January Selection 2007
January 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.
Books for January Meeting 2007
Everyman
Everyman takes its title and its theme from the medieval play in which an unprepared sinner is informed by Death of his imminent judgment day. Everyman, in that 15th-century incarnation, is deserted as he faces his maker by first his friends and his family and then his wealth; these impostors are followed by his strength, beauty and knowledge. All that is finally stacked in his favour in the divine audit are his good deeds. It is not a cheerful tale.
Roth's Everyman, who is godless and nameless, is already dead and nearly buried when we meet him. His few surviving advertising buddies, from the old New York agency where he was once creative director, are around his grave in a broken-down Jewish cemetery beside the turnpike, listening out for the man they knew in the orations of those who knew him better. His second wife, Phoebe, half paralysed by a stroke, the one woman he ever loved, whom he left for a Danish model of 24, recalls him only on their first holiday together, 'swimming across the bay', full of life. His brother, Howie, remembers him in his boyhood, when they both worked for their father who had a jewellery store, full of dexterity and promise, fascinated by the workings of watches, intent on the tiny mechanics of time passing. The others he has left behind, his two embittered sons from his first marriage and his forgiving daughter from his second, begin the process of covering him in earth.
When the mourners have departed, Roth's Everyman faces not his maker, but his readers, and makes his case for sympathy or absolution. For this disembodied hero, judgment day is all in his own head. 'Religion was a lie that he had recognised early in life and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness - the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep.' His plea-bargaining, given that fact, consists in his humanity, in his weakness; he is not claiming to be exceptional, 'only vulnerable and assailable and confused'.Few writers are as alive as Roth to the savagery of failed marriages and as convinced of the impossibilities of fidelity or love. As his Everyman's whole life flashes before him, this particular, universal dying animal is assaulted, principally, by the pain his divorces have brought about and the unmissable thrill of the sex that prompted them.
He argues to himself 'of his right, as an average human being, to be pardoned ultimately for whatever deprivations he may have inflicted upon his innocent children in order not to live deranged half the time'.
Philip Roth proves that, at 72, he is still writing at the height of his phenomenal powers with a stunning portrait of a dead man seeking absolution, Everyman
Observer, Tim Adams, Oct. 2006
The Awakening
"The Awakening was published in 1899, and it immediately created a controversy. Contemporaries of Kate Chopin (1851-1904) were shocked by her depiction of a woman with active sexual desires, who dares to leave her husband and have an affair. Instead of condemning her protagonist, Chopin maintains a neutral, non-judgmental tone throughout and appears to even condone her character's unconventional actions. Kate Chopin was socially ostracised after the publication of her novel, which was almost forgotten until the second half of the twentieth century. The Awakening has been reclaimed by late twentieth-century theorists who see Edna Pontellier as the prototypical feminist. A woman before her time, Edna questions the institution of marriage, (at one point she describes a wedding as 'one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth') has sexual desires of her own, and becomes completely independent of her husband.
www.english-literature.org
Kate Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents were from Irish and Creole backgrounds. When Chopin was widowed at 32, she began writing to support herself and her six children. She was widely accepted as a writer of local color fiction, and was generally successful until the publication of her scandalous novel The Awakening, in 1899. Perched between the social conservatism of the nineteenth century and dealing with tabooed themes too soon for the growingly open twentieth, the novel's sexually aware and shocking protagonist, Edna Pontillier, pushed Chopin into literary oblivion. Chopin, and her memorable characters and stories, finally emerged from society's morally imposed ostracization during the resurgence of women's rights in the early 1970's.
Even today, much of the criticism of Chopin's most famous work centers on Edna Pontillier's morals-- is she a fallen woman, a bad mother, a selfish human being? Why does the character still, in an era where sexual openness is not totally condemned, point us toward a discussion of what makes a woman "bad?" What does the novel say about constrictions and constructions of the feminine role, today and during the time it was written? What does the novel say about human consciousness, and conscience?
Chopin's most famous novel's structure and evocative natural imagery deserve more attention. Her short stories, from "A Night in Acadie" to "An Egyptian Cigarette" to "A Vocation and a Voice," are also quite interesting. Chopin was and is an accomplished writer who deserves to be discussed not only from the standpoint of one woman's "awakening" but from the position of all women and indeed, all humans, in society, today and yesterday.
womenswriters.net
In discovering herself Edna is discovering her fate. In exploring Edna's regression, as she puts aside adult life, retracing her experience to its beginnings, for her its essence, Chopin describes as well a journey inward, evoking all the prodigal richness of longing, fantasy, and memory. The novel is not a simulated case study, but an exploration of the solitary soul still enchanted by the primal, charged, and intimate encounter of naked sensation with the astonishing world.
Marilynne Robinson, in the introducton to the Bantam edition of The Awakening
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