December Selection 2006
December Selection 2006
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 December Meeting, 2006
The Pickwick Papers
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, better known as The Pickwick Papers, is the first novel by Charles Dickens. It was originally an idea by Robert Seymour the illustrator, to which Dickens was asked to contribute as an up and coming writer following the success of Sketches by Boz, published in 1836. Dickens, supremely confident as ever, increasingly took over the unsuccessful monthly publication after Seymour had committed suicide. With the introduction of Sam Weller the book became the first real publishing phenomenon, with bootleg copies, theatrical performances, Sam Weller joke books and other merchandise. It was inspired by a town, Corsham. The name Pickwick is likely to have come from that of a nearby farm, Pickwick Lodge Farm. Pickwick is the part of Corsham which is on the A4, once the main road from London to Bristol.The novel was published in 19 issues over 20 months; the last was double-length and cost two shillings. In bereavement for his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, Dickens missed a deadline and consequently there was no number issued in May 1837. Numbers were typically issued on the last day of its given month
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Unlike some of his later works it is extremely episodic and comic. It always shows its origins in a periodical with its cliff-hangers and the way Dickens changes the story and various characters’ position in the novel as it grows and according to their popularity (such the Wellers). Mr Samuel Pickwick is the founder and chairman of the absurd Pickwick Club which consists Tupman, Snodgrass and Winkle who go through various highly amusing and often quite ridiculous adventures that are scantily interconnected and never amount to a complex sequence of events until perhaps Pickwick’s disastrous misunderstanding with Mrs Bardell. The story instead progresses near-randomly through trips to Rochester (and the meeting with the awful Jingle who challenges Winkle to a duel), Dingley Dell, Eatanswill and Bury St Edmunds. In these stages of the novel the only elements holding the plot together are the troublesome rascal Jingle and his servant Trotter who recur often. Later, Pickwick ends up rather unfortunately in the Fleet Prison and various romances ensue for the main characters to general amusement for the reader if never a sense of great import or substance. Although the book begins Dickens’ lengthy concern about prisons and the evil of lawyers, it is less dark and full of mystery than later works.
Bibliomania.com
Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch
"DAI SIJIE rose to international prominence a few years ago with the publication of his first novel, ''Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress,'' a charming fable about two Chinese boys, sent to be re-educated in the countryside, who awaken the passions of a young seamstress by introducing her to the forbidden classics of French literature. In ''Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch,'' this Paris-based Chinese author once again takes the reader to his homeland, only now the presiding spirit isn't Balzac but Kafka.
The new novel's European-educated Chinese protagonist, Muo, returns to his native land intent on becoming an itinerant Freudian analyst, even though most of his would-be clients prefer to remain unaware of the perils and pleasures of the unconscious. Luckily, Muo has another plan, a hidden agenda -- securing the release of his first love, a young woman with the ''loneliest name imaginable,'' Volcano of the Old Moon. Now a political prisoner under the control of the sinister Judge Di, she will be freed if Muo can procure a nubile young virgin as a bribe. Unfortunately for Muo, the supply of virgins in rapidly modernizing contemporary China turns out to be dauntingly limited.
Elegantly translated from the French by Ina Rilke, Dai's account of the attempt to satisfy Judge Di's hunger for a woman's ''essence of yin'' is enlivened by a cast of characters whose stories merge sharp political commentary with the fanciful eccentricities of a fairy tale. One rare (and particularly tempting) virgin is a professional embalmer, the 40-year-old widow of a homosexual who committed suicide after failing to consummate their marriage. She tells Muo about other unusual characters, like the hapless Communist official who can never ascend the party ladder because he suffers from hemorrhoids and thus is unable to sit still for endless games of mah-jongg with his superiors.
As Muo's travels proceed, China itself becomes a character: at times stunning in its lust for development, at others almost medieval in its cruelty and backwardness. When Muo comes upon two soldiers digging a trench in a vast graveyard, one of them explains their grim task: ''Criminals are executed on their knees. . . . A bullet through the heart. They keel over right into the hole. If they twitch a lot in their death throes, the loose earth settles nicely around them. Next the doctors come to remove the organs.''
Dai deftly establishes a sense of intimacy between the reader and his scholarly hero, adding depth and complexity to Muo's increasingly doubt-filled quest. (''His search for a virgin was not helped by demographics: the majority of the generation among whom the virginal were mainly to be found had abandoned the countryside. . . . Dreamers, by contrast, were to be found everywhere.'') The novel is strongest when Dai shadows the lives of Muo and the others with stark visions of official corruption, but even when the frenetic search for a virgin threatens to become overwhelming, his zesty storytelling continues to entertain. As ''Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch'' hurtles toward its end, one incredible encounter after another forces Muo (and the reader) to reconsider the logic underpinning not only psychoanalysis but modern life itself."
The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Atamian,
"The set pieces and the slaying of symbolic dragons that line Muo's path sometimes interrupt rather than drive the story, which may be Dai's filmmaker's eye lending action to his hero's yearnings. But we keep reading Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch for its voice and wit, for the delicious turns of phrase and perfect characterizations of a naif with professional pretensions inside a "poor dreamy and dream-interpreting head." Will Mr. Muo narrow down his "polyamorous perversion" to the wholesome love of one woman? He has earned our fondest hope for a happy ending.
Elinor Lipman, Washington Post
"Sijie's dense and slightly claustrophobic narrative often has the quality of a bad dream, not least when Muo's teeth start coming loose. Unusually for a comic novel, it grips like a thriller and has some page-turningly tense moments. It also has some interesting details about Chinese life, from the poisonousness of peacock's gall, a favourite suicide method of Manchu nobles, to the delicacy "Three Cries": live newborn mice, eaten bones and all, who squeal once when they are pinched in chopsticks, a second time when they are dipped in sauce, and a third when they go into the diner's mouth, "among the yellow teeth of a judge perhaps, or the dazzling dentures of a lawyer, his red Pierre Cardin tie stained with grease.
Mr Muo's Travelling Couch has been a bestseller in Paris, where Sijie lives. It is only a few years ago since French intellectual life was full of Lacanians and Maoists, and this book juxtaposes the legacy of Freud with the ruins of communism; the two great 20th-century intellectual systems that failed to work. In that sense it is a significant book, as well as an eccentric one. It is obsessional, anxious, jokey, and unresolved - but perhaps that's just right for a book about life on the couch".
Daily Telegraph
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