Castlebar Book Club
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 December meeting, 2007
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Per Petterson, winner of the 2007 Impac Award, was born in 1952 and was a librarian and a bookseller before he published his first work, a volume of short stories, in 1987. Since then he has written three novels which have established his reputation as one of Norway’s best fiction writers. To Siberia and In the Wake are published by Harvill in English translation.
In 1948, when he is fifteen, Trond spends a summer in the country with his father. The events - the accidental death of a child, his best friend's feelings of guilt and eventual disappearance, his father's decision to leave the family for another woman - will change his life forever. An early morning adventure out stealing horses leaves Trond bruised and puzzled by his friend Jon's sudden breakdown. The tragedy which lies behind this scene becomes the catalyst for the two boys' families gradually to fall apart. As a 67-year-old man, and following the death of his wife, Trond has moved to an isolated part of Norway to live in solitude. But a chance encounter with a character from the fateful summer of 1948 brings the painful memories of that year flooding back, and will leave Trond even more convinced of his decision to end his days in solitude.
Per Petterson's novel, Out Stealing Horses, alludes to Gestapo atrocities in wartime Oslo and the heroic Norwegian resistance romanticised in the 1965 film The Heroes of Telemark. Trond, a 67-year-old man, has retired to a remote corner of eastern Norway, where the barren landscape comforts him after the death of his wife. The countryside idyll is destroyed, however, by the unexpected arrival of a man who knows something Trond would rather forget.
When he was 15, Trond had gone out horse-stealing with his friend Jon; shortly afterwards, Jon suffered a nervous breakdown. What had caused his upset? The second world war had just ended; to the shame of many Norwegians, Knut Hamsun had supported the Nazi occupation and his country's pro-German leader Quisling. In those uncertain times came the terrible news that a small boy had accidentally shot dead his twin brother using Jon's hunting rifle. Years later, as the adult Trond is forced to reflect on the accidental killing and the devastation it caused, painful memories return of life in occupied Norway. Out Stealing Horses is tinged with an autumnal sense of loss and the self-examination of an old man looking back on his life. Beckett's Malone Dies is a clear influence, but Petterson is triumphantly his own man. This book is a minor masterpiece of death and delusion in a Nordic land.
The Guardian, Ian Thompson, Dec. 2005
The very title in the original - Ut og stjæle hester - surprised Norwegian readers with the rural rawness of the wording, a phrase, we will learn, with resonance from the war-time Resistance. Yet the backwoodsman Trond who surveys the physical challenges and pains of that distant July - and kinaesthetically evokes them - is, like his creator, a sophisticated man who reaches out to Dickens and Jean Rhys for parallels.
It would be reductive, and wholly against Petterson's intentions, to say that Trond spiritually profits from the tragic happenings of 1948 and from their remembrance. Or that they have indelibly scarred him. Rather he learned earlier than many that living is inextricable from experiencing fear, agony, heartbreak, and that, even after these, one can, amazingly, go on. Joys occur even if parenthesised by pain. Petterson's description of Trond and his father baring themselves to the falling rain, even doing handstands together in it, exhilarates, and with what quiet tenderness he recounts the boy and his mother out for the day over the border in Karlstad, two diffident Norwegians in a smart Swedish town. And even in a present uncomfortably close to old age Trond enjoys the unexpected visit of his good-hearted daughter.
Anne Born's sensitive translation does justice to an impressive novel of rare and exemplary moral courage, and commendably makes convincing the confrontations of different individuals, different milieux.
The Independent, Paul Binding, Nov. 2005
Out Stealing Horses will interest fans of Rick Bass, J.M. Coetzee, and even Marilynne Robinson -- Mr. Patterson has something like her talent for scene setting and chronological collage, and all of the writers above have mastered a kind of tempered, minor-key retrospection. Out Stealing Horses is one of my favorite two or three new novels to appear this year." The New York Sun, Benjamin Lytal
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The story of two women who are unable to get out of Afghanistan when it is torn apart by the Russian invasion and civil war.
Kabul are picking themselves up again after the defeat of the Taleban. Unlike Hosseini’s best-selling debut The Kite Runner, which gradually turned into a novel about exile, A Thousand Splendid Suns is set almost exclusively in Afghanistan; it tells the story of two women who are unable to get out of the country when it is torn apart by the Russian invasion and civil war.
Mariam and Laila are trapped in Kabul by a succession of conflicts and the brutal patriarchy that predates them. The novel offers extraordinarily harrowing insights into the lives of Afghan women over the past three decades, suggesting that the men and boys who left the country – Hosseini’s focus in The Kite Runner– were the lucky ones, even if they found it difficult to adjust to the loss of status and material possessions.
Mariam’s problems begin long before the Soviet invasion, when her wealthy father marries her off to Rasheed, an ignorant and violent man who lives in a poor area of Kabul. Rasheed does not mind that Mariam is illegitimate; middle-aged himself, he is delighted to have a young bride and the chance of a son to replace a child who died through his negligence.
The early pages of the novel convey what was (and still is in some parts of the country) a commonplace horror for Afghan girls, who have traditionally been little more than a unit of exchange between men. When Mariam fails to provide him with a son, Rasheed starts treating her as a slave, beating her savagely at the slightest excuse. It falls to a neighbour, a university lecturer who has lost his job, to tell his teenage daughter Laila that the Russian invasion has at least initiated a new and better regime for the next generation of Afghan women.
To Laila, Mariam is virtually invisible, a figure in a burka who never ventures outside without her coarse and vulgar husband. Then the shelling begins, Laila’s elder brothers become shaheed – martyrs in the fight to liberate their country – and she finds herself alone in a war-torn city without a male protector. Deafened by a bomb blast and terrified that she is pregnant by her boyfriend Tariq, who has already left Afghanistan, Laila’s fate starts to resemble that of countless Afghan women down the ages.
It is a road to humiliation and servitude, and it is only the friendship she forms with Mariam, against all expectation, that saves her from falling into total despair. The two women share similar experiences as victims of male lust, contempt and violence, and when Laila’s daughter is born she becomes both the focus of their affection and their hope for a new generation.
Where The Kite Runner was constructed on two levels, the realistic and the symbolic, Hosseini’s second novel is unflinchingly anchored in the real world. The terrible things that happen to Mariam and Laila are the consequence of confining women to a domestic milieu in which men wield absolute power, aided and abetted by religious fanatics.
Their situation, which seems bad enough when they first meet, is indescribably worse once the Taleban ride into Kabul with their proclamations banning women from work, education and public places. Hosseini demonstrates brilliantly the way in which men such as Rasheed collude with and even welcome a regime that confirms the power of fathers, husbands and brothers. Growing a beard is not much of an imposition for him, and he finds himself belonging to an elite solely on the grounds of gender.
Since they were driven out of Afghanistan, there has been a tendency in the West to forget the worst excesses of the Taleban, whose simple-mind-ed puritanism is easy to mock. But their regime was no laughing matter, as Hosseini’s novel reminds us, and their return would be an unmitigated disaster for that country and its women. This is popular fiction of the most superior kind, and I suspect that it will have an even greater impact on many readers than The Kite Runner.
Despite its stunning success, that novel was in some ways an experiment, in which it was possible to sense Hosseini feeling his way as a writer; there were longeurs, in which the different parts of the narrative did not fit easily together, and the plot sometimes seemed more important than the characters.
In A Thousand Brilliant Suns, Hosseini is not just more assured, although this feels like the work of a much more accomplished writer. If he cut his teeth by writing about his countrymen, it is the plight of Afghanistan’s women that has brought him to realise his full powers as a novelist.
The Times, Joan Smith, 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