June Selection 2006
June 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 June Meeting, 2006
The Accidental
The Accidental by Ali Smith was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2005 and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006,Arresting and wonderful, The Accidental pans in on the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family one hot summer. There, a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door bearing all sorts of unexpected gifts, trampling over family boundaries and sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into the light. A novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves, The Accidental explores the nature of truth, the role of fate, and the power of storytelling.
As Tolstoy noted, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The particular unhappiness of the ironically named Smart family is the subject of Ali Smith's brilliant and engaging new novel. Tetchily holed up in a grotty Norfolk holiday home in the boiling summer of 2003, while the Iraq war rumbles offstage, each family member is weighed down by incommunicable troubles. As the 17-year-old Magnus puts it, it is as if "they all come from different jigsaws, all muddled together into the one box by some assistant who couldn't care less in a charity shop or wherever it is that old jigsaws go to die"....In ways far subtler and more effective than Ian McEwan in his recent novel Saturday, Smith deals with middle-class complacency in the face of the Iraq War. How are we to engage with political events from which we feel so disassociated? What (if any) is the moral responsibility of the artist? While, as Amber teaches the Smarts, not every question has an answer, it is good that we have a writer as exhilaratingly sharp-eyed and humane as Ali Smith to ask the questions that need asking.
The Telegraph, Katie Owens, 2005
..Lavishly discursive within its sturdy frame, this is a novel that touches on Iraq and on early bereavement, on the urban middle-class’s sentimental rural fantasies and on forgiveness, on the potential of the word “and” and on the end of the world. Smith has written a proper novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, but turned it into an exuberantly inventive series of variations. At her beginning, each character is facing some kind of dead end. By the end, everything, including the story of the stranger on the doorstep, is ready to begin again. And in the middle is a fable as beautifully formed and as astringently intelligent as her barefoot delinquent angel.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Sunday Times, 2005
It pays to be suspicious of writers who tie things up too neatly, who end novels a little too perfectly. But Smith doesn't have this problem -- the last sentence of the book manages to be enlightening, confusing and almost destructive in its simple power. It doesn't tie things up; it almost unravels whatever ties the reader has invented while reading the book. You won't know much more about Amber when you finish this book than you did at the beginning. Maybe all we're meant to know is what Amber herself tells us: "I was born free, I've had the time of my life and for all we know I'm going to live forever." The San Fransisco Chronicle, Michael Schaub, 2006 ALI Smith is a magical writer, and her new novel bursts open like a conjuring trick. "My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the cafe of the town’s only cinema... I am Alhambra, named for the place of my conception."
Scotland on Sunday, Andrew Crumey, 2005
The Sea, The Sea
Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prizein 1978. As both a philosopher and a novelist, Murdoch always concerned herself in some way or another with the struggle to develop moral goodness and the concomitant effort to vanquish obsessive self-regard. In The Sea, The Sea, she dramatizes this characteristic moral concern to great effect on a stage crowded with self-absorbed artistic Londoners out of their element in a small seaside village.
As she explores the potent mixture of power, illusion, and self-delusion in retired actor, playwright, and theater director Charles Arrowby, Murdoch weaves a rich tapestry of startling events: old love affairs revive and die again, friendships sour into attempted murder, hallucinations (or are they?) portend ominous happenings, and the drowning embrace of the sea waits restlessly in the background. As Charles negotiates the turbulent swirl of events, an intricate portrait develops of a man bewitched and bewildered by his own powers of self-promotion and manipulation.
In an imaginative style at once realist and gothic, modern yet hearkening back to the age of the grand novel, The Sea, The Sea charts a person's journey toward becoming a virtuous, spiritually mature human being. Taking up the moral development of the individual in a novel rather than a philosophical tract might strike some as a hazardous project, one that could mar both the clarity of thought so necessary for good philosophy and the narrative enchantment so integral to a good novel. And yet it was precisely in her novels that Murdoch so successfully discussed the vital issues of the moral life. Despite this marriage of philosophy and fiction-writing that is so prominent in her work, she always resisted the label of "philosophical novelist," refuting any suggestion that her books might be merely anemic shufflings of philosophical positions by consistently delivering vibrant characters and powerfully effective plots in the realist tradition of such great nineteenth-century novelists as Dostoevsky and George Eliot. The Sea, The Sea is no exception in either the profound issues with which it grapples or in the richness of its fictional world.
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was one of the most acclaimed British writers of the twentieth century (born in Dublin, Ireland July 15, 1919). Very prolific, she wrote twenty-six novels, four books of philosophy, five plays, a volume of poetry, a libretto, and numerous essays before developing Alzheimer's disease in the mid-1990s. Her novels have won many prizes: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince, the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea. She herself was also the recipient of many esteemed awards: Dame of the Order of the British Empire, the Royal Society of Literature's Companion of Literature award, and the National Arts Club's (New York) Medal of Honor for Literature.
Penguin Group
Some useful book club links (external links: open 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