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)
Books for March meeting, 2009
The Other Hand By Chris Cleave
Chris Cleave's first novel, Incendiary, was an object lesson in the perils of relevance. Depicting the aftermath of a terrorist attack in Britain, it came out on July 7, 2005, and was at once - well, upstaged isn't quite the word. Still, DeLillo's line about the terrorist being the novelist's great rival has rarely received more literal confirmation. Who wanted to read about fictional atrocities when London's real death toll was still being reckoned?
Undeterred, Cleave is back with another ripped-from-the-headlines effort. Little Bee is a teenage asylum seeker who has barely escaped a horrible death in one of Nigeria's unsung oil wars. For her trouble, she winds up doing two years in an Essex detention centre.
She whiles away the time scavenging frumpy clothing to guard her chastity and brushing up her English with the help of The Times. After all, as the older girls tell her, "to survive, you must look good or talk better".
An administrative mishap soon sees Bee turfed out without papers into the wilds of south-east England. Having nowhere else to go, she looks up a journalist couple who, two years before, had witnessed the horrors she fled.
Sarah O'Rourke, the editor of a self-proclaimedly edgy women's magazine, and her husband Andrew, a stentorian Times columnist, were holidaying in Nigeria to patch up their relationship after Sarah had had an affair. Straying along the beach away from their hotel compound, they ran into Bee and her sister, and there was an unpleasant incident that some rather precious jacket copy asks me not to describe - "It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it."
Suffice it to say that the O'Rourke marriage became no healthier and Andrew was plunged into a depression that ends only with Bee's reappearance and his prompt suicide. It's a testament to Cleave's talent that the beach scene is nasty enough to shoulder this weight.
The Telegraph
A powerful piece of art ... shocking, exciting and deeply affecting ... [a] superb novel ... Besides sharp, witty dialogue, an emotionally charged plot and the vivid characters' ethical struggles, The Other Hand delivers a timely challenge to reinvigorate our notions of civilized decency.
The Independent
Searingly eloquent.
Daily Mail
It would be hard not to romp through it.
Financial Times
An ambitious and fearless gallop from the jungles of Africa via a shocking encounter on a Nigerian beach to the media offices of London and domesticity in leafy suburbia ... Cleave immerses the reader in the worlds of his characters with an unshakable confidence.
Guardian
By turns funny, sad and shocking
Sainsbury’s Magazine
Warm, witty and beautifully written.
Sunday Tribune
In a novel that tackles serious and uncomfortable subject matter, Cleave's writing makes one laugh and despair in equal measure. (4 stars)
Time Out
A better book than Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand may be published this year, but I wouldn’t bet on it. This exquisitely written story of a Nigerian refugee and a British glossy magazine editor is the most powerful novel I’ve read in a long time … it’s also a very funny book about brave, funny people who the reader quickly grows to love … But the heart of the book is Little Bee; naïve yet insightful and sophisticated, damaged yet capable of great courage and humour, she is an unforgettable character. I finished The Other Hand in tears, and I still can’t get it out of my head. Just read it.
The Gloss
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button & Other Stories
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
According to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his ideas a fair trial.”
Fitzgerald's thought-provoking tale, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is a fantastical satire about aging. It is the strange and haunting story of Benjamin Button who is born as an old man and ages backwards so that at the beginning of his life he is an old man and at the end of his life he is a baby.
This is a valuable collection, whether one reads the stories to delight in Fitzgerald's style, to conjure up a lost era, to learn more about the career of a great American novelist, or simply to gain insight into the human condition.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Humorous and amazing story that gives you a wonderful lesson about life. Never too late or too old to do something you want. Highly recommended.
manybooks.net
This is an interesting tale but unusual for the fact that it doesn't read much like Fitzgerald. The prose style is a bit melodramatic and pulpy. It's fun to read, but not what you might expect if you've read other Fitzgerald stories. It reads as if he was trying to dumb it down. However, still a bit poignant in places.
manybooks.net
Because a film has been made of it, starring Brad Pitt, this droll short story has been elevated to the status of a Penguin Classic and reissued in a miniature collection with the more famous "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". The film makers went to incredible lengths to create a computer-generated mini-Brad who could credibly span the three score and 10 years of Benjamin Button's life. Similar feats of imagination and suspension of disbelief are required for the reader to be caught up in this farfetched tale of a life lived backwards. Why are fiction writers so regularly engaged by the conceit of a back-to-front life? At birth, Benjamin is five foot eight inches of septuagenarian. Of his mother nothing is heard except that she is "all right" after the prodigious delivery. Her absence reflects the chilly bloodlessness of this account of an old man who grows to boyhood and, thence, in a parable of senile dementia, to the cooing bliss of babyhood and, ultimately, nothingness.
The Guardian
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