March Selection 2006
March 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 March Meeting, 2006
Human Traces
This is a long, serious novel. It is also leisurely, in the manner of 19th-century fiction, the sort of book that requires total immersion, if you are to do it justice. No setting is left undescribed, conversations are exhaustive, there are meticulous accounts of all that every character does. Faulks's fans may miss the pace and action of some of his earlier work, but Human Traces seems a deliberate departure - ambitious and thoughtful.
Two young men, one English and one French, come across one another in 1880. Jacques Rebière is a medical student, Thomas Midwinter is at university; both are intelligent and high-minded. There is instant empathy. In due course, that random meeting will prompt a life-long association; the two will become pioneer "mind doctors". Determined to identify the cause of madness, they will set up a ground-breaking clinic and, eventually, experience a distressing falling-out over the treatment of a patient. Much else happens along the way. Jacques marries Thomas's sister, Thomas marries Kitty, the patient who was the unwitting cause of their difference. Children arrive, there are tragic deaths - Thomas's son picked off in the first world war, the suicide of Jacques's schizophrenic brother Olivier, whose sad condition first inspired his own concern with mental illness.
But, in a sense, all this is a vehicle for the substance of the book, which is a prolonged and informative discussion of early views on dementia and its treatment. At the back of the novel, there are five pages of acknowledgments of the author's sources. Faulks's two main characters are purely fictional, but he has given them the knowledge and experience of medical men of their day. .....but, in the last resort, what lingers in the head is all this intriguing subject matter, rather than the narrative of the novel.
London Times, Penelope Lively, Aug 2005
Sebastian Faulks's ambitious study of psychiatry in its infancy, Human Traces, pushes the novel to its very limits, Human Traces is replete with interesting ideas and contains some exceptionally fine topographic writing. However, with respect to the usual pleasures of fiction, the reader sometimes feels a little short-changed.
The Observer, Jane Stevenson, Sept 2005
Faulks identified, "not with his characters and their potential foibles, but with his all too fascinating research. He forgot he was writing a novel."
The Guardian, Adam Thorpe Sept 2005
This is a bold and remarkable work of imagination, particularly in its daring remastery of the 19th-century novel form and the sustained grace of its prose.
The Telegraph
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Irish author John Boyne's fourth book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Jan 06) has reached No 1 in the Sunday Independent's Bestsellers list for the 4th consecutive week.
The story of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is very difficult to describe. Usually we give some clues about the book on the jacket, but in this case we think that would spoil the reading of the book. We think it is important that you start to read without knowing what it is about. If you do start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy called Bruno. (Though this isn’t a book for nine-year-olds). And sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence. Fences like this exist all over the world. We hope you never have to cross such a fence.
From the Book Jacket
In the summer of 1943 a nine-year-old boy moves from his comfortable life in Berlin to Poland, where his father has an important new job. Bored and resentful, Bruno wonders why there are no windows on one side of his house. Why too is he forbidden from visiting something outside only referred to as "the fence"?
As much a parable as a realistic story, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is principally concerned with telling its tale, leaving the subtleties of how outsize evil can co-exist with domestic tranquillity for another day. Bruno, too, is more innocent than seems likely, oblivious to the truth of what he witnesses. Is he that gullible, or fooling himself? John Boyne... never goes into such issues.
This novel is a fine addition to a once taboo area of history. It provides an account of a dreadful episode, short on actual horror but packed with overtones that remain in the imagination. Plainly and sometimes archly written, it stays just ahead of its readers before delivering its killer punch in the final pages.
The Independent (Online), Nicholas Tucker
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