October Selection 2006
October 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 October Meeting, 2006
Zoli
McCANN once expressed an ambition to "write a novel that was completely without boundary and without border". In this parable of love, betrayal and loss on a European scale he has now done so, from the perspective of the Roma.
This is truly a leap into a different world, untold and unknown. The width of the chasm is daunting. One of the central ironies of this novel is that Zoli - a character loosely based on Papusza, a Polish gypsy poet whose life spanned the same traumatic period of the mid-20th century - could have helped bridge this gap but, having published her work, she was banished by her own community.
To find his footing in this enigmatic and, for most of us, alien culture, McCann spent two months in Romany settlements in Slovakia; he also researched extensively in New York, and the book is devoted to "librarians everywhere", the unsung heroes of the literary world. The results are evident and the Roma world is described with all its extraordinary contrasts, but without a shred of romanticism.
In a horrific opening scene, a company of gypsies is held captive on a frozen lake in Slovakia by the Hlinka guards, all too willing to enforce Nazi policies. Fires are lit around the lake and the guards settle down to wait for the ice to thaw. Men, women and children are drowned. Zoli was not among them, but her family was. She is brought up by her grandfather, an iconic figure who speaks five languages and reads Marx. He takes the unorthodox and unpopular decision to send Zoli to school. Literacy is viewed with enormous suspicion and only the Romany elders read, but set to music, Zoli's poems become increasingly popular.
Ironically, it is the advent of communism that proves a greater danger to Zoli, and a lure. She is championed by Stransky, a literary publisher fatally embroiled in the rapidly changing political scene, and by Stephen Swann, an English idealist who becomes her lover but ultimately betrays her. Finally, in the late 1950s, with a symbolism that is chilling, the wheels of the Vlax caravans are sawn off and burnt, and Zoli's former companions are "settled" in tower blocks, flagrantly breaking Romany traditions and taboos.
The story moves inexorably to a climax, narrated alternatively by Zoli, Swann and an external narrator, the author himself during his time in the Romany settlements. In an epigram to his previous best-selling novel Dancer, McCann quotes William Maxwell, who wrote that "in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw". But the force of McCann's language is so convincing that these "lies" are melded into a compelling parable that in the end brings hope as Zoli begins to sing again.
Acknowledging that it is the novelist's privilege to play the fool, rushing in where others might not tread, McCann has offered us an unforgettable picture of this world. Attending her daughter's conference in Paris, Zoli is surprised by the taped birdsong and cheap gloss, but her world remains in harmony with something deeper and, above all, unfinished. As the Romany saying goes: "The river is not where it starts or ends".
Scotland on Sunday, Lucinda Batt, 17th Sept 2006
Author Colum McCann was born in Dublin in 1965. He is the author of This Side of Brightness and Dancer. He has won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been nominated for both the Irish Times Fiction Prize and the Impac Prize. He was recently presented with the Princess Grace Memorial Award. He has travelled widely and is currently based in New York with his wife and children.
Paula Spencer
There were few twists left to the idea of the love story and now there is one fewer. It is hard to know whether Roddy Doyle knew exactly what he was doing but, given the fact that he has already once won the Booker and still writes like a clever little dream, we should give him the benefit of the doubt. On the surface, this is a simple 10-year-on updating of the first harsh book he ever wrote, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, which delighted many critics, but dismayed much of the public, who had revelled in his warmer, funnier successes like The Commitments and The Van, with its bleak and staccato depiction of Dublin life: the murderous wife-beater Charlo, and his alcoholic wife Paula, eponymous anti-heroine and first-person voice of this sequel. In truth, it's four love stories: the stories of a reforming alcoholic trying to love, and be loved by, and forgiven by, her children.
This is - one of Paula's favourite words - a grand part of the story, but the essence is the ceaselessness of her attempts to be properly in love with four people - her children - who she didn't know before, what with being an alco wretch during their childhood. John Paul, the reformed H-addict; Leanne, the family's next drunk; Nicole, the organised one who escaped; and young Jack, her true love. With anger and fondnesses and hesitant phone-texts and passive-aggressive confusion, she tries to know them, to learn them, an adult come late to adulthood and love because of the lost years, before her husband died and she managed to come off the drink. Each relationship reads like its own separate little love affair. Not all successful.
Paula's sentences, her confusions, are snatched, contradictory, sometimes three words long. It is, however, a phenomenally rewarding read, with observational humour on a microscopically careful scale. It will aggravate Doyle fans interested in sentimentality but delight those interested in love. It could not be bettered in its depiction of the minutiae of the life of a recovering alcoholic: relentless, trivial, terrified, and making you wonder whether the syntax of the alcoholics' anthem wasn't got entirely wrong and should , in truth, be:One day at a time.Sweet Jesus...
The Guardian, Euan Ferguson, 3rd Sept., 2006
Some useful book club links (external 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