March Selection 2007
March 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 March Meeting 2007
The Book of Lost Things
In his latest novel, “The Book of Lost Things” (2006), Irish author John Connolly departs from his internationally acclaimed Charlie Parker crime series. In this book Connolly continues to play with other literature forms by producing a rather unusual twist on certain very familiar fairy tales, including a surprising if somewhat gruesome interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood and a definite nod towards The Wizard of Oz. When 12-year-old David loses his mother to illness, he retreats into a shell, using the books of fairytales they both loved to create a fantasy world that begins to blend into his own. He is angry and alone, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in his imagination, he finds that reality and fantasy have begun to blend.
One night after his father and his despised stepmother present David with a new step-brother, Georgie, he clearly hears the voice of his mother calling to him from the Crooked Man's world, begging David to save her. Rushing out into the garden and barely escaping the wreckage of a fallen German bomber, David finds himself transported to the Crooked Man's world. There David befriends a Woodsman, who protects David as he learns more about this strange new place, and meets the Crooked Man himself, a wily trickster whose secrets reflect the darkest, ugliest reaches of the imagination.
The Woodsman accompanies David on a quest to find the king of the realm, an elderly man in search of an heir. David is beset at every turn by the Loups, a race of half-wolf, half-men (born out of the union of Red Riding Hood and the wolf) whose leader wants to claim the throne himself. When the Woodsman is killed, David is left to discover the hidden secrets of this bizarre new land and his own hidden strengths - by himself.
The Book of Lost Things is a story of hope for all who have lost, and for all who have yet to lose. It is an exhilarating tale that reminds us of the enduring power of stories in our lives. John Connolly's unique imagination takes readers through the end of innocence into adulthood and beyond in this dark and triumphantly creative novel of grief and loss, loyalty and love, and the redemptive power of stories.The first 60 pages contain some of the most beautiful writing you could wish to read....some books linger long in the mind, others are forgotten the next day. And then there are those that just refuse to go away.
John Quirk, Manx Independent
Inventive and very different... an allegory on life and death, war and peace, and other aspects of this life and the next... Theodore Feit,
Midwest Book Review
Suite Francaise
Sixty-two years after its author died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, a remarkable and previously unpublished wartime work by an emigré Russian Jew in France has taken the world of publishing by storm.
Suite francaise, the first two parts of what Irène Némirovsky originally intended to be a five-volume epic, has been hailed by ecstatic French critics as "a masterpiece" and "probably the definitive novel of our nation in the second world war".
Born in February 1903 in Kiev, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banker, Irène fled Russia in 1918 and arrived with her family in France the following year. A privileged emigré life of balls, banquets and beaux between Paris, Biarritz and the Cote d'Azur gave way by the mid-1920s to that of a hugely popular and critically-acclaimed writer - "the Francoise Sagan of the time".
In 1926 Irène married Michel Epstein, an emigré Russian businessmen, and the couple had two daughters; Denise, born in 1929, and Elisabeth, in 1937. Harbouring no illusions about the fate that might await them, Irene and Michel dispatched the girls to the small Burgundy village of Issy-l'Evêque with their nurse on September 1 1939 as war loomed.
The parents followed their daughters to the country in 1941. By that stage, two successive "laws governing the status of Jews" had been pronounced by the collaborationist French government; Michel was barred from working for his bank, and Irène, the toast of Paris just months before, was dropped like a stone by the literary establishment and no longer able to publish under her own name. (Only one Paris publisher, Albin Michel, remained loyal, sending Ffr2,000 or Ffr3,000 a month for the daughters' upkeep for the rest of the war after Irène and Michel were deported.)
"All the time we were in that village, I just remember mother writing, writing, writing," Denise, now 75, told the Guardian. "It was as if she knew she was writing against time. Indeed, reading between the lines, her notes show she knew full well that if ever her final work was published, it would be posthumously." Irène was arrested by gendarmes on July 13 1942, days after finishing the second volume, Dolce.
"She was very dignified," said Denise, 13 at the time. "She just said she was going on a journey." Irène survived barely 10 days in Auschwitz-Birkenau, dying on August 17. Michel, arrested and deported two months later after a desperate campaign to save his wife (many of his letters and telegrams are reproduced), died in early November.
Denise and Elisabeth owe their lives to one of the gendarmes who arrested her father. He told Denise to run home with her little sister, grab what she could, and disappear. What she grabbed was a small suitcase containing family photographs, diaries - and the thick leather binder that had never left her mother's side. "I didn't know what it was," she said, "but I knew it was precious to mother."
The suitcase, and the binder, followed Denise into hiding, from cellar to convent to attic, for the rest of the war. For many years afterwards, she could not bring herself to open it. Then in the mid-1970s, after it was nearly destroyed when her apartment was flooded, she decided with her sister to entrust it to the French publishing industry's memorial archives.
The Guardian, October, 2004
"If you read only one piece of fiction this year, read Irène Némirovsky’s miraculous last novel. Suite Française is miraculous for the power, brilliance and beauty of the writing, and for the very wholeness of the work, despite its being less than half the 1,000 pages its author intended. . . . Némirovsky’s novel speaks as resonantly today as it would have had it been published in the year of her death: It is a stunning denunciation of the hypocrisy and greed of the ruling elites who make, but never seem to suffer from, war."
The Globe and Mail
"A uniquely resonant picture of France defeated and occupied, a book of exceptional literary quality – it has the kind of intimacy found the diary of Anne Frank."
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"An heroic attempt to write a nightmare in which the author is actually embedded."
Anita Brookner, The Spectator (UK)"
An exceptionally forceful and frank testimony. . . . Like The Diary of Anne Frank, Suite Française is a real find; it excels both from a literary and historical perspective. A masterpiece."
L’Express (France)
“Suite Française is not about the Nazi anti-Semitic abomination, but about whatever is low in human nature in general…. Némirovsky’s maturity as a writer, her harsh vision of humanity, her utter lack of sentimentalism or politically correct humanism combine in a book that is vigorously disturbing.”
Le Monde (France)
Some useful book club links (external links: open in a 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