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 September meeting, 2009
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
On what might become one of the most significant days in her husband’s presidency, Alice Blackwell considers the strange and unlikely path that has led her to the White House–and the repercussions of a life lived, as she puts it, “almost in opposition to itself.”
A kind, bookish only child born in the 1940s, Alice learned the virtues of politeness early on from her stolid parents and small Wisconsin hometown. But a tragic accident when she was seventeen shattered her identity and made her understand the fragility of life and the tenuousness of luck. So more than a decade later, when she met boisterous, charismatic Charlie Blackwell, she hardly gave him a second look: She was serious and thoughtful, and he would rather crack a joke than offer a real insight; he was the wealthy son of a bastion family of the Republican party, and she was a school librarian and registered Democrat. Comfortable in her quiet and unassuming life, she felt inured to his charms. And then, much to her surprise, Alice fell for Charlie.
As Alice learns to make her way amid the clannish energy and smug confidence of the Blackwell family, navigating the strange rituals of their country club and summer estate, she remains uneasy with her newfound good fortune. And when Charlie eventually becomes President, Alice is thrust into a position she did not seek–one of power and influence, privilege and responsibility. As Charlie’s tumultuous and controversial second term in the White House wears on, Alice must face contradictions years in the making: How can she both love and fundamentally disagree with her husband? How complicit has she been in the trajectory of her own life? What should she do when her private beliefs run against her public persona?
The abdication of personal responsibility … will come to be seen, I suspect, as the defining failure of George W. Bush as President. One hundred years from now, historians will scratch their heads and ask themselves the same question that plagues Alice Blackwell: How did this amiable but feckless man ever get to be President? Curtis Sittenfeld has provided a plausible secret history of an American embarrassment--and a grand entertainment.
Time Magazine
American Wife … raises a prickly moral question: Should a liberal First Lady sit in a corner reading Saul Bellow while her husband pushes a ruthlessly conservative agenda? Sittenfeld dramatizes the question with a forgivably contrived plot twist. And who knows how close she has come to understanding Laura's inner life? My guess: Not close. But it hardly matters. This is a novel, after all, and it's a terrific one.
Entertainment Weekly
If the book has one weakness, it's that Sittenfeld spends too much time letting Alice wring her hands with guilt over her privileged life. She makes up for it with the first lady's startling final confession — an ending foreshadowed by the novel's tantalizing first sentence: "Have I made terrible mistakes?"
USA Today
Though “American Wife” is respectful of the first lady, its portrait of the president is rather more mixed, cartoonish: chilling, too, in its combination of steely indifference to opposing political viewpoints and crude frat-boy humor: “ ‘See, that’s what makes America great — room for all kinds of opposing viewpoints,’ ” Charlie says to Alice. She continues: “I can tell Charlie’s grinning, then I hear an unmistakable noise, a bubbly blurt of sound, and I know he’s just broken wind. Though I’ve told him it’s inconsiderate, I think he does it as much as possible in front of his agents. He’ll say, ‘They think it’s hilarious when the leader of the free world toots his own horn!’ ”
The New York Times Book Review
With American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld has deftly crossed an extraordinarily high wire: She’s written a book in the voice of a someone we all know, and we come out of it thinking not about whether she got it right but rather why it seems here and there just the tiniest bit wrong. This may sound like a backhanded compliment, but I mean it as a straightforward one. A poorly executed version of the novel would grate with each false note, causing you—O.K., me—to scribble furiously in the margins: THIS is wrong, THIS is unbelievable, THIS is stupid. As it is, I read American Wife in just two or three delicious sittings, struck by the granular clarity of the author’s descriptions and the down-to-earth believability of the story, bewitched by the charming, frustrating woman at the center of it: Laura Bush.
The New York Observer
Disguise by Hugo Hamilton
Hugo Hamilton, the internationally acclaimed author of 'The Speckled People' and 'Sailor in the Wardrobe', turns his hand back to fiction with a compelling drama tracing Berlin's central historical importance throughout the twentieth century. 1945. At the end of the second world war in Berlin, a young mother loses her two-year-old boy in the bombings. She flees to the south, where her father finds a young foundling of the same age among the refugee trains to replace the boy. He makes her promise never to tell anyone, including her husband -- still fighting on the Russian front -- that the boy is not her own. Nobody will know the difference. 2008. Gregor Liedmann is a Jewish man now in his sixties. He's an old rocker who ran away from home, a trumpet player, a revolutionary stone-thrower left over from the 1968 generation. On a single day spent gathering fruit in an orchard outside Berlin with family and friends, Gregor looks back over his life, sifting through fact and memory in order to establish the truth. What happened on that journey south in the final days of the war? Why did his grandfather Emil disappear, and why did the Gestapo torture uncle Max? Here, in the calmness of the orchard, along with his ex-wife Mara and son Daniel, Gregor tries to unlock the secret of his past. In his first novel since the best-selling memoir 'The Speckled People', Hugo Hamilton has created a truly compelling story of lost identity, and a remarkable reflection on the ambiguity of belonging.
Amazon.co.uk
As with his riveting memoir The Speckled People...weighty themes of identity resurface in his latest offering Disguise.
Metro
An eloquent and haunting book about identity and the construction of a self under duress.
The Guardian
Hugo Hamilton...brings the reader through a whole series of microcosms, dancing flash pictures of different societies, different times.
Irish Sunday Independent
'Subtle...a narrative that moves elegantly between past and present.'
Sunday Times
This novel is about identity, both personal and national, the vicissitudes of memory, the impossibility and necessity of love. The opening is thrilling but Hamilton knows the real story is in the repercussions. And the final chapter is almost unbearably moving, wonderfully understated, damn near perfect.
Financial Times
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