May Selection 2006
May 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 May Meeting, 2006
The Visitor
Maeve Brennan died in 1993 in obscurity in America where she had lived since she was 17 in 1934. She was born in Ireland and her father was Ireland's first ambassador to America. For many years she worked for the New Yorker. She was enormously regarded, compared to Chekhov and Flaubert. Edward Albee said that 'to mention her in their company is only proper'. Now she seems to be little known.
She was a beauty but a recluse, living at the end of her life in a box-room in the New Yorker offices behind the ladies' lavatories where she would bob out and frighten people. She had nervous breakdowns and an unhappy marriage to an alcoholic. The picture is of intense loneliness.
The Visitor is a study of intense, interior loneliness, too, but loneliness so exquisitely described that it becomes a thing of beauty. It is also a study of quiet evil, resentment that poisons and erodes the soul. It is possible to see The Visitor as an almost seductive book. Its spirit is the still, blanketed Irish town of Ranelagh (where Brennan was brought up), all its secrets deep within the layers of its heavy curtains. The sameness of the ritual of the empty days is a soft and velvety cocoon.
A girl, Anastasia, comes 'home' to it after six years in Paris with her mother, to whom she fled after her mother ran off from a hideous marriage. Her mother has died. Her father also died while she was away. She now confronts her grandmother in the family home she has never left. She hates her grand-daughter, though she never raises her voice and never stops smiling. A quiet, abashed old servant looks on, slowly cutting slices of bread. As a study of pain it is as poignant as William Trevor and, as with him, the pain is only bearable because of a timeless beauty and love that somehow exist outside the frame. It is intensely Irish; and so Irish, too, that such a woman as Maeve Brennan could spend years of her life writing the Talk of the Town column in the New Yorker! It did not save her.
Spectator 2001
This early work by the respected writer never flinches from its exploration of the destructive power of family pride and anger. Brennan's restrained but touching evocation of a young woman whose heart has been wrung dry and who thereafter is condemned to permanent exile is permeated with outrage and sorrow.
Publishers Weekly
An astonishing miniature masterpiece.”
Nuala O’Faolain
Now is the Time to Open Your Heart
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar now gives us a beautiful new novel that is at once a deeply moving personal story and a powerful spiritual journey.
In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Alice Walker has created a work that ranks among her finest achievements: the story of a woman’s spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with love. Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul.
Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love. Told with the accessible style and deep feeling that are its author’s hallmarks, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is Alice Walker’s most surprising achievement.
Publisher Comments
ALICE WALKER won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel The Color Purple. Her other novels include By the Light of My Father’s Smile and Possessing the Secret of Joy. She is also the author of three collections of short stories, three collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, and several children’s books.
Alice Walker Quotations
• Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
• The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.
• It just seems clear to me that as long as we are all here, it's pretty clear that the struggle is to share the planet, rather than divide it.
• Being happy is not the only happiness.
• How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
Some useful book club links (externat 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