August Selection 2007
August 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. (Previous Book Club selections)
Books for August Meeting, 2007
The Woman in the Fifth by Douglas Kennedy
Harry Ricks is a man who has lost everything. A romantic mistake at the small American college where he used to teach has cost him his job, his marriage and his relationship with his only child. And when the ensuing scandal threatens to completely destroy him, he votes with his feet and flees... to Paris .He arrives in the French capital in the bleak midwinter, where a series of accidental encounters lands him in a grubby room in a grubby quarter, and a job as a nightwatchman for a sinister operation.Just when Harry begins to think that he has hit rock bottom, romance enters his life. Her name is Margit - an elegant, cultivated Hungarian ‚migr‚, long resident in Paris - widowed and, like Harry, alone.But though Harry is soon smitten with her, Margit keeps her distance. She will only see him at her apartment in the fifth arrondissement for a few hours twice a week, and remains guarded about her work, her past, her life.However, Harry's frustrations with her reticence are soon overshadowed by a ever-growing preoccupation that a dark force is at work in his life - as punishment begins to be meted out to anyone who has recently done him wrong. Before he knows it, he finds himself of increasing interest to the police and waking up in a nightmare from which there is no easy escape.Random House WHEN A MAN ARRIVES IN Paris alone at Christmas, with $5,000 and a laptop that does not, as yet, contain a Great American Novel, he is, of course, running away from something. In the case of Harry, the college professor who narrates Douglas Kennedy’s latest novel, it is something involving an ill-judged affair with a student and a swift severing of marriage, fatherhood and employment.
Preferable to ignominy in Ohio, he decides, would be to hole up in Paris ’s seediest arrondissement and work as a nightwatchman for a Turkish gangmaster. Kennedy, an extremely popular author in France , gives us the city not as it looks to visitors who pay €100 a night to stay there, but those who earn that much a week in their illegal jobs. It’s a godforsaken place.
Then Margit appears. A Hungarian émigrée, she seduces him most boldly (the subtle prose doesn’t let it get as icky as drunken sex between two depressed fiftysomethings might be), then orders him to come to her apartment every three days at 5pm for more. He must never come at any other time, but this, he assumes, is par for the course with your sexy Parisian mistress . . .
But while things are looking up in the bedroom, they are increasingly nasty back at the concrete cell that Harry calls home. His neighbours keep turning up dead and he fears he will be next, but as the bodies mount, it starts to look as if he is in the frame.
At this point, The Woman in the Fifth turns into a nail-bitingly compulsive thriller. Whose screams does Harry hear in the night? Who is behind the strange things happening to him – and to his family back home? Is he mad? The answer is unguessable, impossible, yet quite believable.
A thriller for people who don’t like thrillers; a romance for people who don’t like romances; a philosophical enquiry into the nature of truth and a thumping good read. Kennedy has done it again.
TimesOnline.co.uk
No one does preppie angst quite like Douglas Kennedy. He made his name with a series of white-collar thrillers detailing American executives caught out of their comfort zone. Then in 2001 he broke into the mainstream with The Pursuit of Happiness. He utilised the skills needed for a page-turning crime caper to produce an ambitious saga of a grand New York family in the McCarthy era. Switching to a female narrative voice brought him a new readership but since that success his output has been of variable quality. However, his new novel finds Kennedy once again adapting his modus operandi to new possibilities and with highly successful results. ....There are a lot of cinematic references but this book specifically pays homage to Hitchcock. It develops as a kind of North by Northwest of Montmartre, a knowing tribute that throws in plenty of MacGuffins to keep the suspense bubbling and pulls out a twist to match anything Hitch framed. The only disappointing aspect is the shoddy line-editing job, which missed a shocking amount of typos. But even this shouldn't stop The Woman in the Fifth placing Kennedy back in the best- seller lists.
independent.co.uk, Christian House, July 2007
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks
Sebastian Faulks’s huge popularity has been built on novels such as Birdsong and Charlotte Gray in which imaginary individuals are caught up in large historical events. Those not seduced by these often skilfully realised narratives complain that some of the devices Faulks uses are a little obvious and that some of the writing is a little flat. His last novel, Human Traces, although set once more in the past, was regarded as a departure, digging rather deeper into the human psyche as two psychiatrists investigated the causes of schizophrenia and psychosis.
Faulks’s new novel is heralded as “unlike anything he has written before”, but again it deals with mental illness. It opens at Cambridge in the 1970s where Faulks’s narrator, Mike Engleby, is an undergraduate. The first three chapters shuttle between his life at university, his deprived childhood in working-class Reading , and his experiences as a scholarship boy at a grim public school. Then, as Engleby puts it, “something truly terrible” happens: Jennifer Arkland, a fellow undergraduate to whom Engleby is attracted, disappears.
The novel is revealed as “a sort of journal” that Engleby has kept “on and off” and brings up to date when fate finally catches up with him. By choosing a narrator who is not merely unreliable in the literary sense but actually suffering from “dissociation”, Faulks has set himself a technical problem that he doesn’t entirely resolve. In order to bring a more objective light to bear on his narrator’s behaviour, he rather crudely arranges for Engleby to read and reproduce not only a long police statement made by an old acquaintance, but also a complicated psychiatric report on himself. Engleby can do this (and memorise great chunks of Jennifer’s stultifying diary) because his memory is “of an almost ‘savant’ or autistic order”.
As a panellist on Radio 4’s The Write Stuff, Faulks is expected to produce literary parodies to order, and while the novel includes some mildly entertaining cameos from the likes of Jeffrey Archer, too much of it – ritual abuse at public school; Oxbridge murder mystery – seems merely hand-me-down. Matters improve once Engleby is incarcerated and amuses himself keeping one step ahead of the psychiatrists. But this seems rather too late for a novel that, although never less than intelligent, has hitherto been oddly unengaging.
It is no surprise to the reader when the police question Engleby, and this is a shame because the novel might have been more compelling if our narrator’s disturbed personality had not been so obvious from the offset. Engleby is not, however, charged, and subsequently becomes a journalist, a job he manages to hold down with considerable success because, although bonkers (his own word), he is also clever and has strong opinions.
Times Online, Peter Parker, May 2007
Sebastian Faulks's ambitious new novel, Engelby, probes the wayward mind of a Cambridge student in the 1970s After his successes with Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, superior sagas of love, trench foot and French peasantry, Sebastian Faulks these days seems determined not to mention the war.
Psychiatrists were the heroes of his last book, Human Traces, and this latest, equally ambitious one, also resounds to the misfirings of an aberrant mind. The narrator is Mike Engleby, a fresher at Cambridge in 1973, and it's from his journal that we build a profile of his 'otherness' - his terrible dress sense, his Rabelaisian appetite for prescription drugs and alcohol, his zest for petty thievery (the novel is a Big Rock Candy Mountain of wallets protruding from the pockets of unattended coats and dozy off-licence assistants looking the other way while Engleby plunders them for fags and gin). His memory, photographic and encyclopaedic one moment, hopelessly amnesiac the next, is enough to send anyone bonkers. But is he bonkers? He seems to have a social life; he attends history lectures with Jennifer, for whom he has a hankering; there are evenings at the folk club and university 'socs'. But you wait in vain for him to have a proper conversation. He's at the fringes, watching, being there - volunteering, fetching and carrying - but his airy assertions of 'friendships' are imaginary. He is, we come to realise, a weirdo, a gatecrasher, a 'loner' - and we all know what that means.
....This isn't a book in which a great deal happens, so it comes almost as a relief when Jennifer vanishes, presumed dead, perhaps buried in the wall behind Engleby's drinks cabinet. And why not? We have learnt that the poor boy was bullied at public school and beaten by his father. If only the police knew he had Jennifer's diary hidden behind the cistern...The eventual arrival of men in white coats - a welcome introduction of sane voices - heralds the most successful section of the book. Relieved of the burden of faux suspense, ideas kept at the fringe by passing ephemera are foregrounded, themes blossom. This, you sense, is what Faulks has been waiting for - the chance to engage more directly with his subject. His prose, freed from the shackles of a troubled mind, starts to shine too. The trouble is it shines too late.
guardian.co.uk, Phil Hogan, May 2007
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