayed was still reeling from the sudden death four years before of her mother from cancer; the ensuing years formed an erratic, confused time “like a crackling Fourth of July sparkler.” Hiking the trail helped decide what direction her life would take, even though she had never seriously hiked or carried a pack before. Starting from Mojave, Calif., hauling a pack she called the Monster because it was so huge and heavy, she had to perform a dead lift to stand, and then could barely make a mile an hour. Eventually she began to experience “a kind of strange, abstract, retrospective fun,” meeting the few other hikers along the way, all male; jettisoning some of the weight from her pack and burning books she had read; and encountering all manner of creature and acts of nature from rock slides to snow. Her account forms a charming, intrepid trial by fire, as she emerges from the ordeal bruised but not beaten, changed, a lone survivor. Agent: Janet Silver, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency. (Mar.) --Staff (Reviewed January 2, 2012) (Publishers Weekly, vol 259, issue 01, p)

Library Journal:

Strayed delves into memoir after her fiction debut, Torch . She here recounts her experience hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in 1995 after her mother's death and her own subsequent divorce. Designated a National Scenic Trail in 1968 but not completed until 1993, the PCT runs from Mexico to Canada, and Strayed hiked sections of it two summers after it was officially declared finished. She takes readers with her on the trail, and the transformation she experiences on its course is significant: she goes from feeling out of her element with a too-big backpack and too-small boots to finding a sense of home in the wilderness and with the allies she meets along the way. Readers will appreciate her vivid descriptions of the natural wonders near the PCT, particularly Mount Hood, Crater Lake, and the Sierras—what John Muir proclaimed the "Range of Light." VERDICT This book is less about the PCT and more about Strayed's own personal journey, which makes the story's scope a bit unclear. However, fans of her novel will likely enjoy this new book. [See Prepub Alert, 10/1/11.]— Karen McCoy, Northern Arizona Univ. Lib., Flagstaff --Karen McCoy (Reviewed February 15, 2012) (Library Journal, vol 137, issue 03, p119)

Kirkus:

/* Starred Review */ Unsentimental memoir of the author's three-month solo hike from California to Washington along the Pacific Crest Trail. Following the death of her mother, Strayed's (Torch, 2006) life quickly disintegrated. Family ties melted away; she divorced her husband and slipped into drug use. For the next four years life was a series of disappointments. "I was crying over all of it," she writes, "over the sick mire I'd made of my life since my mother died; over the stupid existence that had become my own. I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail so darkly." While waiting in line at an outdoors store, Strayed read the back cover of a book about the Pacific Crest Trail. Initially, the idea of hiking the trail became a vague apparition, then a goal. Woefully underprepared for the wilderness, out of shape and carrying a ridiculously overweight pack, the author set out from the small California town of Mojave, toward a bridge ("the Bridge of the Gods") crossing the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border. Strayed's writing admirably conveys the rigors and rewards of long-distance hiking. Along the way she suffered aches, pains, loneliness, blistered, bloody feet and persistent hunger. Yet the author also discovered a newfound sense of awe; for her, hiking the PCT was "powerful and fundamental" and "truly hard and glorious." Strayed was stunned by how the trail both shattered and sheltered her. Most of the hikers she met along the way were helpful, and she also encountered instances of trail magic, "the unexpected and sweet happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail." A candid, inspiring narrative of the author's brutal physical and psychological journey through a wilderness of despair to a renewed sense of self.(Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2012)

READ A NY TIMES REVIEW BY DANI SHAPIRO

READ AN ARTICLE FROM SFGATE (SAN FRANCISCO)

VISIT THE AUTHOR'S WEBSITE

MY 1,000-MILE WALK BACK TO HAPPINESS (MORE ABOUT CHERYL STRAYED'S LIFE) 

THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY: A NOVEL, BY RACHEL JOYCE

Book Discussion Date and Time: Monday, June 23, 2014 at 1:00 PM
Discussion Leader: Edna Ritzenberg 
Harold Fry, recently retired, lives in a small English village with his wife, Maureen, who seems irritated with almost everything he does, even down to how he butters his toast. Little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning the mail arrives, and within the stack of quotidian minutiae is a letter addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl from a woman he hasn't seen or heard from in twenty years.  Queenie Hennessy is in hospice and is writing to say goodbye. Harold pens a quick reply and, leaving Maureen to her chores, heads to the corner mailbox. But then Harold has a chance encounter, one that convinces him that he absolutely must deliver his message to Queenie in person, and he sets off on foot, determined to walk six hundred miles from Kingsbridge to the hospital in Berwick-upon-Tweed, because, he believes, as long as he walks, Queenie Hennessy will live.

DOWNLOAD A READING GUIDE PREPARED BY THE LIBRARY STAFF 

READ A REVIEW FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES 

READ A REVIEW FROM THE WASHINGTON POST

WATCH AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT, BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT

Book Discussion Date and Time: Tuesday, May 6, 2014 at 11:00 AM
Discussion Leader: Ellen Getreu

Claire Limye Lanme--Claire of the Sea Light--is an enchanting child born into love and tragedy in Ville Rose, Haiti.  Claire's mother died in childbirth, and on the girl's seventh birthday, her father, Nozias, decides to give her away to a local shopkeeper, who lost a child of her own, so that Claire can have a better life. Claire disappears, and  as Nozias and others look for her, we are brought deep into the intertwined lives of the people who live in this small seaside town.

READ A REVIEW FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES.

READ A REVIEW FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST

READ A REVIEW FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE

Watch Edwidge Danticat's TED talk 

Download the Readers' Guide, prepared by H-WPL Staff

REALLY? YOU'RE NOT IN A BOOK CLUB? (ARTICLE)

THE LOWLAND: A NOVEL, BY JHUMPA LAHIRI

Book Discussion Date and Time: Monday, April 7, 2014 at 1:00 PM
Discussion Leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman

Brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue vastly different lives--Udayan in rebellion-torn Calcutta, Subhash in a quiet corner of America--until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds.


Lahiri’s (The Namesake) haunting second novel crosses generations, oceans, and the chasms that despair creates within families. Subhash and Udayan are brothers, 15 months apart, born in Calcutta in the years just before Indian independence and the country’s partition. As children, they are inseparable: Subhash is the elder, and the careful and reserved one; Udayan is more willful and wild. When Subhash moves to the U.S. for graduate school in the late 1960s, he has a hard time keeping track of Udayan’s involvement in the increasingly violent Communist uprising taking place throughout West Bengal. The only person who will eventually be able to tell Subhash, if not quite explain, what happened to his brother is Gauri, Udayan’s love-match wife, of whom the brothers’ parents do not approve. Forced by circumstances, Gauri and Subhash form their own relationship, one both intimate and distant, which will determine much of the rest of their adult lives. Lahiri’s skill is reflected not only in her restrained and lyric prose, but also in her moving forward chronological time while simultaneously unfolding memory, which does not fade in spite of the years. A formidable and beautiful book. (Publishers Weekly)

Pulitzer Prize winner Lahiri's (The Interpreter of Maladies ) unparalleled ability to transform the smallest moments into whole lives pinnacles in this extraordinary story of two brothers—so close that one is "the other side" of the other—coming of age in the political tumult of 1960s India. They are separated as adults, with Subhash, the elder, choosing an academic career in the United States and the more daring Udayan remaining in Calcutta, committed to correcting the inequities of his country. Udayan's political participation will haunt four generations, from his parents, who renounce the future, to his wife and his brother, who attempt to protect it, to the daughter and granddaughter who will never know him. VERDICT Lahiri is remarkable, achieving multilayered meaning in an act as simple as "banging the edge of the lid three or four times with a spoon, to break the seal"; her second novel and fourth title is deservedly one of this year's most anticipated books. Banal words of praise simply won't do justice; perhaps what is needed is a three-word directive: just read it . (Library Journal)

READ A REVIEW FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

READ ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND HER WORK ON NPR.ORG 

Download the H-WPL Readers' Guide, prepared by our Staff

DEAR LIFE:STORIES, BY ALICE MUNRO (WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2013)

BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME: MONDAY, MARCH 10, 2014, AT 1:00 PM
BOOK DISCUSSION LEADER: ESTHER DAVIDSON

In story after story  in this brilliant collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human (Random House.)

Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

BookList:

/* Starred Review */ Munro’s latest collection brings to mind the expression, “What is old is new again.” As curiously trite and hardly complimentary as that statement may sound, it is offered as unreserved praise for the continued wonderment provided by arguably the best short-story writer in English today. Some of these 14 stories present new directions in Munro’s exploration of her well-recognized universe (rural and small-town Ontario), while other stories track more familiar paths, with characters and familial situations reminiscent of previous stories. That said, the truth is that on whatever level of reader familiarity Munro is working, in every story she finds new ways to make the lives of ordinary people compelling. “Amundsen” has a setting that will pique the interest of avid Munro followers, yet it is delivered with a tone surprising and even disturbing. A young woman ventures to a remote area to assume teaching duties in a TB sanitarium, soon entering into a dismal relationship with the head doctor. But with Munro’s care in craftsmanship and her trademark limpid, resonant style, the reader accepts that the depressing aftereffect is Munro’s intention. “Haven” will come to be considered one of her masterpieces: a quick-to-maturation piece, a fond specialty of Munro’s, this one is about a teenage girl going to live with her aunt and uncle while her parents do missionary work. In quite dramatic fashion, she observes that what might appear as somone’s acceptance of another person’s quirks may actually be indifference. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A first printing of 100,000 copies supports Munro’s international popularity. -- Hooper, Brad (Reviewed 10-01-2012) (Booklist, vol 109, number 3, p31)

Publishers Weekly:

/* Starred Review */ Joan Didion once said “I didn’t want to see life reduced to a short story... I wanted to see life expanded to a novel.” Didion had her own purposes, but Munro readers know that the dichotomy between expansive novel and compressed short story doesn’t hold in her work. Munro (Too Much Happiness) can depict key moments without obscuring the reality of a life filled with countless other moments—told or untold. In her 13th collection, she continues charting the shifts in norms that occur as WWII ends, the horses kept for emergencies go out of use, small towns are less isolated, and then gradually or suddenly, nothing is quite the same. There are no clunkers here, and especially strong stories include “Train,” “To Reach Japan,” “Haven,” and “Corrie.” And for the first time, Munro writes about her childhood, in the collection’s final four pieces, which she describes as “not quite stories.... I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life.” These feature the precision of her fiction with the added interest of revealing the development of Munro’s eye and her distance from her surroundings, both key, one suspects, in making her the writer she is. While many of these pieces appeared in the New Yorker, they read differently here; not only has Munro made changes, but more importantly, read together, the stories accrete, deepen, and speak to each other. (Nov.) --Staff (Reviewed September 24, 2012) (Publishers Weekly, vol 259, issue 39, p)

Library Journal:

Every new collection from the incomparable Munro, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, is cause for celebration. This new volume offers all the more reason to celebrate as it ends with four stories the author claims are the most autobiographical she has written. As she has moved through the decades, so have her characters, whose stories are mostly set in small-town Ontario in an earlier time or who are looking back from the present with some earned perspective. Two standouts among the riches: in "Train," a postwar drifter lands on the doorstep of an older woman who takes him in and allows him to live companionably with her for the next couple of decades. When she is suddenly taken ill, a revelation about her past brings up haunting memories of his own, causing him to abruptly abandon her. In "Dolly," the comfortable happiness of an older couple is shaken by the reappearance of a woman with whom the husband had a brief but intense wartime affair. In every story, there is a slow revelation that changes everything we thought we understood about the characters. VERDICT Read this collection and cherish it for dearlife.— Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., ON --Barbara Love (Reviewed November 1, 2012) (Library Journal, vol 137, issue 18, p65)

Kirkus:

/* Starred Review */ A revelation, from the most accomplished and acclaimed of contemporary short story writers. It's no surprise that every story in the latest collection by Canada's Munro (Too Much Happiness, 2009, etc.) is rewarding and that the best are stunning. They leave the reader wondering how the writer manages to invoke the deepest, most difficult truths of human existence in the most plainspoken language. But the real bombshell, typically understated and matter-of-fact, comes before the last pieces, which the author has labeled "Finale" and written in explanation: "The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last--and the closest--things I have to say about my own life." The "first" comes as a surprise, because her collection The View from Castle Rock (2006) was so commonly considered atypically autobiographical (albeit drawing more from family legacy than personal memory). And the "last"? When a writer in her early '80s declares that these are the last things she has to say about her life, they put both the life and the stories in fresh perspective. Almost all of them have an older character remembering her perspective from decades earlier, sometimes amused, more often baffled, at what happened and how things turned out. Most pivot on some sort of romantic involvement, but the partners are unknowable, opaque, often even to themselves. In "Train," a character remarks, "Now I have got a real understanding of it and it was nobody's fault. It was the fault of human sex in a tragic situation." In "Leaving Maverley," she writes of "the waste of time, the waste of life, by people all scrambling for excitement and paying no attention to anything that mattered." The author knows what matters, and the stories pay attention to it.(Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2012)

READ A REVIEW FROM THE GUARDIAN

READ A REVIEW FROM THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS         

Download the H-WPL Readers' Guide, prepared by our Staff