July Selection 2006
July Selection, 2006
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 July Meeting, 2006
A Life's Music
Story Synopsis
Alexei Berg's father is a well-known dramatist and his mother an opera singer, but in late 1930s Russia both parents suffer constant suspicion and harrassment under Stalin's reign of terror. So great is Alexei's musical talent that he is allowed to continue his studies, but two days before his first concert in May 1941, he arrives home to find his parents being arrested. He flees, abandoning his budding career as a concert pianist, and assumes the identity of a dead Russian conscript to fight against the advancing Germans. When the war is over he stays on as a general's driver, continuing to keep his real identity hidden until a moment of folly reveals the truth and earns him 10 years in a prison camp. But despite a life of misfortune, Alexei remains unbroken, and in a snowbound railway station in the middle of the Urals, he tells his story.
Fantasticfiction.co.uk
It is typical of Makine's subtle narrative method that the story is presented in the third person, with no breast-beating "I" or "me" to add immediacy to the terrible anguish Alexei has suffered. The constant "he" and "him" puts a necessary distance between Alexei and the reader, giving the book's climactic scene a startling emotional force. The symmetry of A Life's Music is dependent on that scene, in which a general's chauffeur, known as Sergei Maltsev, is invited to play the piano at an engagement party. Enough to say here that the occasion is the cause of tragic consequences.Alexei Berg is Homo sovieticus personified, a man made and unmade by war and politics. Unplayed and unheard music has sustained him through a series of accidents, of a kind only familiar to those who have been degraded by tyranny. It is Andrei Makine's artistic achievement to have accounted for his life without piling on the naturalistic minutiae in the manner of the later Solzhenitsyn.Makine works by allusion, by inference, and with powerful imagery. A trivial event like the death of a squirrel takes on a wholly earned importance in A Life's Music, which - in common with his other distinguished novels - was written in French. No one of any literary discernment will feel short-changed by this miniature, lovingly and spotlessly translated by Geoffrey Strachan.
David Robson: Telegraph.co.uk
A tale of war, heartbreak and survival. Both powerful and graceful, it has...depth and scope. Scotland On SundayA Life's Music again proves Makine to be a very fine craftman.
Times Play
Maps for Lost Lovers
In the opening paragraph of Maps for Lost Lovers, Nadeem Aslam writes: "The snow storm has rinsed the air of incense... but it is there even when absent, drawing attention to its own disappearance." There, though we don't know it at the time, is the very heart of the novel. The lovers, Chanda and Jugnu, have disappeared from the English town of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and though they have been gone five months when the book opens, they haunt it, and the lives of those who occupy it, until the final pages.
But the most extraordinary of the characters is Shamas's wife, Kaukub. A woman brought up to believe in an unforgiving, narrow-minded version of Islam, she could, in the hands of a lesser novelist, have become a monster. But in Aslam's hands she is transformed into a woman entirely human, entirely heartbreaking. She is the devoted mother behind the headlines about the parent who sends her British-born-and-raised child back to Pakistan into an arranged marriage; she is the young bride who used to step out of the bath and wake up her husband by twisting her hair into a yard-long rope and letting beads of water fall over him, but then grew into a woman who equates sex with shame and sin; she is the voice of condemnation raised against all transgressions from orthodoxy and also the voice telling us: "Islam said that in order not to be unworthy of being, only one thing was required: love."
In this book, filled with stories of cruelty, injustice, bigotry and ignorance, love never steps out of the picture - it gleams at the edges of even the deepest wounds. Perhaps this is why the novel never gets weighed down by all the sorrows it carries: there is such shimmering joy within it, too. Here are characters hemmed in on one side by racism and on the other side by religious obscurantism, and yet they each carry remarkable possibilities within them.
But the beauty in the novel does not just come from within the characters. As much as anything else, Maps for Lost Lovers is a homage to the flora and fauna of an English town. Writing about violent racist attacks on the homes of migrants, Aslam tells us: "At night the scented geraniums were dragged to the centre of the downstairs room in the hope that the breeze dense with rosehips and ripening limes would get to the sleepers upstairs ahead of the white intruders who had generated it by brushing past the foliage in the dark after breaking in." Throughout the book, birds and flowers and insects make their way into the prose, either pulling someone out of a bleak thought or, as in the lines above, heightening a vicious moment through the shock of contrast. To read Aslam's physical descriptions is to be reminded of the ability of language to make us re-see the world through analogy and metaphor. So, a woman's gold bracelet is composed of a series of semi-colons; dead tulips lean out of a bin like the necks of drunk swans; a falling icicle is a radiant dagger. Perhaps the words that best describe the remarkable achievement of this novel come from within its pages, in a glorious riff on the wonders of jazz musicians: "[They] seemed to know how to blend together all that life contains, the real truth, the undeniable last word, the innermost core of all that is unbearably painful within a heart and all that is joyful, all that is loved and all that is worthy of love but remains unloved, lied to and lied about, the unimaginable depths of the soul where no other can withstand the longing and which few have the conviction to plumb, the sorrows and the indisputable rage."
The Guardian, Kamila Shamsie, 2004
Despite the violence that lies at the heart of the novel, it is a celebration of love and life. Sights and sounds, smells and colours are not so much vivid backdrops for the narrative as structural, mood-and-texture-enhancing parts of it. Rarely does Aslam put a foot wrong. This is that rare sort of book that gives a voice to those whose voices are seldom heard.
The Observer, Soumya Bhattacharya, 2004
Some useful book club links (external links: opens in 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