April Selection 2007
April Selection 2007
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting.
Books for April Meeting 2007
Dirt Music
Shortlisted for the 2003 Booker, Dirt Music is an evocative and compelling journey through the sunburnt landscape of Western Australia. Three Aussie drifters are trying to escape their past in a small, claustrophobic fishing village on Australia's vast west coast.
The novel centres around a complex triangular relationship between three burnt out and emotionally hurt residents of White Point, an isolated small fishing village, north of Perth on the Western Australia coast. Although fictional, White Point is the classic insular and hierarchical small community where outsiders are viewed with suspicion and there is a threatening undercurrent of violence.
Georgie, a 40 year old newcomer to White Point, is living with Jim, the local powerful fishing 'king'. She has been a life-long drifter trying to prove a point to her unhappy but wealthy family and now finds herself in a futile relationship, spending her nights drinking vodka and surfing the net. She becomes attracted to Luther, a local poacher whose family is despised by White Point locals and have had more than their fair share of bad luck and tragedy. When Jim discovers their secret, Luther is forced to flee north to the tropics, leaving Jim and Georgie with the dregs of their empty relationship. Jim and Georgie follow Luther up North and search him out in his isolated island hideaway, but we are never certain whether dangerous Jim is intent on forgiveness or revenge.
The overpowering sensation when reading this novel is the power of the language - the achingly bleak and beautiful landscape of coastline and desert, the haunting and vivid dreams and nightmares of the emotionally suffering, the clever and moving literary allusions to the world of literature and music and the rough cynical slang of the Aussie vernacular. The combination of both the raw and the profound is like contrasting counterpoint on a musical score.
The three characters are all stuck, so emotionally crippled and hampered by their past that they are incapable of action. They are very real and flawed but likable, even Jim, despite the tight feeling of restrained violence. But it is the bizarre sideshow of minor characters that illuminate the shadows of Winton's stark landscape - Rusty, the drug crazed amputee set on revenge; Horrie and Bess, an elderly couple on their last campervan adventure, facing death in the eye by yelling macabre Anne Sexton poems ; Beaver the lovable ex gang member whose Vietnamese bride is nicknamed "Mail-order" by the parochial community. A marvelous array of what is weird and wonderful and downright scary about humanity.
book-club.co.nz
If character were Winton's only strength, Dirt Music would still be a compelling story, but the author's understated, vivid language is entrancing -- lean and quick as a dingo. He's strongest when he unveils horror with seeping dread: "The dog doesn't get up to greet him. The truck windows have no sheen. Cicadas. The boat wake arrives; it laps up a desolate crescendo while he begins to see what he's looking at. He vaults from the boat in his wetsuit and walks up to the dog which lies in a stain of itself on the chain's end. It feels awkward to enjoy the spell of such delicately rendered trauma, but Dirt Music's quiet intensity only tightens as the story evolves from a domestic drama into an epic quest. And if you have trouble shaking Winton's novel from your mind, take heart. Georgie and Lu would be the first to admit that some stories can't be abandoned easily.
The Washington Post Todd Pruzan , May 5 02
An exhilarating multilayered amalgam of withering satire and beguiling character creation — a more than worthy successor to [Winton's] critically acclaimed Cloudstreet and The Riders....Winton presents this uniquely textured fable of growth and change as a boisterous comedy....A terrific novel. Winton's best yet.
Kirkus Reviews
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Xiaolu Guo's first novel in (deliberately bad) English is a romantic comedy about two lovers who don't speak each other's language. The heroine, twenty-three-year-old Zhuang, the daughter of shoe factory owners in rural China, has come to London to study English.
She calls herself Z because English people can't pronounce her name, but when she arrives at Heathrow she's no better at their language. Set loose to find her way though a confusion of youth hostels, Full English Breakfasts and a lack of the famous London fog, she winds up lodging with a Chinese family in Tottenham, and thinking she might as well not have left home. But then she meets a man who changes everything.
From the moment he smiles at her, she enters a new world of sex, freedom and self-discovery. But she also realizes that, in the West, 'Love' does not always mean the same as in China, and you can learn all the words in the English language and still not understand your man.
As soon as she enters his life, Qiao's pragmatic wit begins to prod at her lover's character. His penchant for second-hand clothes is merely a desire to wear "rubbish costumes" while his romanticised affection for the rustic over the intellectual makes him a "Red Guard who living in the West". Even his fashionable obsession with Frida Kahlo and suffering is reduced to a fittingly bathetic avatar: "I think you like to feel the weight of the life. You said you hated Ikea because furniture from Ikea are light and smooth."
Perhaps the strangest attempt at cultural translation comes when she is swept up in a march opposing the Iraq war. Shocked by the passive protesters, whose smiling faces seem more akin to those of pleasure walkers on a "weekend family picnic", she remembers a Mao dictum -- "Oppose unjust war with just war" -- and concludes: "If people here want to against war in Iraq, they needing have civil war with their Tony Blair ... If more people bleeding in native country, then those mens not making war in other place."
It's a comic and childish comment that cuts to the chase and is indicative of the humour throughout this gentle face-off between Chinese pragmatism and the insouciant liberalism of middle-class England.
Qiao also offers an outsider's perspective on Western loneliness, particularly our inability to combine the freedoms that sexual liberation and capitalism offer us with our understanding of family. It's Michel Houellebecq without the distaste for sex: Qiao loves her first exposures to sex and considers becoming a prostitute for personal rather than financial reasons.
Guo's wicked sense of humour and occasionally masterful descriptions of the new fantasy worlds that open up in our first truly intimate relationships reveals a talent that outstrips this easy genre, with the potential to move forward into weightier, more important work.
theaustralian.new.com, Daniel Stacey, Feb. 2007
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers has been nominated for the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction
Author Biography:
Xiaolu Guo was born in 1973 in a fishing village in south China. She studied film at Beijing Film Academy, worked as a screenwriter and film teacher as well as writing several books in Chinese.
Xiaolu moved to London in 2002 where she began a diary written in English, which became the seed for this novel. Village of Stone, a novel first published in China, appeared in English translation in 2004.
Xiaolu has directed award-winning films including The Concrete Revolution and How is Your Fish Today? She divides her time between Europe and China.
Some useful book club links (external links: open in a new window)
- Reader's Area of this site
- Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities