May Selection 2007
May 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 May Meeting 2007
The Secret Life of E.Robert Pendleton
Synopsis
It's been over a decade since Robert Pendleton published his brilliant short story debut, and his hopes for a dazzling literary career now lie in tatters. Hanging on to his tenure in literature at Bannockburn college by the slimmest of threads, Pendleton's simmering despair boils over with the arrival on campus of his one-time friend, now nemesis, the bestselling author and king of the coffee-table book, Allen Horowitz. For Pendleton, death seems to be the only remaining option, but his attempt to kill himself is wrecked by the intervention of Adi Wiltshire, a graduate student battling her own demons of failure and thwarted ambition. Whilst Pendleton recovers from his suicide attempt, Adi discovers a novel hidden in his basement: a brilliant, bitter story with a gruesome murder at its core. The publication of Scream causes a storm of publicity, a whirlwind into which Adi and Horowitz are thrust - along with the sister of a young girl whose real-life, unsolved murder bears an uncanny resemblance to the crime in Pendleton's novel and a burnt-out cop with secrets of his own, who is determined to prove that in this case fact and fiction are one and the same.
What follows is an investigation that is criminal in more than one sense. A frazzled cop called Ryder, who, naturally, has a few secrets of his own, is assigned to Pendleton's case, but all he seems to find is more dirt. There are other murders, more suspects, and an increasingly labyrinthine relationship between the myriad players who emerge and fade in the last two thirds of the narrative. The chapters, and the revelations, come thick and fast, but there is no sense of a guide here. It is as if one has fallen asleep with the television on.
.... The Secret Life of E Robert Pendleton should not feel like a marathon, but it does. Perhaps Collins, who in another life is an extreme athlete (who was recently selected for Ireland's 100km running team), has spent too much time pounding out endless miles in the desert. Because what should have been an intriguing thriller surrounding death and the writer, has somehow become a writer plotting us to death.
"All plots tend to move deathward," writes Don Delillo in his 1985 postmodern masterpiece, White Noise. "This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots... we edge nearer death every time we plot." Well, if plots move us deathward, I was dead some time before the closing chapters of Michael Collins' new novel, The Secret Life of E Robert Pendleton. There is enough plot for a drive-by, a massacre.
independent.co.uk
"Collins shows his versatility... the result is an intelligent, whodunnit/bloodbath."
Times Literary Supplement
"Michael Collins is a publicists dream"
Irish Examiner
The Year of Magical Thinking
In late 2003, the daughter of writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne was hospitalized with septic shock and put in a medically-induced coma. Shortly afterward, Dunne died from a heart attack. Joan Didion suddenly found herself dealing with her daughter's life-threatening illness and the inconsolable grief for her husband of forty years. The Year of Magical Thinking is her memoir of the year after his death, coping with the usual questions and concerns of those who have lost a partner, but also remembering their lifetime together. Didion and Dunne spent most of their days together, working out of offices in the same house, sharing and editing each other's writing. During this year of grief and remembrance, her daughter relapsed and was sent back to the hospital. Joan Didion tells the story of that year with poignance and sadness and The Year of Magical Thinking has received glowing reviews.
"The Year of Magical Thinking" is not a downer. On the contrary. Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative. As in Didion's previous writing, her sense of timing, sentence by sentence and in the arrangement of scenes, draws the reader forward. Her manner is deadpan funny, slicing away banality with an air that is ruthless yet meticulous. She uses few adjectives. The unshowy, nearly flat surface of her writing is rippled by patterns of repetition: an understatement that, like Hemingway's, attains its own kind of drama. Repetition and observation narrate emotion by demonstrating it, so that restraint itself becomes poetic, even operatic.....Didion's book is thrilling and engaging - sometimes quite funny - because it ventures to tell the truth
NYTimes.com, Robert Pinsky
Out of excruciatingly painful personal experience, Joan Didion has written a lacerating yet peculiarly stirring book "about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."
"The Year of Magical Thinking, though it spares nothing in describing Didion's confusion, grief and derangement, is a work of surpassing clarity and honesty. It may not provide 'meaning' to her husband's death or her daughter's illness, but it describes their effects on her with unsparing candor."
The Washington Post
[Didion's] admissions are severe and often excruciating. They also are as instructive, resonant and searing as her 40 years of sympathetic stories about how we deny our trouble discerning illusion from reality, how we pretend that things aren't falling apart
Los Angeles Times
I can't think of a book we need more than [Didion's] those of us for whom this life is it, these moments all the more precious because they are numbered.
New York Review of Books
Some useful book club links (external links: open 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