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 May meeting, 2009
Leaving the World by
Douglas Kennedy
The joys of self-sabotage are often found at the heart of Douglas Kennedy's fiction. His heroes and heroines may start out as well adjusted professionals in happy relationships, but you can be sure that by chapter five they'll find themselves on the run – both from the authorities and themselves. It's what makes his bestsellers so compelling.
Kennedy's latest narrator, Jane Howard, is a smarty-pants Harvard graduate student. Having grown up in the shadow of her parents' troubled marriage, she is drawn to men as damaged as herself. When the novel opens, she's mid-affair with her married supervisor, but under strict instructions not to fall in love. As soon as she does, her part-time inamorato decides to ride his bike into the path of an oncoming truck.
For Kennedy, bad timing really shapes our lives. "A chacun son destin" is a literary refrain throughout his work, and Jane's prospects don't look rosy. Her next liaison certainly gives her pause to contemplate the principle that life is a series of random accidents over which no one has any control. The new man in Jane's orbit is Theo Morgan, a beatnik film fanatic and all-round screw-up. Together they have a child, but Jane once more finds herself facing tragedy – the kind no mother can bear.
Kennedy's piling on the grief can feel excessive, but at least you get to find out what happens next. Final acts are his forte. Moving to the Canadian city of Calgary – it's either that or suicide - Jane reinvents herself as a librarian with a severe haircut and a taste for Bergman films. It's only when news of a local child abduction case hits the headlines that she re-engages with the world and turns detective.
In a novel remarkably devoid of mawkishness, Kennedy has pulled off another classy page-turner that engages, entertains and consoles. Adopting the persona of the erudite everyman, he once more delivers the message that whatever hole you dig for yourself, you're probably not alone.
The Independent
Whatever else one may think of Douglas Kennedy as a novelist, there is no denying that he is generous to the point of profligacy with his plotting. His latest novel, Leaving the World, involves a fistful of wrenching storylines dramatic and resonant enough for a more parsimoniously inclined writer to have used them as material for an entire tetralogy, rather than a single novel.
When an author works as hard as this to entertain his readers, it seems churlish to complain of a degree of coarse technical ruthlessness. You might as well complain that Dickens or Trollope were prone to extremes of coincidence and invented characters for no other purpose than to perform an allotted role.
Kennedy is not, admittedly, Dickens or Trollope. He hasn’t the emotional range or the instinctive psychological insight, and he is nothing like as adroit a female impersonator as Trollope. His habitual trick of female impersonation has some alarmingly wobbly moments, in particular a risible account of birth and the early months of motherhood – not for nothing does his heroine describe them as “textbook”.
A sententious tendency to editorialise about abstracts – money, loss, relationships and so on – and a continual anxious fingering of great writers – Eliot, Shakespeare, Graham Greene – like rosary beads, leaves the impression that Kennedy would like Leaving the World to be considered as Great Literature. It isn’t that. But it is Great Entertainment.
The Telegraph
Douglas Kennedy’s strength lies in producing finely drawn characters thrown by the randomness of life into unbearable situations which, though not their own fault, arise through their flaws.
Leaving the World is a fast-paced, stylishly written novel. But at times it feels over-plotted. Some of the plot-turns feel like devices to set up later action. But for all that, Kennedy has turned out a book that will be popular with his many fans (he is translated into 16 languages and has sold millions), and he will win readers over with his well written and lyrical investigation of how single random events shape lives.
The Irish Times
Essays in Love by Alain de Botton
Essays in Love is a novel about two young people, who meet on an airplane between London and Paris and rapidly fall in love. The structure of the story isn’t unusual, but what lends the book its interest is the extraordinary depth with which the emotions involved in the relationship are analysed. Love comes under the philosophical microscope. An entire chapter is devoted to the nuances and subtexts of an initial date. Another chapter mulls over the question of how and when to say ‘I love you’. There’s an essay on how uncomfortable it can be to disagree with a lover’s taste in shoes and a lengthy discussion about the role of guilt in love.
The book is an intriguing blend of novel and non-fiction. As in a novel, there are characters and realistic settings, but these are blended in with a host of more abstract ideas. The book has attracted a particular following among those who have recently fallen in love - or come out of a relationship.
alaindebotton.com
A well-heeled young couple meet on a plane and instantly fall for each other. They make love on the first date and, over a space of time, their relationship thrives, falters and finishes almost as abruptly as it began. It’s a familiar tale but there is nothing predictable about De Botton’s explanation of how love enthrals us all. This is no light romance but a sort of ‘When Harry Met Sally Meets Roland Barthes’.
Cast in the form of a series of academic essays, the novel analyses each stage of the affair and considers just what is this thing called love. De Botton calculates the probability of falling love at first sight on a British Airways flight (one chance in 5840.82). He draws diagrams to illustrate why there are those of us who can love only those who do not love us back and tells us why a lover’s gaze is like a kebab. Erudite and light-hearted, he brings in Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Heraclitus and Hegel, the French Revolution, a Chinese meal and a pair of shoes to demonstrate the problem that our need to love precedes our love for anyone in particular.
Plot is negligible, characterisation minimal, but the freshness and clarity of De Botton’s style enlivens what might sound worthy or merely clever. This is a novel of wit and insight; whatever the state of your love life, it will make entertaining and sometimes painful, sometimes profitable reading.
Time Out
Charting the progress of an affair, from first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to anxiety, this is a wholly modern attempt to define the age-old dilemmas of the heart by detailing the highs and lows of contemporary romance, interwoven with forays into philosophy.
Kirkus UK
De Botton's first book, written when he was 23, is the story of a love affair with philosophical annotations. It won a cult following for his brand of thoughtful enquiry into everyday dilemmas. The Independent said he'd "taken philosophy back to its simplest, most important purpose: helping us live our lives."
The Independent
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