December Book Selection 2008
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)
Book for December meeting, 2008
Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier
Raimund Gregorius is a 57-year-old classics teacher. Nicknamed “Mundus” by his pupils, he travels from his native Switzerland to Portugal in pursuit of a striking woman who scribbles a telephone number on his forehead after stepping back from a suicidal leap, and to seek the author of a slim volume of philosophical ruminations he is given by a bookseller.
Such serendipitous coincidences continue when he arrives in Lisbon. The author is dead, but in a plot device familiar from A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Mundus gradually reads the essays while seeking out the author’s relatives, friends and acquaintances. In the process, he gains a new perspective on his own life – quite literally so when, in a particularly clunky development, he gets a new pair of glasses.
Mundus is a likeable character, and his escape from a life of duty to explore his stifled inner self is an engaging premise. Mercier’s novel has already sold two million copies since its publication in German, but it is hampered by an inelegant translation. Even so, this cannot explain the absence of narrative tension, or Mercier’s grandiose style. They make the novel particularly ponderous.
www.newstatesman.com
… a meditative novel that builds an uncanny power through a labyrinth of memories and philosophical concepts that illuminate the narrative from within, just as its protagonist will discover the shadows of his neglected soul by bringing the story of another man into the light.
The writing has a seasoned quality to it, as though the ideas themselves have gestated for decades, and then through a creative alchemy, crystallized into a book that manages to be both a narrative and a philosophical work. And yet Night Train to Lisbon maintains a remarkable immediacy that makes for a rare reading pleasure.
www.sfgate.com
According to its American publisher, Night Train to Lisbon has rung up "over two million copies sold worldwide" and has been lavishly reviewed throughout Europe. It's a strange book. Its protagonist, Raimund Gregorius, is 57 years old, a professor of dead languages at a secondary school -- a "gymnasium" -- in Switzerland. He is set in his ways and most unlikely to change them.
He is comfortable with words, with texts, far less comfortable with people. His childless marriage ended several years ago. Now he lives alone in a drab apartment, talks from time to time with his friend Constantine Doxiades, wears heavy eyeglasses and assumes that the rest of his days will be spent in exactly the same way. Then, on his way to the school on a rainy morning, he is stopped in the street by a woman who writes a telephone number on his forehead with a felt-tipped pen. He is startled but recovers, and in their brief encounter before she disappears he learns that her native language is Portuguese. He feels his life changing. He goes to a Spanish bookstore, where he is drawn to a book called A Goldsmith of Words, by Amadeu de Prado. The dealer, who "found it last year in the junk box of a secondhand bookshop in Lisbon," presents it to him as a gift. The book is in Portuguese, which he does not know, but he obtains a dictionary and laboriously sets about reading it, learning a new language in the process.
As he immerses himself in the book … he realizes that the chance encounter with the woman and the gift of the book are omens that cannot be ignored. He tells himself that "I'd like to make something different out of my life," that "my time is running out and there may not be much more of it left."
So he quits the school, closes up his apartment, and takes a night train to Lisbon to search for Amadeu de Prado. It isn't an easy journey, since he has spasms of doubt about this "crackpot idea" and more than once thinks to turn back, but he persists.
One problem with Night Train to Lisbon is that its plot, if plot is the word for it, consists almost entirely of talk - talk, talk, talk - about people and events in the past. The effect of this endless conversation is numbing rather than stimulating. Night Train to Lisbon never engages the reader, in particular never makes the reader care about Gregorius. It's an intelligent book, all right, but there's barely a breath of life in it.
www.washington post.com
Night Train to Lisbon
is a novel of ideas that reads like a thriller: an unsentimental journey that seems to transcend time and space. Every character, every scene, is evoked with an incomparable economy and a tragic nobility redolent of the mysterious hero, whom we only ever encounter through the eyes of others.
The author, too, seems to enjoy keeping his readers at arm's length. Pascal Mercier is the pseudonym of the Swiss philosopher Peter Bieri, who retired early from a chair in Berlin to write novels. Having situated himself on the disputed border between fact and fiction, Pascal Mercier now takes his rightful place among our finest European novelists.
www.telegraph.co.uk
Some useful book club links (external links: open 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
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)
Book for January meeting, 2009
Home by
Marilynne Robinson
After a 24-year silence, Marilynne Robinson returned to fiction with her second novel, Gilead. By any standards, that novel - an international bestseller and Pulitzer-winner in 2005 - was a surprising success.
Home is also set in Gilead; once again John Ames appears, but on the periphery. This time the central character is Jack Boughton, who featured briefly in the previous novel, the prodigal son of Ames's friend, the Reverend Boughton, a retired Presbyterian minister.
After 20 years away, Jack returns home, a destitute 43-year-old alcoholic and atheist, who has been in and out of jail for unspecified crimes. His elderly father is ailing and being cared for by his sister, Glory, the baby of the family. A former schoolteacher, recovering from a broken relationship, she is also seeking solace in the balm of Gilead. Temporarily, she hopes.
It is 1961, although the outside world makes very little impression in Gilead or on the sepulchral home of the title. Jack's return, nonetheless, excites great agitation in the household. His father, who blames himself for his son's waywardness and estrangement from loved ones - both his birth family and the teenage wife and daughter Jack abandoned 20 years before - is desperate to work out the why of his own and Jack's failure.
Glory, for her part, is angry not for Jack's years of absence but for the fact that he was always, in some way, lost.
Robinson's prose is beautiful and lusciously startling. That restored car gleams "like a ripe plum", old man Boughton's thinning fine hair is "a soft white cloud-like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming", washed cucumbers smell "like evening, like chill".
There is no grand resolution. Jack, who is the only one of the three who accepts his lostness as his particular fate, realises that all he can offer his father is a reassurance that he has not lost his faith. But, he remarks, even after a life of deception and betrayal, honesty is the one scruple he has left.
Robinson insists on the impossibility of love yet celebrates its manifestation on every page in the small, exquisite gestures of grace her flawed characters manage, in their failure, to bestow on one another.
Irish Times
'Her fiction attends with rapt attention to the "dear ordinary" breathing fresh air into the long-standing debates of American Protestantism'
Daily Telegraph
'A quietly moving novel of faith and forgiveness.'
Daily Mail
'So finely wrought as to make the work of her more productive contemporaries seem tawdry by comparison... The cadences of her prose have a resonant authority more like that of a great music rather than language. The effect is utterly haunting. The bad news is that is makes all other writing seem jejune for ages afterwards'
Sunday Telegraph
'A luminous, profound and moving piece of writing. There is no contemporary American novelist whose work I would rather read'
Independent
'This is certainly a novel about faith and love. However, it is also a meditation on doubt and fear... There is both a subtlety and a simplicity about her most powerful themes. She asserts the elusiveness of perfection, the foolishness of sever self-judgement and the unavoidable necessity of having to suffer in order to love... The beauty of HOME is that it does not offer the counterfeit currency of certainty but proffers the under-valued coin of hope. That is its glory, too'
Herald
'Compelling'
Observer
'One of the saddest books I have ever loved'
Guardian
There is almost no first-rate American fiction about what happens in a household where religion is the family business, but if you ever wondered what it's like to be a preacher's kid, you can't do better than "Home." Robinson's greatest achievement is that she manages to introduce the notions of belief and religious mystery without ever seeming vague. She never shies from uncomfortable truths. When Jack asks Glory why she hates Gilead and wants to leave, she says, "Because it reminds me of when I was happy." Fixing dinner, she "wished that it mattered more that [she and her father and brother] loved one another. Or mattered less, since guilt and disappointment seemed to batten on love. Her father and brother were both laid low by grief, as if it were a sickness, and she had nothing better to offer them than chicken and dumplings." This is a novel that builds its truth out of quotidian detail—the way Jack thumbs the felt on his hat brim, the way Glory
thinks in Bible verses: watching Jack leave at the end of the book, she thinks, "A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face. Ah, Jack." This is book full of sadness, but the greatest sadness on the reader's part is that it has to end.
Newsweek
Home offers such intricate characterizations, so many passages of surpassing wisdom and beauty, one yearns to quote page after page. It rejoices in the humblest actions - giving a haircut, weeding, making meals, coffee - the holiness of the daily.
San Francisco Chronicle
“Any novel from Marilynne Robinson arrives with a sense of the miraculous. More than two decades passed between the publication of her quietly earth-shattering debut, Housekeeping, a book that remains a modern classic, and its triumphant, expansive follow-up, Gilead, a Pulitzer Prize-winner in 2005. We can be grateful to not have to wait so long for Home ... Marilynne Robinson lives up to her dazzling reputation.”
Vogue
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
Some useful book club links (external links: open new window)