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)
That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo
Thirty years ago and full of hope, on their Cape Cod honeymoon, Jack and Joy Griffin drafted the Great Truro Accord, a plan for their future that's now thirty years old and has largely come true. At the time they were living in Los Angeles, where Griffin wrote scripts that were already losing his interest. He left all that behind for a family life and to teach at the sort of New England college his parents had aspired to. Now the two of them are back on the Cape - where Jack also spent childhood vacations which still cast a long shadow - to celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura's best friend. Things look good, even if cracks are beginning to show...Jack's been driving around with his father's ashes in an urn in the boot of his car, though his mother's very much alive and often on his mobile. Laura's boyfriend seems promising - but be careful what you wish for, especially if there's a chance it could come true. A year later, at her wedding, Jack has a second urn in the car, and his life is starting to unravel. Full of every family feeling imaginable, painfully comic and profoundly involving, "That Old Cape Magic" is surprising, uplifting and unlike anything this Pulitzer Prize winner has ever written.
amazon.co.uk
About the Author
Richard Russo won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for his fifth novel Empire Falls (made into a TV series starring Paul Newman, Ed Harris, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Helen Hunt). He is also the author of Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody's Fool (filmed with Paul Newman), Straight Man and Bridge of Sighs, as well as a collection of stories, The Whore's Child. His original screenplay is the basis for Rowan Atkinson's film Keeping Mum, with Maggie Smith and Kristin Scott Thomas. He lives with his wife in Maine and in Boston.
“That Old Cape Magic” is the only Richard Russo novel that has its own theme song. It’s also the only Russo book that needs one. And Mr. Russo supplies enough props, picture postcards and pratfalls to underscore the fragility of his latest venture. Its main character, the autobiographical-sounding Jack Griffin, feels adrift after having lived in the worlds of both moviemaking and academia and is no longer sure where his heart or his talents lie. This entertaining but facile book suggests that Mr. Russo is himself contemplating those same questions.
Putting his great, woebegone small-town books behind him, the author of “Empire Falls,” “Straight Man” and “Nobody’s Fool” (among others) adopts an abbreviated and touristy format this time. He uses two weddings and a couple of funerals (or at least deaths) as plot points. And he sticks to postcard-pretty settings: sunny California, coastal Maine and Cape Cod. Now cue the music: to the tune of “That Old Black Magic,” Jack’s parents used to sing their own version, calling it “That Old Cape Magic,” as they drove across the Sagamore Bridge and began each summer’s overpriced, ultimately disappointing Cape Cod vacation.
New York Times
"That Old Cape Magic" is eminently filmable -- two weddings and two urns of cremains in search of release, if not a funeral. It boasts a tight single-year timeline, photogenic locations, lots of physical comedy and snappy dialogue. But readers looking for the warmth and complexity of that old Russo magic may prefer his harder-hitting, small-town novels.
LA Times
Richard Russo has written a novel for people who are terrified of becoming their parents, which is to say for everybody. The misanthropic hero of "That Old Cape Magic" jitters with the anxiety of influence, repelled and attracted to his mom and dad like Woody Allen playing Hamlet. After those sprawling epics of American life "Empire Falls" and "Bridge of Sighs," Russo's new book seems especially intimate, a dyspeptic romantic comedy from a Pulitzer Prize winner who catches the bittersweet humor of our common neuroses.
Washington
Post
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian artist living in Paris, is a memoir of growing up in Iran during the 1979 revolution that deposed the shah. With the recent publication of two other Iranian memoirs, Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas and Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, Persepolis offers readers another link to understanding a country whose politics is gaining attention in the American media.Satrapi presents her story as a graphic novel — a book-length comic book — and the stark drawings owe much to Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, which chronicled his father's experiences at Auschwitz. Although Satrapi is able to convey a wide range of emotions, the simplicity of the artwork lacks the texture of Maus, thus keeping Persepolis from rising above a child's point of view.
But the simple lines and shapes of Satrapi's drawings lend poignancy to the story. The fact that she is able to portray such a vast range of emotions with a few simple strokes of a pen is impressive. That she does this consistently for 153 pages is a mighty achievement.
The dialogue seems somewhat stilted, as when a fundamentalist protester remarks to Satrapi's more liberal mother: "What was more important, to fight against the satanic influence of Western imperialists or to obstinately hold on to a personal preference that created divisions among the ranks of the revolutionaries?" But Satrapi defends her writing style: "In those days, people really talked that way. One had a feeling, in revolutionary and intellectual circles, that they spoke from a script, playing characters from an Islamized version of a Soviet novel."
Persepolis covers Satrapi's story from when she was 6, living in Tehran with her intellectual parents, to when she was 14 and had to flee to Vienna to continue her education. At its strongest, it's an inspiring coming-of-age story.
Illuminating the similarities between the Western and Islamic worlds is what Satrapi does best. In both worlds, kids grow up and rebel against their parents and society. They try to shape their own identities. The only difference between a girl growing up in the USA and a girl growing up in Iran is that in Iran, rebellious behavior we take for granted could lead to jail time — if not worse.
Satrapi tried to live in a world that was falling apart, a world that she understood better than her parents imagined, but a world that was — and is — absurdly unfair.
USA Today
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