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 February meeting, 2009
The Story of a Marriage
by Andrew Sean Greer
World War II shapes and complicates a young married couple's shared and separate lives in this latest from California author Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli, 2004, etc.).What narrator Pearlie Cook says of her introverted spouse
We learn early on that she met shy, handsome neighbor Holland Cook in grade school in their native
Greer creates numerous moving moments, but they're often obscured by emotionally charged figurative language and imperfectly dramatized expressions of enlightened social and political attitudes. (If only George Orwell had edited this book ) Little more can be said without revealing the novel's crucial surprises - except that the author simply tries too hard, and the reader balks at its surplus of sentimentality.Greer's best feature as a novelist is his willingness to keep trying new things. Let's hope his next book avoids the worst excesses of this one.
Kirkus Reviews
'This is an exquisite story with shattering realizations about love.'
Amy Tan
“A beautiful and moving tale of war, sacrifice, race, and motherhood.”
Khaled Hosseini
“Greer’s considerable gifts as a storyteller ascend to the heights of masters like Marilynne Robinson and William Trevor.”
New York Times
“Wondrously unsettling…Greer’s new novel is equally praiseworthy…A timeless story of conflicting loyalties.”
New York Times Book Review
“What can be seen plainly on every page of this slim, lovely novel is Greer’s prodigious talent.”
“It’s too good to put down and yet each passage is also too good to leave behind…a perfect mix of what we want from literature.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Thoughtful, complex and exquisitely written.”
Washington Post
“A mesmerizing tale, where you’ll want to charge forward to dig out the secrets in these people’s lives while also wanting to drag your heels and revel in the beautiful writing of this hugely talented writer.”
The Oregonian
“Greer has packed a tremendous amount into less than 200 pages. The story has a languorous, unhurried feel, and yet it contains many surprises. These are not always the shocking twists found so often in fiction but rather resemble the smaller jolts of real life, the moments in which we learn something new about those we love. The Story of a Marriage is a beautiful, understated novel that celebrates the heroes of private battles.”
London Observer
“It’s hard not to gush about American author Andrew Sean Greer’s new novel. For once, the publicity superlatives are true. The Story of a Marriage is a wonderful, exquisitely written book of the kind that keeps the reader up late at night to find out what happens next….Apart from sounding like an effusive sycophant, however, the trouble with writing about The Story of a Marriage is that its plot is full of twists and delayed revelations…truly touching, thought-provoking novel.”
Financial Times
“Makes you want to race ahead and stay up all night until you know what happens in the end.”
Colm Toibin
“A poignant account of people helpless in the throes of passion and an affirmation of the strength of the human spirit.”
Publisher’s Weekly
A Lost Lady
By Willa Cather
The personality of Willa Cather is characterized chiefly by firmness. She is positive, determined, a trifle withdrawn. Her charm is undeniable, yet it has the air of being at times carefully reserved for a greater occasion.
This precision of thought and character illuminates her writing. Miss Cather, born in Virginia, spent most of her early life in Nebraska, where she was graduated from the State University in 1895. She has been both journalist and teacher. Then, quite deliberately, she began her career of writing, after many years of apprenticeship, and has, as deliberately, progressed.
I saw her last summer in the Vermont mountains. She was to deliver a series of addresses on the craft of writing. She spent days in careful thought and preparation. She walked alone in the woods and fields. Her talks are said to have been superb. The students literally worshipped her. It was this tremendous force of hers, breaking through an equally tremendous reserve, that made her lectures so inspiring.
My enthusiasm for her latest book is unqualified. A Lost Lady is a character study of strength and beauty. The story of a high-strung, attractive, weak woman, told as she is reflected in the lives of her various lovers, is superbly wrought. I can think of no other picture of broken idealism so striking as that of young Neil confronted with the truth about his idol, Marian Forrester. The background of the Middle West of the last century seems thoroughly inconsequential. The story is that of Marian Forrester. Here, surely, is writing one of the most brilliant technicians in American letters!
Time Magazine (September 10, 1923)
"A delicate, lovely, fragile piece of literature … that very rare thing, a perfect thing in parvo."
Chicago Daily Tribune
"More novelette than novel, but it is almost perfect of its kind."
The Bookman
A Lost Lady is Cather's elegiac portrait of the spirit of an earlier age. In her depiction of Marian Forrester, the much-admired figurehead of culture and society in the town of Sweet Water, Cather evokes a quality of life that began, for her, to vanish sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century. To Cather, much of what was wrong with twentieth century life was the absence of those qualities that Mrs. Forrester embodies: charm, warmth, and a certain graciousness of manner that has no place in the harsher climate of an industrialized society.
enotes.com
Marian Forrester is the symbolic flower of the Old American West. She draws her strength from that solid foundation, bringing delight and beauty to her elderly husband, to the small town of Sweet Water where they live, to the prairie land itself, and to the young narrator of her story, Neil Herbert. All are bewitched by her brilliance and grace, and all are ultimately betrayed. For Marian longs for "life on any terms," and in fulfilling herself, she loses all she loved and all who loved her. This, Willa Cather's most perfect novel, is not only a portrait of a troubling beauty, but also a haunting evocation of a noble age slipping irrevocably into the past.
amazon.com
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