Introducing Great Novels

Atonement (Boeke Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, ..., winner)

2010-12-12T01:34:00.000-08:00

Atonement is a 2001 novel by one of Britain's most highly regarded writers Ian McEwan (1948- ). It is published in 2001 and won the 2002 Boeke Prize, the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2002 WH Smith Literary Award, and the 2004 Santiago Prize.

Plot Summary [1]

In the hot summer of 1935, 13-year-old Briony Tallis is already an ambitious writer. She has written a play for her older brother, Leon, who is supposed to arrive later in the day. The characters are to be played by her cousins, 15-year-old Lola and the nine-year-old twins Jackson and Pierrot. Briony's sister, Cecilia, has returned home from Girton College, Cambridge, and is trying to sort out her confused feelings toward her childhood friend, the housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, who is also home from Cambridge for the summer. His studies were financed by her father, Jack Tallis, and Robbie is now considering becoming a doctor, which would also be funded by Jack Tallis.
Cecilia wants to fill a vase with water at the fountain in front of the Tallis house. She meets Robbie and they start talking but the conversation quickly becomes awkward. When Robbie wants to help Cecilia with the vase, she remains stubborn, the vase breaks, and two pieces fall into the fountain. Cecilia strips to her underwear, jumps into the fountain and retrieves the fragments while Robbie only stares at her. Briony witnesses the ensuing moment of sexual tension from an upstairs bedroom and is confused as to its meaning.
Leon Tallis arrives with his friend, Paul Marshall. They meet Robbie on their way to the house, and Leon invites him to dinner. Cecilia is irritated at Robbie's coming, but does not know why he bothers her so much.
Meanwhile, Robbie wants to write a letter to Cecilia to apologize for his behavior at the fountain. He indicates that he also feels awkward around her, and, like her, does not know why. After finishing it, he unthinkingly writes another letter, using the word "cunt," suggesting his subconscious desires towards Cecilia. Although he then writes another version of it, the first version is accidentally delivered to Cecilia via Briony, who reads it. Briony consults her cousin Lola. Briony is then convinced that Robbie is a "sex maniac" and that she must "protect" her sister from him.
Upon reading Robbie's letter, Cecilia realizes her love for Robbie and they end up making love in the library. Briony interrupts them, and interprets their lovemaking as a sexual assault upon her sister.
During dinner, the twin cousins run away, leaving a letter. The dinner party divides into groups to go out searching for them. Robbie and Briony are the only ones who are left alone, as Robbie has to acknowledge later. In the dark, Briony comes across Lola being raped by an unknown attacker. Briony blames Robbie as the attacker. Lola, afraid and disturbed, lets Briony do the talking.
The police arrive to investigate, and when Robbie arrives with the rescued twins, he is arrested solely on the basis of Briony's testimony. Apart from Robbie's mother, only Cecilia believes in his innocence.

By the time World War II has started, Robbie has spent three years in prison. He is released on the condition of enlistment in the army. Cecilia has become a nurse. She cuts off all contact with her family because of the part they took in sending Robbie to jail. Robbie and Cecilia have only been in contact by letter, since she was not allowed to visit him in prison. Before Robbie has to go to war in France, they meet once for half an hour during Cecilia's lunch break. Their reunion starts awkwardly, but they share a kiss before leaving each other.
In France, the war is going badly and the army is retreating to Dunkirk. As the injured Robbie goes to the safe haven, he thinks about Cecilia and past events like teaching Briony how to swim and reflecting on Briony's possible reasons for accusing him. His single meeting with Cecilia is the memory that keeps him walking, his only aim is seeing her again. At the end, Robbie falls asleep in Dunkirk, one day before the evacuation.

Remorseful Briony has refused her place at Cambridge and instead is a trainee nurse in London. She has realized the full extent of her mistake, and now remembers it was Paul Marshall, Leon's friend, whom she saw raping Lola. Briony still writes, although she does not pursue it with the same recklessness as she did as a child.
Briony is called to the bedside of Luc, a young, fatally wounded French soldier. She consoles him in his last moments by speaking with him in her school French, and he mistakes her for an English girl whom his mother wanted him to marry. Just before his death, Luc asks "Do you love me?", to which Briony answers "Yes," not only because "no other answer was possible" but also because "for the moment, she did. He was a lovely boy far away from his family and about to die." Afterward, Briony daydreams about the life she might have had if she had married Luc and gone to live with him and his family.
Briony attends the wedding of her cousin Lola and Paul Marshall before finally visiting Cecilia. Robbie is on leave from the army and Briony meets him unexpectedly at her sister's. They both refuse to forgive Briony, who nonetheless tells them she will try and put things right. She promises to begin the legal procedures needed to exonerate Robbie, even though Paul Marshall will never be held responsible for his crime because of his marriage to Lola, the victim.

The fourth section, titled "London 1999", is written from Briony's perspective. She is a successful novelist at the age of 77 and dying of vascular dementia.
It is revealed that Briony is the author of the preceding sections of the novel. Although Cecilia and Robbie are reunited in Briony's novel, they were not in reality. Robbie Turner died of septicaemia caused by his injury on the beaches of Dunkirk and Cecilia was killed by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains above Balham Underground station. The truth is that Cecilia and Robbie never saw each other again after their half-hour meeting. Although the detail concerning Lola's marriage to Paul Marshall is true, Briony never visited Cecilia to make amends.
Briony explains why she decided to change real events and unite Cecilia and Robbie in her novel, although it was not her intention in her many previous drafts. She did not see what purpose it would serve if she told the readers the pitiless truth. She reasons that they could not draw any sense of hope or satisfaction from it. But above all, she wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia their happiness by being together. Since they could not have the time together they so much longed for in reality, Briony wanted to give it to them at least in her novel.

[1] Wikipedia.org: Atonement

Ysabel (World Fantasy Award winner)

2010-12-12T01:17:00.000-08:00

Ysabel is a novel by multiple award-winning Canadian author of fantasy fiction, Guy Gavriel Kay (1954- ), published in 2007, and won the 2008 World Fantasy Award in the Novel category.

Plot Summary [1]

Ned Marriner is in France with his father, Edward, a celebrated photographer who is working on a book about Provence. While his father shoots outside the deserted Saint-Sauveur Cathedral, Ned wanders in to look around. There he meets Kate Wenger, an American exchange student with a passion for ancient history and an extensive knowledge of the cathedral's past. The pair is startled by the appearance of a then-nameless man, who warns them to leave immediately, stating that they "have blundered into the corner of a very old story". Ned finds that he is able to sense the man's presence, a power of which he was previously unaware. Ned and Kate also notice an ancient carving of a woman on one of the church pillars, which the nameless man claims he created.
Frightened by the incident, Ned and Kate make plans to meet a few days later. Ned goes on a photo-scouting mission with his father's assistants, Greg, Steve, and Melanie, a young woman who is hyper-organized, witty, and well-liked by everyone, including Ned. They head towards Mont Sainte-Victoire, a much-photographed location made famous by Cezanne. But along the way, Ned falls suddenly and inexplicably ill. Arriving at the mountain, he is overcome by images of the slaughter that took place there centuries prior, when a Roman general killed thousands of Celts. He is rushed back to the team's villa, but once he has travelled only a short distance from the mountain, he recovers completely. Ned and Kate meet later that day in a coffee shop to discuss their situation. Ned is unnerved by the discovery of his strange abilities, while both are curious to find out more about the nameless man and his "story." Unaware that they are being watched by the nameless man, they make plans to meet again in Entremont, an ancient Celtic site, on the Eve of Beltaine. Kate leaves, but Ned becomes aware of the nameless man's presence and confronts him. The man tells him little, and soon leaves the cafe. Outside, however, he is attacked by unnaturally vicious dogs, and Ned steps in to defend him, saving his life.
Ned meets his Aunt Kim, a woman with mysterious powers. She tells him that she sensed he was in trouble, and came at once to offer her help. He discovers that she has the same ability to "sense" the presence of those with power, which she claims "runs in the family." They are confronted by a second nameless man, a large Celt with antlers, and are again warned to stay out of the "story." The Celt plans to kill the nameless man from the cathedral (who he calls a "Roman"), and threatens Ned for having helped him, but Aunt Kim manages to bluff their way out of the situation. Despite Ned's misgivings, Kate, who is acting strangely, convinces him to follow their original plan of visiting Entremont on Beltaine. They plan to be away from the place before dark, but not long after they enter the site, darkness falls several hours early. They hide from a ghostly procession of druids that arrives soon after and becomes more solid as the light continues to fade. The nameless Roman from the cathedral confronts them, ordering them to flee as soon as they can. Kate begins to struggle, possessed with a strange desire to join the druidic ceremony below. Just before she escapes, however, Melanie arrives, looking for Ned. As she approaches the waiting Celts, she is transformed into Ysabel, possessed by the spirit of an ancient woman who the two nameless men have been fighting over for centuries. Ysabel names the Roman Phelan and the Celt Cadell, and orders them to spend three days searching for her. Whoever finds her first will win her. Ned and Kate discover that this is the "story": a battle between two men for one woman's love, which has been repeated in various incarnations throughout the millennia.
Ned and Kate leave unnoticed, stricken by the loss of Melanie. He tells his father, Aunt Kim, Greg, and Steve everything that has happened, and also asks his mother, Meghan, to leave Sudan, where she is working with Doctors Without Borders, to be with them as they attempt to get Melanie back. Meghan and Kim, her sister, had a falling out when they were younger, and there are some strained moments once Meghan arrives and they attempt to work together and reconcile their differences. They are aided by Uncle Dave, Kim's husband, who also possesses special abilities and knowledge of the supernatural. Ned and his fellow searchers visit various historical sites in Provence over the following two days, trying to track down Ysabel's hiding place before Phelan or Cadell in the hopes that they will be able to rescue Melanie. Following a hint from one of the wild boars that are common throughout the South of France, Ned realizes that Ysabel is hiding on Mont Sainte-Victoire, the site where he experienced his mysterious illness. He decides to go there alone, as he is a marathon runner and will be able to reach the summit fastest. Despite feeling sick the entire way, Ned makes it to the summit before Phelan or Cadell, discovering Ysabel in a cavern that looks out over Provence. He demands that she release Melanie. Cadell and Phelan arrive shortly thereafter, both claiming the victory. Ysabel points out that it was Ned who arrived first, and reveals that Ned is distantly descended from the original Ysabel (who would have gone by a different name). Both Phelan and Cadell commit suicide by leaping from the mountain, for neither succeeded in reaching Ysabel first. When Ned looks at Ysabel again, he finds that she too has departed, leaving Melanie safe and unharmed in her place.

[1] Wikipedia.org: Ysabel

The City & the City (Hugo Award, BSFA Award, Clarke Award, & World Fantasy Award winner)

2010-11-23T22:46:00.000-08:00

The City & the City is a fiction novel by British author China Miéville (1972- ) published in 2009 and won the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 2010 BSFA Award for Best Novel of 2009, the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the 2010 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

The City & The City

The City & The City takes place in the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. These two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but via the volition of their citizens (and the threat of the secret power known as Breach), they are perceived as two different cities. A denizen of one city must dutifully 'unsee' (that is, ignore, or fade into the background) the denizens, buildings, and events taking place in the other city — even if they are an inch away. This separation is emphasized by the style of clothing, architecture, gait, and the way denizens of each city generally carry themselves. Residents of the cities are taught from childhood to recognise things belonging to the other city without actually seeing them. Ignoring the separation, even by accident, is called "breaching" - a terrible crime by the citizens of the two cities, worse than murder.

The twin cities are composed of crosshatched, alter, and total areas. "Total"' areas are entirely in one city, the city in which the observer currently resides. "Alter" areas are completely in the other city, and so must be completely avoided and ignored. Between these are areas of "crosshatch". These might be streets, parks or squares where denizens of both cities walk alongside one another, albeit unseen. Areas that exist in both cities usually go under different names in each one. There is also Copula Hall, "one of the very few" buildings which exists in both cities under the same name. Rather than being cross-hatched, it essentially functions as a border. It is the only way in which one can legally and officially pass from one city to another. Passing through the border passage takes travellers, geographically (or "grosstopically"), to the exact place they started from — only in a different city.

From a physical standpoint, little differentiates the two cities, other than slight differences of architecture, vehicles and styles of dress which citizens and visitors are trained to recognise. Those who do not know about the separation might naturally view the two cities as one. Because of this, an extra power is needed to keep the separation in place: this organisation is known as Breach. When a 'breach' takes place (used here in the sense of 'breaching' the barrier between the two cities), Breach comes to take care of it. Members of the Breach organisation use their powers to take the breacher captive, and bring them to an unknown punishment. "Breachers", as they are called, disappear and are never seen again. Children and tourists, however, are treated more leniently: children may be forgiven for a small breach; if tourists breach, they are bundled out and banned from both cities forever.

Most breaches are taken care of by Breach immediately, but its surveillance capabilities are not absolute. Sometimes Breach must be specifically invoked to investigate a crime that seems to be a clear-cut case of breach, such as a smuggling operation that involves breaching in order to transport the smuggled goods from one city to the other. In order to invoke Breach, the police must present their evidence to an Oversight Committee composed of 42 members, 21 from each city. If the evidence presented is convincing enough, the Committee performs whatever other investigation into the matter it deems appropriate to resolve any remaining doubts its members have. If its investigation concludes to its satisfaction that a breach has taken place, then and only then will it invoke Breach. Invoking Breach is a last resort because it is an alien power to which some consider that Besźel and Ul Qoma surrender their sovereignty at their peril. [1]

[1] Wikipedia.org: The City & the City

The Kite Runner (Boeke Prize winner, the first 2005 best seller in US, ...)

2010-11-11T20:21:00.000-08:00

The Kite Runner is a novel by Afghan-born American novelist and physician Khaled Hosseini (1965- ); published in 2003 and won the Boeke Prize in 2004. It was the first 2005 best seller in the United States [1].

Plot Summary [2]

Part I

Amir, a well-to-do Pashtun boy, and Hassan, a Hazara who is the son of Ali, Amir's father's servant, spend their days in the then peaceful city of Kabul, kite fighting and roaming through the streets. Amir’s father, a wealthy merchant, who Amir affectionately refers to as Baba, loves both the boys, but seems critical of Amir for not being manly enough. Amir secretly believes his father blames him for his mother’s death during childbirth. However, he has a kinder father figure in the form of Rahim Khan, Baba’s friend, who understands Amir better, and is supportive of his interest in writing. Amir tells us that his first word was 'Baba' and Hassan's "Amir,' suggesting that Amir looked up most to Baba, while Hassan looked up to Amir.

Assef, a notorious sociopath and violent older boy with sadistic tendencies, mocks Amir for socializing with a Hazara, which is, according to Assef, an inferior race that should only live in Hazarajat. He prepares to attack Amir with brass knuckles, but Hassan bravely stands up to him, threatening to shoot out Assef's left eye with his slingshot. Assef and his posse back off, but Assef threatens revenge.

Hassan is a successful "kite runner" for Amir, knowing where the kite will land without even watching it. One triumphant day, Amir wins the local tournament, and finally Baba's praise. Hassan runs for the last cut kite, a great trophy, saying to Amir, "For you, a thousand times over." Unfortunately, Hassan runs into Assef and his two friends. Hassan refuses to give up Amir's kite. Amir searches for Hassan but hides when he hears Assef's voice. Assef decides to teach Hassan a lesson by raping him. Amir witnesses the act but is too scared to intervene, and returns home ashamed, guilty for not being able to help his best friend. He feels that his cowardice in Hassan's rape would destroy any hopes for Baba's affections, so he says nothing. Afterwards, Hassan and Amir keep a distance from each other. Amir reacts indifferently because he feels ashamed, and is frustrated by Hassan's saint-like behavior. Already jealous of Baba's love for Hassan, he worries that if Baba knew of Hassan's bravery and his own cowardice, that Baba's love for Hassan would grow even more.

Amir, filled with guilt on his birthday, cannot enjoy his gifts. The only present that does not feel like "blood" money is the notebook to write his stories in given to him by Rahim Khan, his father's friend and the only one Amir felt really understood him.

Amir felt that life would be easier if Hassan was not around, so he planted a watch and some money from his birthday party under Hassan's mattress in hopes that Baba would force him to leave; Hassan falsely confesses when confronted by Baba about the watch and the money. Baba forgives him, despite the fact that, as he explained earlier, he believes that "there is no act more wretched than stealing." Hassan and his father Ali, to Baba's extreme sorrow, leave anyway. Hassan's departure frees Amir of the daily reminder of his cowardice and betrayal, but he still lives in their shadow and his guilt.

Part II

Five years later, the Soviet Union invade Afghanistan. Amir and Baba escape to Peshawar, Pakistan and then to Fremont, California, where Amir and Baba, who lived in luxury in an expensive mansion in Afghanistan, settle in a run-down apartment and Baba begins work at a gas station. Amir eventually takes classes at a local community college to develop his writing skills after graduating from high school at age twenty. Every Sunday, Baba and Amir make extra money selling used goods at a flea market in San Jose. There, Amir meets fellow refugee Soraya Taheri and her family. Soraya's father, General Taheri, once a high-ranking officer in Afghanistan, has contempt for Amir's literary aspiration. Baba is diagnosed with terminal small cell carcinoma but is still capable of granting Amir one last favor: he asks Soraya's father's permission for Amir to marry her. He agrees and the two marry. Shortly thereafter Baba dies. Amir and Soraya settle down in a happy marriage, but to their sorrow learn that they cannot have children.

Amir embarks on a successful career as a novelist. Fifteen years after his wedding, Amir receives a call from Rahim Khan, who is dying from an illness. Rahim Khan asks Amir to come to Peshawar, Pakistan. He enigmatically tells Amir, "There is a way to be good again." Amir goes.

Part III

From Khan, Amir learns the fates of Ali and Hassan. Ali was killed by a land mine. Hassan had a wife named Farzana and a son who he named Sohrab. He had set up a life for himself in a village outside Bamiyan, but returned to Baba’s house as a caretaker at Khan’s request, although he moved to the little hut in the yard so as not to dishonor Amir by taking his place in the house. During his stay, his mother Sanaubar returned after a long search for her son, and died after four years. One month after Khan left for Pakistan, the Taliban ordered Hassan to give up the house and leave, but he refused, and was executed, along with Farzana. Khan reveals that Ali was not really Hassan's father, and that Ali was sterile, and that Hassan was actually the son of Baba, and therefore Amir's half-brother. Finally, Rahim Khan tells Amir that the true reason he has called Amir to Pakistan is to go to Kabul to rescue Hassan's son, Sohrab, from an orphanage.

Khan asks Amir to bring Sohrab to Thomas and Betty Caldwell, who own an orphanage. Amir becomes furious; he feels cheated because he had not known that Hassan was his half-brother. Amir finally relents and decides to go to Kabul to get Sohrab. He storms out of the house in a rage, but later returns and tells Khan will go find Sohrab. He travels in a taxi with an Afghan driver named Farid, a veteran of the war with the Soviets, and stays as a guest at Farid's brother Wahid's house. Farid, initially hostile to Amir, is sympathetic when he hears of Amir's true reason for returning, and offers to accompany him on his journey.

Amir searches for Sohrab at the orphanage. In order to enter Taliban territory, Amir, who is normally clean shaven, wears a fake beard and moustache, to avoid the punishment the Taliban would otherwise deliver. However, Sohrab is not where he was supposed to be: the director of the orphanage tells them that a Taliban official comes often, brings cash, and usually takes a girl back with him. Once in a while however, he takes a boy, recently Sohrab. The director tells Amir to go to a soccer match, where he could see the procurer making speeches at half-time and wearing black sunglasses. Farid manages to secure an appointment with the speaker at his home, by saying that he and Amir have "personal business" with him.

At the house, Amir meets the man, who turns out to be Assef. Assef is aware of Amir's identity from the very beginning, but Amir doesn't recognise his childhood nemesis until Assef starts asking about Ali, Baba, and Hassan. Sohrab is being kept at Assef's home where he is made to dance dressed in women's clothes, and it seems Assef might have been raping him. (Sohrab later confirms this saying, "I'm so dirty and full of sin. The bad man and the other two did things to me.") Assef agrees to relinquish him, but only for a price—cruelly beating Amir. However, Amir is saved when Sohrab uses his slingshot to shoot out Assef's left eye, fulfilling Hassan's threat made many years before.

While at a hospital treating his injuries, Amir asks Farid to find information about Thomas and Betty Caldwell. When Farid returns, he tells Amir that the American couple do not exist.

Amir tells Sohrab of his plans to take him back to America and possibly adopt him, and promises that he will never be sent to an orphanage again. However, US authorities demand, among other things, paperwork as evidence of Sohrab's orphan status. After decades of war, this is all but impossible to get in Afghanistan where, as Amir says, many dead have no certificate just as they had never had a birth certificate. Amir tells Sohrab that he may have to temporarily break his promise until the paperwork is completed. Upon hearing this, Sohrab attempts suicide. Amir eventually manages to take him back to the United States without an orphanage, and introduces him to his wife. However, Sohrab is emotionally damaged and refuses to speak or even glance at Soraya. This continues until his frozen emotions thaw when Amir reminisces about Hassan and kites. Amir shows off some of Hassan’s tricks, and Sohrab begins to interact with Amir again. In the end Sohrab only shows a lopsided smile, but Amir takes to it with all his heart as he runs the kite for Sohrab, saying, "For you, a thousand times over."

Adaptation

The Kite Runner was adapted into a film of the same name directed by Marc Forster in 2007.

[1] "Harry Potter tops US best-seller list for 2005". ninemsn.com.au. 2006-01-07.
[2] Wikipedia.org: The Kite Runner

Diary of a Bad Year

2010-11-05T00:32:00.000-07:00

Diary of a Bad Year is a novel by Australian citizen, South African-born author J. M. Coetzee (1940- ) who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is one of the two writers to win the Booker Prize twice. It was published in 2007 and nominated for New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, The Age Book of the Year Award, Victorian Premier's Literary Award, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, and Australia-Asia Literary Award, all in 2008.

Diary of a Bad Year

Plot Summary [1]

The protagonist, called Señor C. by the other characters, is an aging South African writer living in Sydney. The novel consists of his essays and musings alongside diary entries by both Señor C. and Anya, a neighbor whom he has hired as a typist. The essays, which take up the larger part of each page, are on wide-ranging topics, including the politics of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Guantanamo Bay, and terrorism. The diary entries appear beneath the essays and describe the relationship that develops between the two characters, a relationship that ultimately leads to subtle evolutions in both their worldviews.

From The Washington Post [2]

J.M. Coetzee is a great novelist, perhaps the greatest writing today, and has garnered just about every important prize awarded for fiction written in English, including the Nobel Prize for Literature. By common consent his most powerful work is Disgrace, published in 1999, in form an old fashioned realistic novel that one can readily imagine having been written by Dostoevsky, Coetzee's acknowledged master, if the terrifying event at the center of its plot -- the gang rape of a young lesbian in the South African bush -- were transposed to Russia during one of its periods of violence and chaos. Coetzee's previous novels, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Age of Iron (1990) and The Master of Petersburg (1994) among them, are likewise in the realist tradition. They are stories plausible enough for the reader to accept them as true. To quote the protagonist of Coetzee's new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, such stories "tell themselves, they don't get told." The author doesn't intrude in the space between the version of reality he has created and the reader, or otherwise take the risk of breaking the spell he has cast.

Since Disgrace, however, Coetzee has been engaged in a fascinating effort to bend the realist novel into a new medium. Diary of a Bad Year is the most recent example of that enterprise; the mesmerizing and beautiful novel Elizabeth Costello (2003) was the first. In the latter work Coetzee introduced an alter ego, a famous female writer, born in 1928, and the author of nine novels, a volume of poems, a book on birds and a body of journalism -- an oeuvre closely corresponding to Coetzee's. We see her deliver seven lectures. Among them: one on the novel, two on animal rights (these were in fact given by Coetzee at Princeton) and one on Eros as it affects men and gods. The last chapter is a retelling of the parable of the Law in Kafka's Trial.

Elizabeth Costello came back on stage, as though to take a bow, in an exquisite chapter-length sequel to the novel that appeared in 2005 in the New York Review of Books, and again, much more substantially, in the novel Slow Man, also published that year. There Costello literally moves in with the protagonist, a 60-something man by the name of Rayment, living alone in Adelaide, Australia. Rayment had never met Costello before, and she is not a welcome or easy guest. But she is obsessed with him, and the difficulty she faces is that he won't cooperate. He refuses to undertake anything that makes the protagonist of a novel photogenic, such as making love to the three women who are in all likelihood available or, for that matter, Costello herself. Slow Man -- with its slow protagonist -- can be seen as a novelist's interaction with the characters of a novel that is still a work in progress and may not turn out as had been intended.

The obduracy of invented characters can be very real. The novelist comes across them somewhere in the zone of imagination and, because of a mysterious affinity, invites them to come aboard. They do -- and misbehave. Coetzee's surrogate in Diary of a Bad Year is JC (two of Coetzee's initials), another very distinguished novelist but this time originally South African, laden with honors, born in 1934 (Coetzee was born in 1940), and now living in Sydney (Coetzee, like Rayment, lives in Adelaide). Asked why he isn't writing a novel instead of the string of little essays to be published in Germany as "Strong Opinions," JC answers, "I don't have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up the whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today."

JC and Coetzee may be protesting too much. Diary of a Bad Year is an ingenious work that rivets the reader's attention, and it cannot have been easy to write. The top third of each page is occupied by the essays that JC is writing for a German publisher.

The middle third of the page tells the story of JC's relationship with Anya, a Philippine-Australian beauty he meets in his building's basement laundry room. In the manner of old men who have loved women, he feels an immediate flash of desire, but, cagy and reasonable, he resists temptation. Instead of making a pass or venturing a proposition, he engages her to type the essays he dictates into a recording machine. Her secretarial skills aren't much, but she becomes his Segretaria, his Secret Aria, an echo of Humbert Humbert's string of endearing names for Lolita. When they discuss his work, she bosses him around, adding to his infatuation.

On the bottom third of each page appears a running commentary by Anya on JC and on her own live-in affair with Alan, and also Alan's comments to Anya on JC. Alan is an Australian yob who has worked his way to being a financial consultant; in his case that may mean he is a crook. He has planted spyware on the hard drive of JC's computer, which reports on everything JC confides to his computer, especially his finances. Alan's Thatcherite lucubrations are a counterpoint for JC's sometimes quirky and more often predictable worldview: JC distrusts democracy and deplores the decline of Australian political life, loathes George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, feels shame descending upon him when he thinks of Guantanamo and Americans' use of torture. Alan, we soon learn, has concocted a larcenous scheme designed to get his hands on JC's money. Anya's response is somber and unequivocal: She will stand by her JC. More than that, she will be there to hold his hand and give him a kiss when the end comes, "just to remind him of what he is leaving behind."

So it turns out in the end that Coetzee has written a sometimes sentimental love story that plays out nicely to the legato accompaniment of his pronouncements, political and cultural, some of which hit the bull's eye while some come to the verge of pomposity. I said "his pronouncements," but of course they are JC's essays, which is a reminder that not everything in Coetzee's novel is as it seems. Except this: Lovely Anya has her heart in the right place, and JC is lucky enough to understand that. Is the experimental form the story took a success? I was amused and at the same time hoped that the marvelously inventive Mr. Coetzee will move beyond it.
Reviewed by Louis Begley
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

[1] Wikipedia.org: Diary of a Bad Year
[2] Breaking the Fourth Wall, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR, by J.M. Coetzee, The Washington Post, 2008.

The Brass Verdict (Anthony Award winner)

2010-10-26T01:26:00.000-07:00

The Brass Verdict is a novel by American author of detective novels Michael Connelly (1956- ) published in 2008 and won Anthony Award for the Best Novel in 2009 [1].

Plot Summary [2]

Since the events of the previous novel, Attorney Mickey Haller has spent a year recuperating from his wounds and a subsequent addiction to painkillers. But he is called back to the practice of law when an old friend, defense attorney Jerry Vincent, is murdered. Haller inherits Vincent's caseload, the high-profile trial of a Hollywood mogul accused of slaying his wife and her lover. Haller secures the "franchise" case, persuading the mogul to keep him on as counsel by promising not to seek a postponement of the trial, which is due to start in nine days.

Meanwhile, maverick LAPD detective Harry Bosch, the main character in several earlier novels written by Connelly, is investigating Vincent's murder. Bosch, warning that Vincent's killer may come after Haller next, persuades the reluctant lawyer to cooperate in the ongoing murder investigation. Meanwhile, Haller shakes off the rust, and lingering self-doubts, as he prepares for the double-murder trial.

Unknown to Haller, but revealed in previous Connelly novels, is the fact that Bosch is Haller's half-brother.

Review [3]

"The Brass Verdict has the sneaky metabolism of any Connelly book. It starts slowly, moves calmly, hides pertinent bits of information in plain sight and then abruptly ratchets up its energy for the denouement....In the midst of this new story, Mickey rebounds with a vengeance....Like Harry Bosch's mojo, Mickey Haller's is liable to work well for a long time." (New York Times Janet Maslin 2008)

"Connelly is firing on all cylinders in this epic page-turner. The intriguing story line, the chance to view Bosch from another perspective, and Haller's reappearance as a main character add up to a fantastic read. One of the best thrillers of the year." (Library Journal Jeff Ayers )

"The answer to every Connelly fan's dream: Hieronymus Bosch meets the Lincoln Lawyer....By turns wary, competitive, complementary, cooperative and mutually predatory....Connelly brings his two sleuths together in a way that honors them both" (Kirkus Reviews )

"Connelly once again hits it out of the park in the tightly written, fast-paced and sharply imagined The Brass Verdict....Connelly builds to some breathtaking twists before all comes to a close. And a more perfect end to the maze he has drawn is difficult to imagine." (Denver Post Robin Vidimos )

"If at first encounter Connelly seems primarily an exceptionally accomplished writer of crime novels, at closer examination he is also a mordant and knowing chronicler of the world in which crime takes place, i.e., our world....Aterrific ride." (Washington Post Jonathan Yardley )

"A beautifully executed crime thriller....Bosch might have met his match in the wily Haller, and readers will delight in their sparring." (Publishers Weekly )

Washington Post [4]: Graham Greene liked to distinguish between his serious novels and those he called his "entertainments," though given the complexity of the man and his work it wasn't always easy for readers to draw the distinction. Probably Michael Connelly would be the last to compare himself with Greene, but he, too, writes at differing levels of seriousness. If at first encounter he seems primarily an exceptionally accomplished writer of crime novels, at closer examination he is also a mordant and knowing chronicler of the world in which crime takes place, i.e., our world. Three years ago, within the space of only a few months, Connelly published two novels notable for the serious business underlying the entertainment. The first, The Closers, published in May 2005, found his noted Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch trying to solve a "cold case" and thus trying to bring justice to victims on whom the law has turned its back. Then, in October of the same year, he published The Lincoln Lawyer, his first novel told from a lawyer's point of view, about an ambulance chaser named Mickey Haller, who, in the course of pursuing a lucrative case, finds himself seeking justice for a man he believes he failed to represent fairly when his case was being heard. Now, in The Brass Verdict, Connelly brings Bosch and Haller together for the first time. Though the novel has some serious things to say about the workings, and occasional failures, of the jury system, it is primarily an entertainment, and more than welcome purely as such. It's narrated by Mickey, a criminal-defense lawyer who is just coming off a year's self-imposed sabbatical -- he'd been shot in the gut and then had become addicted to painkillers in various forms -- and plans to ease slowly back into his practice. He's no K Street lawyer, as he tells a young man he takes on as his driver: "I haven't had an office since I left the Public Defenders Office twelve years ago. My car is my office. I've got two other Lincolns just like this one. I keep them in rotation. Each one's got a printer, a fax and I've got a wireless card in my computer. Anything I have to do in an office I can do back here while I'm on the road to the next place. There are more than forty courthouses spread across L.A. County. Being mobile is the best way to do business." Mickey's hopes of easing back in are quickly deep-sixedConnelly's faithful readers don't have to be told that his real name is Hieronymus, "like the painter" -- but there's a problem: The deeper both men dig into Vincent's past, the more suspicions are raised. Vincent had received a lot of money, presumably from Elliot, and much of it -- $100,000, to be precise -- had disappeared. Mickey says Vincent claimed that "he needed the money to buy a boat and that if he made the deal in cash, he would get the best deal and save a lot of money," to which Harry replies: "There is no boat. The story was a lie." Vincent "bought something," Harry says, "and your client Walter Elliot probably knows what it was" -- something, for starters, like a potential juror. "You should take it as a warning, Counselor," Harry continues. When Mickey scoffs, he says, "His lawyer got killed, not him. Think about it. And remember, that little trickle on the back of your neck and running down your spine? That's the feeling you get when you know you have to look over your shoulder. When you know you're in danger." Mickey doesn't want to be scared, but as things unfold it appears he doesn't have much choice. One of those things is, how much -- if at all -- can he trust his client? Walter Elliot loudly and frequently proclaims his innocence and insists he wants a speedy trial to clear his name as rapidly as possibly, but though Mickey wants to believe him, experience teaches him to be cautious: "Over the years I had represented and been in the company of a couple dozen killers. The one rule is that there are no rules. They come in all sizes and shapes, rich and poor, humble and arrogant, regretful and cold to the bone. The percentages told me that it was most likely Elliot was a killer. That he had calmly dispatched his wife and her lover and arrogantly thought he could and would get away with it. But there was nothing about him on first meeting that told me one way or the other for sure. And that's the way it always was." If you're beginning to get a whiff of the O.J. Simpson case, well, that's pretty obviously how Connelly planned it. Not merely is the accused murderer a Los Angeles celebrity and the victims his wife and her lover, but Connelly drops in the occasional teasing reference as well. When Elliot blusters in court that "the sooner Mr. Haller gets to prove my innocence to the world, the better," Mickey dismisses it as "O.J. 101," and when another lawyer offers to pitch in and help, Mickey tells him: "He wants only one lawyer at the table. . . . He said no dream team." But all of that is just a little juice on the side; the main story is strictly Connelly's. The essence of it is this, as Mickey puts it: "I was defending a man I believed was innocent of the murders he was charged with but complicit in the reason they had occurred. I had a sleeper on the jury whose placement was directly related to the murder of my predecessor. And I had a detective watching over me whom I was holding back on and couldn't be sure was considering my safety ahead of his own desire to break open the case." Yet how does Mickey feel? "I felt like a guy flipping a three-hundred-pound sled in midair. It might not be a sport but it was dangerous as hell and it did what I hadn't been able to do in more than a year's time. It shook off the rust and put the charge back in my blood." Mickey is pumped, and, take my word for it, you will be too. Even though the way it ends is just a wee bit contrived, it's still a terrific ride.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

[1] Anthony Award, Best Novel, 2009 Michael Connelly, The Brass Verdict

[2] Wikipedia.org: The_Brass_Verdict

[3] Amazon.com: The Brass Verdict

[4] Washington Post: Jonathan Yardley on 'The Brass Verdict'

The Book Thief (Boeke Prize, Daniel Elliott Peace Award, ... winner)

2010-10-16T00:53:00.000-07:00

The Book Thief is a novel by Australian author Markus Zusak (1975- ), published in 2005 and won Commonwealth Writers Prize, Horn Book Fanfare, Kirkus Reviews Editor Choice Award, School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, Daniel Elliott Peace Award, Publishers Weekly Best Children Book of the Year, Booklist ChildrenEditors' Choice and Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book in 2006, Boeke Prize, ALA Best Books for Young Adults, Michael L. Printz Honor Book and Book Sense Book of the Year in 2007, and Pacific Northwest Young Readers Choice Master List in 2009 [1].

Plot Summary [1]

The Book Thief takes place in Germany before and during World War II. The story is told from the point of view of Death, who finds the story of the Book Thief, Liesel Meminger, to be very interesting, as she brushed Death three times in her life. The novel begins when Liesel's mother takes Liesel and her brother Werner to live with foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann. We learn that her father is a communist, and her mother is chronically sick. Her brother dies during the trip and Liesel steals the apprentice Gravediggers' Grave Digging handbook, after he drops it in the snow. This would be Liesel's first close call with death, as well as her first time stealing a book. Liesel's foster mother and father, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, treat her well, though Rosa often insults Liesel by calling her a pig in German (affectionately, of course). Hans teaches her how to read using "The Gravedigger's Handbook", and she continues stealing books from various sources - mainly the library of Ilsa Hermann, the mayor's wife, a friend of hers who enjoys and tolerates her thievery. Liesel also befriends the other children of Himmel Street, including Rudy Steiner, who is in love with her and is also her best friend.

Eventually, Hans and Rosa take in and hide Max Vandenburg, a Jewish man whose father saved Hans' life in World War I. Max becomes friends with Liesel, making her two books, using repainted pages from a copy of Mein Kampf(My Struggle) and showing her his life story in a series of sketches. However, the Nazi presence and the rise of World War II throw all of their lives into turmoil. When a parade of Jews is brought through the town, Hans gives a piece of bread to an old man. He and the old man are whipped and the family lives in fear of the Gestapo searching their house and discovering Max. They arrange for Max to leave and rendezvous with Hans after a few days; however, when Hans arrives at the meeting point he finds only a note that they believe is from Max saying "You've done enough." After a few weeks, Hans is ordered into the army, as is Rudy's father, Alex Steiner - this is also a punishment; Rudy shows athletic and academic promise and is offered a place at an 'elite' school which was meant for Germany's future elite group, which his parents refuse. Hans is drafted into an air raid service, however after a few months he breaks his leg and returns home.

Liesel begins to write her own book, The Book Thief : the story of her life. When Himmel Street is bombed, she is the only survivor, as she was in the Hubermanns' basement, finishing her book that Hans encouraged her to read. She finds the bodies of her foster parents, and then Rudy. This is Death's third encounter with Liesel. Distraught, she drops the book, which Death finds and keeps. She goes to live with the Hermanns and when Alex Steiner returns, works in his tailor shop. In 1945, Max Vanderburg walks into the shop and he and Liesel are reunited. At the end of the book, Death tells us that she dies in Sydney, Australia, although few other details of her life are revealed, and gives her back the book, along with a truth he can not tell anyone else: "I am haunted by humans."

Total Death Encounters: 1) When Liesel was in the train with her younger brother. Werner coughed and stared blankly into the floor as death came and noticed Liesel. 2) After an air raid an American bomber plane crashes into the woods just at the end of Himmel street, Rudy walks to the dying man in the plane and puts a teddy bear on his chest before being carried away. Death saw Liesel and recognized her. 3)During a unknown midnight air raid on Munich, the bombers missed and hit Himmel street. Death watched as Liesel ran to see all of her dead peers. He was especially sad to take Rudy, He had so much life and so much to live for. He takes his soul when Liesel bent down to gave him a final farewell kiss, as she was in love with him after all. This is when Death finds the book.

Editorial Review [2]

The Book Thief will be appreciated for Mr. Zusak's audacity, also on display in his earlier I Am the Messenger. It will be widely read and admired because it tells a story in which books become treasures. And because there's no arguing with a sentiment like that.

[1] Wikipedia.org: The Book Thief
[2] The Book Thief - Markus Zusak - Review - Books - New York Times

The Finkler Question (Man Booker Prize winner)

2010-10-13T01:28:00.000-07:00

The Finkler Question is a novel by British author and journalist, Howard Jacobson (1942- ), published in 2010 and won the Man Booker Prize on October 12, 2010.

The Finkler Question

Video: Howard Jacobson wins Booker Prize

Plot Summary [1]

The story centers on Julian Treslove, a former radio producer whose career has failed to rise as it should have, mainly because of his lack of focus on the task in hand and a degree of self-doubt which robs him of the certainty he needs to succeed.
Treslove has two close friends, Sam Finkler, a television producer and Jewish philosopher and the former teacher of Sam and Julian, Libor Sevcik, an elderly widower, also Jewish, who in some ways acts as a mentor to the two men.
One day, while walking near Broadcasting House Treslove is mugged and all his valuables are stolen. Treslove is mortified to realize that his assailant is a woman. And to complicate matters, although the words she uttered at the time of the robbery are indistinct, on further reflection, Treslove comes to believe that they were the words, “You Jew!”.
The thought of being the victim of an anti-Semitic attack, when he is in fact a Gentile begins to worry Treslove. Because of his two friends Sam and Libor, Treslove is already familiar with all things Jewish, and he begins to think about anti-Semitism, reading of attacks on Jews in Canada, France, Germany and Argentina. Slowly, his mugging begins to take the form in his mind of an “atrocity”, and as the novel unwinds, poor Treslove begins to question whether he is not in fact Jewish after all, something discerned by the mugger due to innate characteristics which he had not previously recognized.

Editorial Reviews [2]

“It is tempting—after reading something as fine as The Finkler Question—not to bother reviewing it in any meaningful sense but simply to urge you to put down this paper and go and buy as many copies as you can carry … Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding. It is also beautifully written … Indeed, there’s so much that is first rate in the manner of Jacobson’s delivery that I could write all day on his deployment of language without once mentioning what the book is about.”—Edward Docx, Observer (UK)

“Howard Jacobson [is] a writer able to recognize the humor in almost any situation and a man as expansive as most on the nature of Jewishness.”—Gerald Jacobs, Telegraph (UK)

“This charming novel follows many paths of enquiry, not least the present state of Jewish identity in Britain and how it integrates with the Gentile population. Equally important is its exploration of how men share friendship. All of which is played out with Jacobson’s exceptionally funny riffs and happy-sad refrains … Jacobson’s prose is a seamless roll of blissfully melancholic interludes. Almost every page has a quotable, memorable line.”—Christian House, Independent on Sunday (UK)

“Both an entertaining novel and a humane one.”—Henry Hitchings, Financial Times

“There are some great riffs and skits in The Finkler Question … But at the heart of the book is Julian the wannabe Jew, a wonderful comic creation precisely because he is so tragically touching in his haplessness. The most moving (and funniest) scenes are those in which he and Libor, the widower with nothing more to live for, ruminate on love and Jewishness.”—Adam Lively, Sunday Times (UK)

“[A] bleakly funny meditation on loss, belonging and personal identity.”—Ross Gilfillan, Daily Mail (UK)

“For some writers a thorough investigation of the situation of British Jews today might do as the subject for a single book. In The Finkler Question it’s combined with his characteristically unsparing—but not unkindly—ruminations on love, aging, death and grief. He also manages his customary—but not easy—trick of fusing all of the above with genuine comedy … No wonder that, as with most of Jacobson’s novels, you finish The Finkler Question feeling both faintly exhausted and richly entertained.”—James Walton, Sunday Telegraph (UK)

“A terrifying and ambitious novel, full of dangerous shallows and dark, deep water. It takes in the mysteries of male friendship, the relentlessness of grief and the lure of emotional parasitism.”—Alex Clark, Guardian (UK)

“The Finkler Question balances precariously a bleak moralizing with life-affirming humor.”—Bryan Cheyette, Independent (UK)

“Another masterpiece … The Finkler Question is further proof, if any was needed, of Jacobson’s mastery of humor. But above all it is a testament to his ability to describe—perhaps it would be better to say inhabit—the personal and moral worlds of his disparate characters.”—Matthew Syed, Times (UK)

“Jacobson writes perceptively about how durable friendships are compounded, in large part, of envy, schadenfreude and betrayal.”—Jonathan Beckman, Literary Review (UK)

“The Finkler Question is very funny, utterly original, and addresses a topic of contemporary fascination … The writing is wonderfully mobile, and inventive, and Jacobson’s signature is to be found in every sentence … The Finkler Question is a remarkable work.”—Anthony Julius, Jewish Chronicle

“Jacobson is at the height of his powers … As the men tussle with women and their absence, and their own identities, Jacobson’s wit launches a fusillade of hard-punching aperçus on human nature and its absurdities that only he could have written.”—Ben Felsenberg, Metro (UK)

“The Finkler Question, which is as provocative as it is funny, as angry as it is compassionate, offers a moving testimony to a dilemma as ancient as the Old Testament. It also marks another memorable achievement for Jacobson, a writer who never fires blanks and whose dialogue, which reads like an exchange between Sigmund Freud and Woody Allen, races along like a runaway train.”—Alan Taylor, Herald Scotland

“Howard Jacobson’s latest holler from the halls of comic genius … The opening chapters of this novel boast some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language … Jacobson’s brilliance thrives on the risk of riding death to a photo-finish, of writing for broke. Exhilaration all the way.”—Tom Adair, Scotsman

“Here are three men who are in varying ways miserably womanless. This is rich soil for comedy, and Jacobson tills it for every regretful laugh he can muster … Perhaps [Jacobson’s] Leopold Bloom time has come at last.”—Irish Independent

“The Finkler Question is characterized by [Jacobson’s] structuring skill and unsimplifying intelligence—this time picking through the connections and differences, hardly unremarked but given fresh treatment here, between vicariousness and parasitism, and between Jewishness, Judaism and Zionism.”—Leo Robson, New Statesman

“Full of caustic moments … that are also, essentially, funny … No matter the book’s themes, the way Jacobson weds humor to seriousness makes it affecting for anyone.”—Eric Herschthal, Jewish Week

[1] ACommonReader.org: Review: The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson, August 21st, 2010.
[2] Amazon.com: The Finkler Question, Editorial Reviews, October 13, 2010.

Things Fall Apart (the most widely read book in modern African literature)

2010-10-09T23:17:00.000-07:00

Things Fall Apart is a novel by Nigerian novelist, poet, professor at Brown University and critic Chinua Achebe (1930- ).

Things Fall Apart is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world [1].

It is one of the first African novels written in English to receive global critical acclaim. The title of the novel comes from William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" [2].

In 2009, Newsweek ranked Things Fall Apart #14 on its list of Top 100 Books: The Meta-List [3].

Plot Summary [1]

Although Okonkwo's father was a lazy man who earned no titles in his village, Okonkwo was a great man in his home of Umuofia, a group of nine villages in Nigeria. Okonkwo despised his father and does everything he can to be nothing like him. As a young man, Okonkwo began building his social status by defeating a great wrestler, propelling him into society's eye. He is hard-working and shows no weakness—emotional or otherwise—to anyone. Although brusque with his family and neighbors, he is wealthy, courageous, and powerful among his village. He is a leader of his village, and his place in that society is what he has striven for his entire life.

Because of his great esteem in the village, Okonkwo is selected by the elders to be the guardian of Ikemefuna, a boy taken prisoner by the village as a peace settlement between two villages. Ikemefuna is to stay with Okonkwo until the Oracle instructs the elders on what to do with the boy. For three years the boy lives with Okonkwo's family and he grows fond of him, he even considers Okonkwo his father. Then the elders decide that the boy must be killed, and the oldest man in the village warns Okonkwo to have nothing to do with the murder because it would be like killing his own child. Rather than seem weak and feminine to the other men of the village, Okonkwo helps to kill the boy despite the warning from the old man. In fact, Okonkwo himself strikes the killing blow as Ikemefuna begs him for protection.

Shortly after Ikemefuna's death, things begin to go wrong for Okonkwo and when he accidentally kills someone at a ritual funeral ceremony, he and his family are sent into exile for seven years to appease the gods he has offended with the murder. While Okonkwo is away in exile, white men begin coming to Umuofia and they peacefully introduce their religion. As the number of converts increases, the foothold of the white people grows beyond their religion and a new government is introduced.

Okonkwo returns to his village after his exile to find it a changed place because of the presence of the white man. He and other tribal leaders try to reclaim their hold on their native land by destroying a local Christian church that has insulted their gods and religion. In return, the leader of the white government takes them prisoner and holds them for ransom for a short while, further humiliating and insulting the native leaders. The people of Umuofia finally gather for what could be a great uprising, and when some messengers of the white government try to stop their meeting, Okonkwo kills one of them. He realizes with despair that the people of Umuofia are not going to fight to protect themselves because they let the other messengers escape and so all is lost for the village. He also decides never to let the whites imprison him.

When the local leader of the white government comes to Okonkwo's house to take him to court, he finds that Okonkwo has hanged himself, ruining his great reputation as it is strictly against the custom of the Igbo to kill oneself.

[1] Wikipedia.org: Things Fall Apart
[2] Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart Study Guide
[3] Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List

FYI: Obama's Wars by Bob Woodward is published on Amazon.

One Day (Exclusive Books Boeke Prize winner)

2010-10-02T22:46:00.000-07:00

One Day is a novel by English novelist and screenwriter David Nicholls (1966- ), published in 2009 and won Exclusive Books Boeke Prize in 2010. Each chapter of this novel covers the lives of two protagonists on 15 July, St. Swithin's Day, for twenty years.

Review [1]

In 1988, the day after commencement, two college graduates briefly, romantically collide. The girl has pined for the boy for years; the boy is more aware of the girl than he lets on. She’s an earnest, outspoken lefty, he a handsome, apolitical toff who “liked the word ‘bourgeois’ and all that it implied” and “wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.” Their chemistry is as inarguable as their differences, but because of the pride, carelessness and misplaced optimism of youth, they let time and distraction separate them. Yet they never lose track of each other. “One Day” checks in on their intersecting lives once a year, every July 15, from 1988 through 2007.

The trajectories of Emma’s and Dexter’s lives will resonate with many American readers, even though the couple’s relationship begins at the University of Edinburgh and their adulthood takes root in London. With pleasing precision, Nicholls tags cultural touchstones that will be familiar to college graduates on both sides of the Atlantic. For the late 1980s, he resurrects a faultless diorama of the activist female student mentality, in the form of Emma’s cluttered bedroom. Entering it for the first time, Dex knows “with absolute confidence that somewhere in amongst the art postcards and photocopied posters for angry plays there would be a photograph of Nelson Mandela, like some dreamy ideal boyfriend.” He had seen “any number of bedrooms like this, dotted round the city like crime scenes, rooms where you were never more than six feet from a Nina Simone album.” After their night of kissing, fumbling and (on her part) hostile banter meant as coquetry, Emma, upright and uptight, announces that she can picture Dex at 40, in a tiny sports car: “You’ve got this little paunch tucked under the leather steering wheel like a little pillow and those backless gloves on, thinning hair and no chin. You’re a big man in a small car with a tan like a basted turkey.” His own vision for himself is more hopeful. He wants to “feature in magazine articles,” and grandly imagines a future “retrospective of his work, without having any clear notion of what that work might be.”

Very soon, their attitudes have stretched to fit the contours of the compromised, flashy decade to come. Emma, clinging to her idealism, plays bass in an “all-girl band . . . variously called Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit,” then joins a strident arts collective called Sledgehammer Theatre Cooperative (intent on doing “really good, exciting original political devised work”) before taking a job at a Mexican restaurant called Loco Caliente. It’s grubby work, but not as degrading, from Emma’s point of view, as applying for and being rejected from publishing jobs. On the side, she writes poetry in an “expensive new black leather notebook with a stubby fountain pen.” One sample of her work doesn’t augur well for her literary future: “It was the nachos that did it. / The steaming variegated mess like the mess of her life / Summing up all that was wrong / With / Her / Life.” Later Emma wonders if “what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.” When her boss offers her the job of restaurant manager because “I want someone who isn’t going anywhere. Someone reliable who isn’t going to run off to India without giving proper notice or drop it all for some exciting job,” she begins to cry.

Meanwhile, Dex, who did run off to India after Edinburgh, builds a career in London as the host of a succession of tawdry late-night television shows like “Largin’ It,” a loud lad-fest with rock bands and movie star guests, and cage dancers as backup. Flush with cash and coke, gleaming with zircon semi-fame, he shows up at Emma’s restaurant with a glossy new girlfriend, bragging of star-studded nights out and shaming Emma by pushing her to accept a tip. “Wrap party,” the hurt, contemptuous Emma says to herself. “He has become someone who goes to wrap parties.” But that sour reflection won’t sweeten her regard for her dull, devoted boyfriend, a lackluster comic (and Loco Caliente waiter) named Ian, whose mouth “hung open in repose” and whose face “made her think of tractors.” Ian’s relentless store of canned jokes fills Emma with chagrin. When they’re first dating, as he riffs on the menu offerings, she wonders “where the fallacy had come from, that there was something irresistible about funny men.” She can’t help making a comparison: Ian “was a man with a great sense of humor while at the same time being in no way funny. Unlike Dexter.” “Where,” she wonders, “was Dexter right now?”

Back in Bombay, Dex had drafted a long letter, “six blue sheets densely written on both sides,” guardedly revealing his affection for Emma and urging her to spend a few months with him in India. He would wire her money for the ticket; they would meet at the Taj Mahal. But the letter was never mailed. Instead, he left it on a barroom sofa in Bombay and headed off to a hostel with a “trainee pharmacist from Rotterdam with fading henna on her hands, a jar of temazepam in her pocket and a poorly executed tattoo of Woody Woodpecker at the base of her spine.”

A few years later, in the Greek islands, where they’ve gone for a just-friends holiday, Dex and Emma abide by a pre-vacation agreement: separate bedrooms and no flirting. Should they give it a try anyway? Could Cupid possibly unite a rudderless roué (whose own mother mourns, “Sometimes I worry that you’re not very nice anymore”) and a woman so self- conscious she thinks there’s a wrong way to skinny dip? Again and again, these two nearly come together. But it’s not until 1999, 11 years after their first collision, that Emma finally tells Dex, “When I didn’t see you, I thought about you every day, I mean every day, in some way or another.” “Same here,” he replies. The tardy confession accompanies the announcement of his engagement to another woman.

Will Dex and Emma get together before it’s too late? Will they ever act on the lone un-self-conscious thought Emma has been able to hold in her head since the day she walked away from Dexter, when she was 22 and he was 23, as his parents drove him home from college into his still unblemished future? “Love and be loved,” she had told herself, “if you ever get the chance.” It’s something you may want to find out this summer at poolside. And if you do, you may want to take care where you lay this book down. You may not be the only one who wants in on the answers.

Short Reviews [2]

"[An] instant classic. . . . One of the most hilarious and emotionally riveting love stories you’ll ever encounter." —People

“Big, absorbing, smart, fantastically readable." —Nick Hornby, from his blog

"[Nicholls] has a gift for zeitgeist description and emotional empathy that's wholly his own. . . . [A] light but surprisingly deep romance so thoroughly satisfying." —Entertainment Weekly

“Nicholls offers sharp dialogue and wry insight that sounds like Nick Hornby at his best.” —The Daily Beast (A Best Book of the Summer)

"Fluid, expertly paced, highly observed, and at times, both funny and moving." —Boston Globe

"Those of us susceptible to nostalgic reveries of youthful heartache and self-invention (which is to say, all of us) longed to get our hands on Nicholls’s new novel. . . . And if you do, you may want to take care where you lay this book down. You may not be the only one who wants in on the answers." —New York Times Book Review

"Who doesn’t relish a love story with the right amount of heart-melting romance, disappointment, regret, and huge doses of disenchantment about growing up and growing old between quarreling meant-to-be lovers?" —Elle, Top 10 Summer Books for 2010

“A great, funny, and heart-breaking read.” —The Early Show [CBS]

"Funny, sweet and completely engrossing . . . The friendship at the heart of this novel is best expressed within the pitch-perfect dialogue/banter between the two." —Very Short List

“A wonderful, wonderful book: wise, funny, perceptive, compassionate and often unbearably sad . . . the best British social novel since Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!. . . . Nicholls’s witty prose has a transparency that brings Nick Hornby to mind: it melts as you read it so that you don’t notice all the hard work that it’s doing.” —The Times (London)

“Just as Nicholls has made full use of his central concept, so he has drawn on all his comic and literary gifts to produce a novel that is not only roaringly funny but also memorable, moving and, in its own unassuming, unpretentious way, rather profound.” —The Guardian (London)

[1] The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, "The Love Not Taken", LIESL SCHILLINGER, June 18, 2010.

[2] Amazon.com: One Day (Vintage Contemporaries Original) [Paperback]

Palimpsest (Lambda Literary Award winner)

2010-09-20T23:16:00.000-07:00

Palimpsest is a novel by Tiptree, Andre Norton, and Mythopoeic Award winning novelist, poet, and literary critic Catherynne M. Valente (1979- ), published in 2009 and won Lambda Literary Award in the same year; also it was named a 2010 Hugo Award nominee in the Best Novel category.

The novel follows four travelers: Oleg, a New York City locksmith; the beekeeper November; Ludovico, a binder of rare books; and a young Japanese woman named Sei. They've all lost something important in their life: a wife, lover, sister, or direction. They find themselves in Palimpsest after each a spend a night with a stranger who has a tattooed map of a section of the city on his or her body. [1]

Review [2]

“Catherynne M Valente’s Palimpsest just knocks me flat with her use of language: rich, cool, opiated language, language for stories of strange love and hallucinated cities of the mind.” — Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan

“Palimpsest is an elegant and evocative story set in a gorgeous alien wonderland.” — Elizabeth Bear, author of Hammered

"Gorgeously written and deliriously imaginative, Palimpsest is the book for those who love old maps and grow wistful at the sound of a night train. A modern masterpiece in Valente's unique voice and singular sensibility."—Ekaterina Sedia, author of The Alchemy of Stone

“Catherynne Valente has once again proved her mastery of the fantastic. Full to the brim with beautiful images and gorgeous prose, Palimpsest belongs on the same shelf with Calvino's Invisible Cities and Winterson's The Passion. Valente is writing the smartest, gentlest, deepest work in the field, and she's good enough to do it. I remain in awe.”—Daniel Abraham, author of The Long Price Quartet

"It's never enough to merely read a book like Palimpsest, it has to be imbibed, and it's sensuality fully savored."—Nick Bantock, author of The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy

“Outstandingly beautiful prose.”–Publishers Weekly

Palimpsest: A Review [3]

I first heard about the book "Palimpsest" through Livejournal spam. I kept getting reminders that the author, Catherynne Valente, would be reading from her latest novel at the KGB Bar. There was a plot synopsis of the novel in the announcement: something quivering and salacious, but also far, far too coy. Something about four strangers meeting in the night.

Here's the plot synopsis that would have got me to buy her book in person and to hear her read, something I wish I'd done now:

Palimpsest is a book about a city that is also a sexually transmitted disease. You visit the city the night after you fuck somebody infected with it, and then the city possesses your heart and dreams.

After you are infected, you can only be conscious of the lack of magic, mystery, and beauty in your life now that you have seen the alternative. The lack is as brutal as a spiked bat!

Palimpsest is the true reality that you have always known lies just out of reach for you. Like HIV, once you are infected with the city, you die unless you find a cure. But there is only one cure -- permanent immigration to Palimpsest -- and there has been a war that makes this nearly impossible. Good fucking luck, you wanton travelers!

Or, to sum up the theme using Valente's own far more lyric and lucid prose:

"To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them. I have been so many times to countries like that. I have learned how to make coffee in all their ways, how to share food, how to comfort, how to dance in the native ways. It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to... immigrate you could say."

* * *

"Palimpsest" is a fantasy novel, I guess. But it is a fantasy novel in the same way that the works of Haruki Murakami or David Mitchell are fantasy novels.

It is "high fiction," a book that tells a story on its own terms, using an uncompromising and invented form to create higher resonance than the genres of either "literary fiction" or "fantasy" are capable of providing.

High fiction is gaining ground in literature and might be literature's best hope for bringing in new souls. It melds the best things about post-modernism, modernism, and genre fiction, while cutting out the excesses of all three disciplines.

High fiction would not be possible without post-modernism's brush clearing, even though reading the triumphs of 60s, 70s, and 80s literature is like reading through the filing cabinet of an English professor while all the air is being sucked out of a sealed room, like some kind of Batman deathtrap.

But post-modernism worked! At least, it worked in television and film. Everything has now been leveled. Thanks to the gimcrackery of image, New York City is just as real a place as Hogwarts. Since this is true, fiction can tell whatever the fuck story it wants now and people will just go with it. Settings can be manipulated and tweaked to conform to the logic of stories without rigorous world building.

Nobody cares what is real anymore, because now even telling "true" stories means we have to incorporate the mystical, the alien, the fantastical, and the arcane. Also, memoirs and reality television have laid such siege to the truth these days that they have stolen it from fiction like a fancy toy, so fiction can do what it pleases.

However, the lessons of modernism have also taught us that formal experimentation, craft, and deployment of a unique style, are the best ways to elevate prose, and they always improve a work when used deliberately and with control. "Ulysses" = huge success! "Finnegan's Wake" = unreadable, unless it is the only book you ever read.

People toiling for decades in the thankless Prose Mines of modernism taught us the limits of language and revealed many of the tricks, traps, inadequacies, and open areas of narrative exploration.

These days, while you write fantasy novels, you must read Faulkner.

Which brings us to the most important component of "high fiction." The fantastic. The genre spirit. Over the years, the genre writers kept the raw spirit of fiction alive by focusing on pure story. Tales! Adventure! Imagination! Crisis! Catharsis!

And that's what people want. Genre writers realized that if they didn't get it from fiction, they'd get it elsewhere. Those with aspirations for high fiction can no longer neglect this audience. This audience is all of us.

High fiction combines the structural freedom of post-modernism, the elevated style of modernism, and the story power of genre. To write a piece of high fiction is to therefore write fiction that challenges a writer's skills on all levels.

This is a great age for such challenges, an age where if you know how to look, you can see that the path is clear for anything. This is the age of high fiction masterpieces such as Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore," Ursula Le Guin's "The Tombs of Atuin," Susannah Clarke's "Dr. Strange and Mr. Norrell," and Peter Matthiessen's "Shadow Country."

"Palimpsest" is part of this tradition; a tradition struggling out of imagination's protoplasm to reignite the novel for modern readers.

* * *

"Palimpsest" is the story of four people on three continents who journey to the city of Palimpsest together for the first time one night and are then forever linked.

The structure is simple but specially tailored to the subject. The story cycles between the four characters -- each of whom has different desires and problems -- while alternating between the psychogeography of the sexually-transmitted city and the real life dilemmas of four very damaged human beings.

For instance, in order to keep visiting the city, the characters must keep fucking new people who have been there. And every time they visit, they lose something or are permanently altered.

My major problem with this book is also its chief strength. This is not a novel driven by plot or characters. This is a novel driven by setting and by ideas, where the characterization is revealed by the setting. The setting is actuated by the structure, and the structure is lyrical and poetic, replete with images and synesthesias that describe a city that is half-wonder and half-nonsense.

It is a place built for crazy people. Luckily, our protagonists are crazy and fit right in. However, it is a gamble that the reader will be able to empathize with the obsessions of these half-rendered characters. Taken as a story about the safety valve of the imagination, however, "Palimpsest" becomes a book about what people will risk in order to fight for their rightful place.

Sometimes the end result was like reading a beautiful map instead of visiting a real place. Or reading the rules to a game instead of playing it. I am conventional: I wanted more change, growth, risk, and plot.

However, the map and the rules were so engrossing that I stopped caring after awhile and just let my mind savor the possibilities. The ingredients were so fascinating and rare that it became okay that I could not always taste the dish.

* * *

Palimpsest is also really hot.

The characters don't care who they fuck in order to travel to their dream city. Men, women, lepers, the disfigured, the portly, the old, the young, the good, the evil. Every person is their own country and if you want to visit, you have to pay the price.

The tension of the book is the movement between sleaze to the sublime, which is also the tension of sex itself. Isn't it? The passage from life to mystery; the movement from the ordinary to the exalted.

The lowest world is raised up:

"A folktale current in Hokkaido just after the war and passed from conductor to conductor held that the floor of heaven is laced with silver train tracks, and the third rail is solid pearl. The trains that ran along them were fabulous even by the standards of the Shinkansen of today: carriages containing whole pine forests hung with golden lanterns, carriages full of rice terraces, carriages lined in red silk where the meal service brought soup, rice-balls, and a neat lump of opium with persimmon tea poured over it in the most delicate of cups. These trains sped past each other, utterly silent, carrying each a complement of ghosts who clutched the branches like leather handholds, and plucked the green rice to eat raw, and fell back insensate into the laps of women whose faces were painted red from brow to chin. They never stop, never slow, and only with great courage and grace could a spirit slowly progress from car to car, all the way to the conductor's cabin, where all accounts cease, and no man knows what lies therein."

"In Hokkaido, where the snow and ice are so white and pure that they glow blue, it is said that only the highest engineers of Japan Railways know the layout of the railroads on the floor of heaven. They say that those exalted engineers are working, slowly, generation by generation, to lay the tracks on earth so that they mirror exactly the tracks in heaven. When this is done, those marvelous carriages will fall from the sky, and we may know on earth, without paying the terrible fare of death, the gaze of the red women, the light of the forest lanterns, and the taste of persimmon tea."

* * *

Valente has a huge, wild talent and reading her book is intoxicating yet dangerous, like sipping liquor from a crystal goblet and eating dainty sandwiches while getting a massage from an assassin.

It's a book that feels well-tuned and well-edited. Blood was spilled on this book. Whole ink buffalo were slaughtered, and every part was used.

Here's a fascinating and spot-on editorial Valente wrote about why editors are so important, and why self-publishing is not a good idea.

"The general meme seems to be this: with the advent of ebooks, which are definitely going to be the dominant form of book publishing forever and ever, there will no longer be any need for traditional publishers. Each writer will become something of an autonomous press, self-publishing through Amazon and Apple, who are totally awesome indie champions of the little guy, unlike those horrible corporate presses, hiring their own editors, copyeditors, typesetters, marketers, and artists, and putting up their work directly for sale online. Then: profit!"

"I find this to be a horrifying dystopian future, and I'll tell you why."

However, in this editorial, she does bring up a very important point about electronic rights:

"Where I think change could best happen right now is on the contract level. If, for example, e-rights became a subsidiary right I could administer separately, like audio rights, then you'd see a revolution in ebooks as we all experiment. Right now, however, you more or less cannot sell a book to a major publisher without giving them e-rights, and that sucks."

She isn't just whistling Dixie, either. When her partner lost his job and they needed money, she took a YA-novel from "Palimpsest" and turned it into a persistent, online web novel called "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making."

You can read this book for free here, and donate what you want.

I think this is exactly how electronic novels should look, personally. By putting out an online novel this way, an author doesn't have to go through Amazon, Apple, or Google, and they are able to add artwork, audio tracks, links, and "code art" in ways that simply don't work for ebook readers. You can read "Fairyland" from any computer with an internet connection. It can be tweaked. Corrected. Added to.

Unfortunately, "Fairyland" is also an example of a book that a professional writer had to put out without help, unable to pay for good graphic designers, good coders, or good editors, and also unable to convince publishers that this is what an ebook should look like.

Imagine what kind of electronic books publishers could make if they brought all of the resources of the New York industry to bear on this burgeoning market, instead of buying into the idea that Apple or Amazon are in a better position to create and leverage narrative art, which is a ludicrous idea.

* * *

"Palimpsest" is a radical and experimental piece of metatextual prose, cloaked in the guise of a perverted fantasy novel about A City. It is rough, smart, and flawed.

It is a book designed to makes passing it on a radical act. An act of transgression.

And I want to pass it on to you.

I want to put this book in your mind forever.

To make it a part of you. To tattoo it on your flesh. You like to read, right? So come a little closer...don't be shy...just a little bit closer, please... [END]

[1] Wikipedia.org: Palimpsest
[2] Amazon.com: Palimpsest
[3] Palimpsest: A Review by Miracle Jones

To Kill a Mockingbird (Pulitzer Prize winner)

2010-09-11T22:05:00.000-07:00

To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by American author Harper Lee (1926- ) published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. It became a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old [1].

Summary [2]

Chapter 2 September comes around and Dill leaves to go back home to Meridian, Scout realizes that she's starting her first year of school. After her first day, however, she's determined not to go back. After trying to explain the complicated backgrounds of some of the county folks to the new teacher, Scout lands herself into trouble again and again, and is not quite sure how. It should be obvious, she thinks, that offering Walter Cunningham a quarter for lunch is simply not done. They don't take help from anyone, and the reason why he doesn't have a lunch is because he can't afford one. When she tries to explain this to the new teacher, however, she gets her hands slapped by a ruler. When lunchtime finally rolls around, she's grateful to get out of class and go home. Chapter 3 Scout wastes no time paying back Walter Cunningham for getting her started on the wrong foot with the new teacher. It isn't until Jem comes and stops her that she quits tormenting him in the playground, and she nearly falls over when Jem invites the poor boy to lunch at their house. The day doesn't improve when she embarrasses Walter at the table and is forced to eat in the kitchen by Calpurnia. When she returns to school the day's drama isn't over. Miss Caroline, the teacher, is horrified to discover a cootie in the hair of Burris Ewell, a hulking, angry boy who quickly reduces Miss Caroline to tears as he slouches out of the room, his first and only day of school over. That evening Scout is weary from the day's crimes and begs Atticus not to send her back to school anymore. The fact that Miss Caroline forbade her to read and write anymore is really what's distressing her, and when Atticus strikes a deal with her that if she will concede to go back to school they'll continue reading together like always, she happily accepts. Chapter 4 As the schoolyear inches along, Scout begins to realize that she's far more educated than her peers, and even more so, perhaps, than her teacher. As construction paper and crayon Projects evolve day after day, she realizes she is just plain bored. As she walks home from school there is a huge oak tree that sits on the corner of the Radley lot. She passes it every day without incident, only one day she spots two pieces of chewing gum in a knot in the tree. After making sure it won't kill her she hastily crams it into her mouth, and Jem is furious with her when he finds out, convinced that it's poisoned by Boo Radley. During their walk home on the last day of school Scout and Jem find another treasure in the tree, this time two old, shined up pennies. When Dill arrives for the summer two days later the group resumes their obsession with Boo Radley. They create a play that reenacts Boo's life, and continue with it all summer long until they are very nearly caught by Atticus. Chapter 5 When Dill and Jem start excluding Scout from their plots she begins to spend more time with her next door neighbor, Miss Maudie Atkinson. Miss Maudie is garden obsessed, and spends her evenings reining over her front porch in the twilight. Scout gets a lot of valuable information from her about Boo Radley's past, and the reason, perhaps, why he never comes out. The next day she uncovers a major plot by Dill and Jem to pass a note to Boo Radley. Scout protests but they threaten her and before she knows it she's part of the scheme. Things proceed fairly smoothly until they're caught by Atticus, who forbids them to set one more foot on the Radley property and to leave Mr. Radley alone.

Chapter 6 The last night of the summer Jem and Dill hatch the biggest plot of them all (reasoning that, if they get killed, they'll miss school instead of vacation). They decide to try and peep into one of the windows at the Radley house. When Scout (who until tonight knew nothing of the plan) starts to protest, they call her a girl and threaten to send her home. With that, she joins them. Things take a disastrous turn when Boo Radley's older brother, Mr. Nathan Radley, hears them and, thinking they're intruders, fires a shotgun. They barely make it through the fence in time and high tail it back home so they're not missed by the adults. When they step into the gathering crowd to discuss the gunshot Scout is horrified to realize that Jem is missing his pants. Dill hatches a good one and tells Atticus that he won them from Jem playing strip poker. The adults seem satisfied with the lie, and don't suspect them of causing the gunfire at the Radley place. After they slink off, Scout discovers from Jem that he lost his pants as they were scurrying through the wire fence. They got caught and he had to leave them behind or risk getting shot. Late that night Jem decides to go after them rather than risk Mr. Nathan finding them the next morning and turning him in. Scout pleads with him not to go, but he does it anyway. When he gets back, he doesn't say a word but lies in bed, trembling. Chapter 7 Jem's silence about that night lasts for a week. They both start school again, and Scout discovers that the second grade is worse than the first, and the only consolation is that now she gets to stay as late as Jem and they can walk home together. It's during this walk home one afternoon that Jem finally opens up about his sojourn trip back to the Radley place to retrieve his pants. He tells Scout that his pants were not tangled up the wire as he left them but were folded neatly on the fence post, as if someone was expecting him to come back and get them. As they approach the oak tree with the knot hole they discover a ball of twine. After waiting a few days to make sure that the knot hole is not some other child's hiding place, they take ownership of everything they find in there from here on out. The next treasure they discover in there is the figure of a boy and girl carved out of soap. They're carved to look like Scout and Jem. The next prize is an old pocket watch that doesn't run. They decide to write a letter to whomever is leaving them things, but they're shocked to discover the next day that the hole has been filled with cement. When they question Mr. Nathan Radley (Boo's brother who does leave the house) he tells them the tree was sick and he had to do it. Upon questioning Atticus, however, he tells them that tree is perfectly healthy. Chapter 8 That fall Maycomb endures the coldest snap since 1885, and Scout thinks the world is ending one morning when she wakes up and finds snow on the ground. Although it's only a dusting, Jem is determined to build his first snowman and sets out creatively making one out of dirt, and then using the precious white snow to cover it up. That night the temperature drops even further and all the stoves in the house are lit for warmth. Scout is awakened in the middle of the night by Atticus, who tells her Miss Maudie's house next door is on fire and they have to get out. They spend the night in front of the Radley driveway, watching the commotion. The men of Maycomb help as much as they can getting furniture out of her house while there is still time, but eventually the whole thing is up in flames. They don't go back inside the house until morning, and Scout is horrified to discover she's wrapped up in blanket and she has no idea where she got it. She almost falls over when they deduce it was Boo Radley that brought the blanket out to her in the night, and she never even knew. They're heartened to discover the next day that Miss Maudie is not grieving for her lost house, saying she always wanted a smaller one anyway. Chapter 9 As the school year progresses Scout begins to get teased at school over her father, atticus is called a "Nigger Defender" and one night she asks Atticus why people are talking about him. He tells her that's he's taken on a case that affects him personally and because he is defending this man, Tom Robinson, there is a big stink about it in town. Atticus asks Scout that, no matter what she hears, she's not to get into a fight with someone over this case. True to her word, she doesn't fight, even when antagonized at school. Until Christmas. Their Uncle Jack Finch comes down from Boston, which is the good part of Christmas. The bad part is that they all have to spend Christmas day at Aunt Alexandra's house at Finch's Landing. Even worse, their cousin Francis is there, and Scout hates him. Things go smoothly until after dinner when, alone in the backyard with Scout, Francis starts calling Atticus all sorts of terrible names because he's defending a black man. Scout sails in with her fists to defend him and gets caught by Uncle Jack. She doesn't have a moment to tell her side of the story, and moments later they're on their way back home. She's finally able to tell her story to Uncle Jack later that night, and he apologizes for jumping all over her when he should've been punishing Francis. Chapter 10 The neighborhood excitement starts up again in February when Tim Johnson, a mangy dog owned by a man on the other side of town, is discovered walking up the street with rabies. The sheriff is called and he and Atticus drive up with a gun to shoot it. Scout and Jem watch in amazement as their father, whom they've never seen hold a gun in his life, takes aim and shoots the dog square in the head from an amazing distance. They're further shocked to discover that he is the deadest shot in Maycomb county, an accomplishment he's never bothered to mention to them since he doesn't like guns. Chapter 11 The day after Jem's 12th birthday finds the two walking into town to spend his birthday money. The downside to taking the route into town is that they have to walk past Mrs. Dubose's house, a cantankerous, bitter old woman who lives at the end of the street. She never has anything good to say to anyone, but Atticus constantly tells the two of them to ignore her foul words and treat her with courtesy and respect. Normally they're able to do this, but today their patience is pushed thin when she starts insulting Atticus's decision to defend Tom Robinson. They wait until they're on their way back home from town and suddenly Jem starts destroying Mrs. Dubose's flowers with Scout's baton wand, chopping them viciously off the bush and scattering them across her yard. When Atticus comes home later that evening, he knows he's in for it worse than he's ever been. Atticus makes Jem go to her house and talk with her, and when Jem returns he says that she is making him read to her everyday for the next month. When Monday comes around, Scout goes with him to keep him company, and the days drag by. When she dies a month later, Atticus informs them that Mrs. Dubose was a morphine addict who had decided she was not going to die addicted to the drug. Jem's afternoons of reading to her broke her from her addiction, and she was able to die in peace. Chapter 12 As summer begins Scout is crushed to discover that Dill will not be joining them. When Atticus has to go out of town for two weeks, Calpurnia decides that she will take them to church with her. Aside from one woman, Jem and Scout are welcomed into the African church with open arms and they're amazed to see how different it is from their own staid church service. They're also amazed to find out that the church collection is going to Helen Robinson, Tom's wife, and the Reverend is not letting anyone leave until they've collected $10, which is what she needs each week to support her kids. Purses are scraped and pockets searched, and finally everyone comes up with enough money and the doors are opened. They also find out that Tom is in jail because he's accused of raping Bob Ewell's daughter, Mayella (who is white), which is why the entire town is in an uproar over Atticus taking on the case. When they get back home from church, they find Aunt Alexandra on the front porch swing waiting for them. Chapter 13 As Scout and Jem begin to question Aunt Alexandra, she tells them she's come to stay awhile (which could be days or years, according to Maycomb's customs). She settles in and the county welcomes her with open arms, although she certainly adds a formidable presence to Jem and Scout's daily routine. She begins trying to instruct the two on how to be a proper Finch (since they come from, in her words, a Fine Family) but both Scout and Jem have no interest in becoming a little gentleman and a little lady, and hardly bother trying to learn. Chapter 14 As life continues on with Aunty in the house, one night Scout goes to bed and steps on something soft and warm and round, which she thinks is a snake. After calling Jem in for a thorough investigation under her bed they find Dill under there, dirty and starving and still his same old self. Scout finds out that the reason why Dill ran off was because his parents just aren't interested in him, and he spends most of his days alone. He spends the night with them, uncertain what the next day will bring. Chapter 15 It is decided a week later that Dill will stay in Maycomb with his Aunt Rachel, who happens to be the Finch's neighbor. This news makes both Scout and Jem very happy. One night they're all relaxing in the living room when Mr. Heck Tate, the sheriff, comes knocking at the door with a group of men, warning Atticus that the local group of no-accounts might try to come at Tom Robinson this weekend. He is being held in the Maycomb jail. The next night Atticus mysteriously leaves the house and on a hunch Jem, Scout and Dill go looking for him in town. They finally find him reading a book on the porch at the jailhouse. Once Jem is satisfied that Atticus is ok they turn to go, but suddenly a line of cars pull up and a group of men get out and surround the porch. Things get serious when Scout, Jem, and Dill rush into the crowd to Atticus's defense, and although he tells them to go home they don't budge. Scout realizes that these men are strangers, and that they're here to get Tom Robinson. Scout finally sees that she does know one man in the crowd, Mr. Cunningham, Walter's father, and as she tries to make conversation with him the entire group falls silent, listening to her talk about Walter and Mr. Cunningham's entailment, which Atticus is currently helping him out on. Although she doesn't realize it, she makes them all realize that they are acting barbaric and finally it's Mr. Cunningham who calls off the mob and makes everyone go home. Chapter 16 The next morning, Saturday, the whole county begins to file into town to watch Tom Robinson's trial. Jem and Scout run a constant commentary for Dill, explaining the backgrounds and tendencies of everyone that passes. After lunch they head into town themselves to watch the trial. Due to the immense crowd there's no room downstairs but Reverend Sykes, the black preacher from Calpurnia's church, gives them seats in the colored section upstairs. When they get up there and sit down, they see the first witness is Mr. Heck Tate. Chapter 17 As Atticus begins to question the sheriff, who was the one that immediately saw Mayella after she was raped, he immediately begins to find holes in his testimony that prove there is no way that Tom Robinson could have beaten and raped the girl, although at this time the jury and crowd don't really know where he's going with his questioning. All that is apparent is that Mayelle's right eye was blackened and that all around her throat was bruised, as if two strong hands had tried to strangle her. The next witness to take the stand is Mayella's father, Bob Ewell, who is poor, uneducated, and downright mean-spirited. As Atticus begins to question him, it becomes finally apparent to Jem where he's going. He suddenly sees that there is no doubt that it was Bob Ewell who beat up Mayelle and then pointed the finger at Tom. Scout still doesn't see it; however, and thinks Jem is counting his chickens before they're hatched. As she looks at the back of Tom Robinson, who is big and strong, she thinks he easily could have hurt Mayella. Chapter 18 Mayella is the next to take the stand, and as Atticus questions her he begins to poke holes in her testimony as well. Finally he asks Tom Robinson to stand up so Mayella can identify him, and everyone sees that his left arm is fully 12 inches shorter than his right, and is therefore crippled and unusable. Scout finally sees that there is no way he could have choked Mayella and blacked out her right eye. It's a physical impossibility. Atticus then begins to ask her if it was really her father that beat her up but she refuses to say, and she refuses to say another word after she accuses Tom Robinson one more time. Chapter 19 The next and last witness is Tom Robinson himself. Tom tells the jury that he went into Mayella's yard lots of times to help her with little chores, and that she was always asking for his help. She once offered to pay him, but Tom declined the invitation. Since that, Tom willingly executed Mayella's chores free of charge. When he begins talking about the night of the rape he tells everyone that Mayella invited him in to do a chore and then started coming on to him, trying to kiss him, and it was her father that saw what she was trying to do through the window. Tom tried to resist Mayella without hurting her, and as soon as he could get away he took off running. He is soft-spoken and polite. But he makes the mistake of telling Mr. Gilmore that the reason he helped Mayella is because he felt sorry for her. And in those times, a black man feeling sorry for a white woman or even saying it may as well be a crime. During the cross examination by Mr. Gilmore Dill begins crying uncontrollably, so Scout takes him outside for some fresh air. Dill cannot get over how cruel Mr. Gilmore (the prosecutor) is to Tom Robinson, and another man is outside the courthouse and knows exactly why Dill is so upset. Chapter 20 The man is Mr. Dolphus Raymond, a local character who is ostracized because he married a black woman. To tone down the talk about him around the town he pretends to be a drunk, but it is really Coca Cola that is in the paper sack he carries around. He tells Dill that people can be very cruel sometimes and that it makes him sick too. Scout knows she shouldn't be out talking to this sinful man, but she finds him nice and fascinating. When they get back inside the courthouse they find Atticus in the middle of his closing statement, and Jem is convinced they're going to win the case since Tom Robinson could not have physically done what Mayella is accusing him of. Chapter 21 When they go home that evening for dinner they can hardly wait to go back to the courthouse because they don't want to miss the verdict. They wolf down their supper and race back. The jury stays out a long time, till almost midnight, deciding on a verdict, and Scout falls asleep waiting to hear. In total the jurors were out deciding almost nine hours. Finally they come back with a verdict: guilty. Chapter 22 Jem starts to cry, and cannot believe the jury would convict Tom when it was so obvious he hadn't raped Mayella. He and Scout are both in shock. The next morning the Finches all surprised at the amount of food that was left on the back porch from black people in the community, mostly from Calpurnia's neighborhood, to tell Atticus "thank you" for defending Tom Robinson, in spite of the verdict. The children have a conversation with Miss Maudie who tells them that it wasn't just Atticus trying to help Tom Robinson. They Judge was trying, Mr. Heck Tate was trying, there were lots of people behind the scene trying. They might of lost the case, she says, but only Atticus could have kept a jury out so long deciding. In her mind, it's a baby step towards equality. Chapter 23 The next drama of the day is that Bob Ewell spits in the face of Atticus and says he'll get him back for embarrassing him so badly in court. Atticus passes it off as an empty threat, and does his best to assuage the fears of Jem and Scout, who are very worried for him. Atticus has not lost hope for Tom Robinson, either. There's still the appeal, which he's confident that they have a good chance of winning. As Jem and Scout discuss the lives and ways of Maycomb county folks after the trial, they begin to realize something disturbing about human nature, and the ways people can come up with to just be mean spirited. Jem begins to understand that the reason Boo Radley never comes out of his house is not because he can't, but is because he doesn't want to come out. Chapter 24 As September inches closer Scout is introduced to formal tea time, hosted by Aunt Alexandra, who is on a relentless campaign to teach her to be a lady. As Scout navigates through the social hour she's lost on how ladies can look so pretty and delicate, and yet trap each other with conversation, revealing an aggressiveness you can't really see except when they talk to each other. She decides she feels much more at home in her father's world. When Atticus comes home early from work and interrupts tea Scout knows something's up. She follows him into the kitchen and learns that Tom Robinson is dead. He made a break for it at the prison and was shot by the guards. Atticus enlists the help of Calpurnia to go and tell Tom's wife, Helen. Scout, Miss Maudie, and Aunt Alexandra pull themselves together and rejoin the ladies at tea. Chapter 25 Jem and Dill were able to witness the sad affair of Atticus having to tell Helen that Tom is dead, as his car passed them as they were walking back from swimming at Barkers Eddy. Atticus was very gentle about it, but Helen fainted away. The town of Maycomb was interested in Toms death for about two days, and then moved on to other things. Jem tells Scout that he heard from the grapevine that Mr. Ewell was threatened them again, saying that there was one down and two to go. Jem believes that he's all talk and warns Scout not to breathe a word to Atticus, and not to worry. Chapter 26 As school starts Jem begins high school (7th grade) and Scout rarely sees him until dark. She's in 3rd grade now, and although the Radley place ceases to terrify her she still thinks about Boo, and regrets ever tormenting him the way they used to. One day in class they start talking about Adolf Hitler, and Scout discovers that her teacher, Miss Gates, hates Hitler and feels strongly that his persecution of Jews is wrong. Scout is confused about this, however, because during the summer at the trial she heard Miss Gates distinctly saying ugly things about Tom Robinson, and how this should teach them all a lesson. When she asks Jem about it, why Miss Gates can hate Hitler and yet feel Tom Robinson's verdict is justified because he's black, Jem gets very upset and yells at her not to ever talk about that trial to him again. When she goes to Atticus for comfort he tells her that Jem is just trying to come to terms with something in his head, and when he does he'll start being himself again. Chapter 27 As October crawls forward a few things happen in town. The Judge finds a nighttime crawler in his yard but doesn't see who it is. Helen Robinson, Tom's wife, starts working for Mr. Link Deas, Tom's old employer, who offers her a job because he feels so badly about what happened to Tom. She has to go a mile out of her way to avoid the Ewell place, because each time she passes they antagonize her. When Mr. Deas finds out about it he goes over to the Ewell place and threatens Mr. Ewell to leave Helen alone. The next day Mr. Ewell follows Helen all the way to work and Mr. Deas has to chew him out again. To Aunt Alexandra, it bodes trouble. As Halloween approaches Scout learns that she will be required to participate in the school pageant, an agricultural themed production where she'll be playing the part of "Pork". Her costume is a large ham hock fashioned out of brown cloth and chicken wire. Everyone else is too worn out to come to the night's pageant, so Scout and Jem go alone. Chapter 28 It's a really dark night, but Scout has fun playing the various games the school put on before the pageant. The entire county is there to watch the show, and Scout invariably falls asleep waiting for her part in the play and makes her entrance much too late. She's mortified, but it makes everyone laugh. Because she's so embarrassed about her performance she asks Jem to wait until most of the people have left the school before they begin walking home. As they start their journey back home in the pitch black dark, Jem begins to hear someone following them. At first they think it's their friend, Cecil, trying to scare them, but they begin to realize that it's not. Before they know what's hit them they're attacked from whomever is following them. Scout is crushed under her costume, and then Jem screams. She can't see a thing, and then things grow quiet and she realizes there are now 4 people under the tree. Scout stumbles out into the road, calling for Jem, and then sees a man walking unsteadily, carrying Jem in front of him towards their house. When she gets inside Atticus quickly calls the doctor and the Sheriff, and none of them know how badly Jem is hurt until Dr. Reynolds gets there and informs them that he's got a broken arm. Heck Tate gets there next and tells them all that Bob Ewell is lying under the tree where they were attacked, dead with a kitchen knife stuck in his ribs. Chapter 29 Scout tells them all what happened leading up to the attack. The man that carried Jem into the house is still in the room with them, but he's so silent and in the shadows that they pretty much forget he's there. Heck Tate tells them that Scout's costume probably saved her life, as there is a slash mark through the chicken wire where Bob Ewell tried to stab her. When she gets to the end of her story she realizes that the man who saved their lives, the man who carried Jem home, is Boo Radley. Chapter 30 As Dr. Reynolds starts to set Jem's arm they all head to the front porch, where Boo will be more comfortable in the shadows. Scout leads him out and sits beside him in the deepest shadow. Atticus and Heck Tate get into a battle of wills over who really killed Bob Ewell. Atticus believes Jem did it, and refuses to have the affair "hushed up" so it's hanging over Jem's head and the county has ample material for gossip. Heck Tate contends that Bob Ewell fell on his knife, and flat out refuses to tell anyone that Boo Radley killed him (which is what really happened). His reason is because he knows all the ladies of Maycomb county would be by Boo's house bringing him cakes to thank him, and he knows Boo doesn't want to be dragged into the limelight. Finally, Atticus agrees to the story, and thanks Boo for saving his children. Chapter 31 Scout leads Boo back into the house one last time so he can say goodbye to Jem, who is still sleeping, and then she walks him home. After he goes inside she stands on his front porch and realizes that she can see the entire neighborhood. She understands that all through the years Boo has watched them grow up, playing games and living their lives. She begins to understand that maybe she and Jem did give something to Boo after all. She gives him a hug and heads back home. The novel To Kill A Mockingbird revolves around a young girl named Jean Louise Finch who goes by the nicknamed "Scout". Scout experiences different events in her life that dramatically change her life. Scout and her brother Jem are being raised by their father, a lawyer named Atticus and a housekeeper named Calpumia in a small town in the south. At this point in time in the South racism and discriminations towards black was a big issue . The story begins when Scout is 6 years old, and her brother is about to enter the 5th grade. That summer Scout and her brother meet a young boy named Dill who comes from Mississippi to spend the summers there. They become fascinated with a man named "Boo" Radley, a man in his thirties who has not been seen outside of his home in years, mainly because of his suppressed upbringing. They have an impression of Mr. Radley as being this large ugly and evil man. Then comes the trial. Scout's father becomes a defense attorney for a black man, Tom Robinson, who is falsely accused of raping a white women. This has a big affect on Scout. During this trial she gets teased by friends because her father was helping this black man. Scout starts to see the racism that exist. During the trial Scout and her brother and close friend Dill witness the trial. Even though they are young they can see that Mr. Robinson is innocent. Even though Mr. Robinson's innocence was clear even in the eyes of kids, Mr. Robinson was still found guilty. Later in an attempt to escape, Mr. Robinson is shot dead. Scout is extremely disappointed at the verdict and even more at the death of Mr. Robinson and realizes the injustice that exist. Later in a cowardly attempt by the alleged rape victims father, tries to kill Scout and her brother in order to get even with her father for making him look back in court. This is when Mr.Radley makes an appearance again an stabs their attacker. Even though Mr. Radley kills a man he is not tried for murder because he was defending the Scout and her brother. Finally some justice. This gives Scout some hope that is a chance for improvement in this unjust world.

Review [3]

"A first novel of such rare excellence that it will no doubt make a great many readers slow down to relish more fully its simple distinction...A novel of strong contemporary national significance."
-- Chicago Tribune

"All of the tactile brilliance and none of the precocity generally supposed to be standard swamp-warfare issues for Southern writers...Novelist Lee's prose has an edge that cuts through cant, and she teaches the reader an astonishing number of use truths about little girls and about Southern life...Scout Finch is fiction's most pealing child since Carson McCullers's Frankie got left behind at the

wedding." -- Time

"That rare literary phenomenon, a Southern novel with no mildew on its magnolia leaves. Funny, happy and written with unspectacular precision, To Kill a Mockingbird is about conscience--how it is instilled in two children, Scout and Jem Finch; how it operates in their father, Atticus a lawyer appointed to defend a Negro on a rape charge, and how conscience crows in their small Alabama town."

-- Vogue --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

[1] Wikipedia.org: To Kill a Mockingbird
[2] Wikisummaries.org: To Kill a Mockingbird
[3] Amazon.com Review: To Kill a Mockingbird

Sons and Lovers (ranked ninth on 100 best novels ...)

2010-09-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

Sons and Lovers is a novel by English writer D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) published in 1913.

The Modern Library ranked Sons and Lovers ninth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century [1].

[You can read the full story online or on Amazon Kindle (Stories for Your Leisure Time):

Sons and Lovers (Part One)

Sons and Lovers (Part Two::Section One)

Sons and Lovers (Part Two::Section Two)]

Plot Summary [2]

Part I:

The refined daughter of a "good old burgher family," Gertrude Coppard meets a rough-hewn miner at a Christmas dance and falls into a whirlwind romance. But soon after her marriage to Walter Morel, she realizes the difficulties of living off his meagre salary in a rented house. The couple fight and drift apart and Walter retreats to the pub after work each day. Gradually, Mrs. Morel's affections shift to her sons beginning with the oldest, William.

As a boy, William is so attached to his mother that he doesn't enjoy the fair without her. As he grows older, he defends her against his father's occasional violence. Eventually, he leaves their Nottinghamshire home for a job in London, where he begins to rise up into the middle class. He is engaged, but he detests the girl's superficiality. He dies and Mrs. Morel is heartbroken, but when Paul catches pneumonia she rediscovers her love for her second son.

Part II:

Both repulsed by and drawn to his mother, Paul is afraid to leave her but wants to go out on his own, and needs to experience love. Gradually, he falls into a relationship with Miriam, a farm girl who attends his church. The two take long walks and have intellectual conversations about books but Paul resists, in part because his mother looks down on her. At work, Paul meets Clara Dawes who has separated from her husband, Baxter.

Paul leaves Miriam behind as he grows more intimate with Clara, but even she cannot hold him and he returns to his mother. When his mother dies soon after, he is alone.

Lawrence summarized the plot in a letter to Edward Garnett on 12 November 1912:

It follows this idea: a woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so her children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers — first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother — urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them. It's rather like Goethe and his mother and Frau von Stein and Christiana — As soon as the young men come into contact with women, there's a split. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother holds his soul. But the split kills him, because he doesn't know where he is. The next son gets a woman who fights for his soul — fights his mother. The son loves his mother — all the sons hate and are jealous of the father. The battle goes on between the mother and the girl, with the son as object. The mother gradually proves stronger, because of the ties of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother's hands, and, like his elder brother go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again. But, almost unconsciously, the mother realizes what is the matter, and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to his mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift towards death.

[1] Stories for Your Leisure Time [Kindle Edition]

[2] Wikipedia.org: Sons and Lovers

Humboldt's Gift (Pulitzer Prize ..., and Nobel Prize in Literature ...)

2010-09-05T23:22:00.000-07:00

Humboldt's Gift is a novel by Canadian-born American writer Saul Bellow (1915–2005), published in 1975, won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize, and contributed to Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year.

The novel, which Bellow intended to be a short story, is a roman à clef about Bellow's friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz. It explores the changing relationship of art and power in a materialist America. This theme is addressed through the contrasting careers of two writers, Von Humboldt Fleisher (to some degree a version of Schwartz) and his protege Charlie Citrine (to some degree a version of Bellow himself). Fleisher yearns to lift American society up through art but dies a failure. In contrast, Charlie Citrine makes quite a lot of money through his writing, especially from a Broadway play and a movie about a character named Von Trenck - a character modeled after Humboldt.

Another notable character in the book is Rinaldo Cantabile, a wannabe Chicago gangster, who tries to bully Citrine into being friends and whose career advice to Citrine, focused solely on commercial interests, is the opposite of the advice Citrine was once given by his old mentor, Humboldt Fleisher, who valued artistic integrity above all other concerns.

Some critics, including Malcolm Bradbury, see the novel as a commentary on the increasing commodification of culture in mid-century America, and throughout much of the book, Bellow analyzes, through the voice of Citrine, his concerns about spirituality, poetry, and success in America. [1]

Humboldt's Gift Summary [2]

Chapters 1–3

Humboldt’s Gift begins with an introduction to Von Humboldt Fleisher, who published a popular avant-garde poetry book in the 1930s. Charlie Citrine, fresh out of college and in love with literature, is so moved by this work that he relocates to New York City in 1938 and becomes friends with Humboldt. Humboldt is a famous talker and manic depressive. In the 1940s, Humboldt marries Kathleen, and they move from Greenwich Village to rural New Jersey. Charlie spends a weekend with Humboldt and Kathleen in September 1952 when Humboldt’s mania is in full swing. Humboldt’s success is dissipating just as Charlie hits it big with a Broadway play a couple years later. They are estranged, and Humboldt pickets his show, arguing that real intellectuals do not make money.

Humboldt dies of a heart attack at a hotel in the early 1960s. Charlie reads his friend’s obituary in the paper and is deeply moved. Humboldt is one of the few people Charlie loves, and he dreams of him often. In the present day, ten years later, Charlie’s life is not going well. He has a beautiful girlfriend and is physically fit, but his ex-wife and the IRS are taking all of his money, and he is mentally unchallenged. But it is all about to change, thanks to Humboldt.

Chapters 4–7

Charlie leaves for an appointment and finds his Mercedes-Benz 280 SL smashed up. He is stunned. He knows Rinaldo Cantabile did it because he has been harassing Charlie with late night phone calls. Charlie lost to Cantabile in a poker game but stopped the check he paid him with when he found out that Cantabile was cheating. Charlie asks his doorman, Roland, to flag down a cop and returns to his apartment. Charlie is overwhelmed by the mess this has made of his day. He thinks on his past success; most of his money is gone, the money that came between him and Humboldt. The cops show up and seem amused by Charlie’s smashed up car. They also hint that it is mob-related, but Charlie plays dumb.

Around noon, Cantabile calls Charlie, and they set a time and place to meet for Charlie to pay him back in cash. Charlie manages to drive his wrecked car to the bank and from there calls to make an appointment with the dealership. Charlie leaves a message for George, asking him to stay away from the Russian Bath today. He is worried Cantabile will go after George for telling Charlie to stop the check. George set up the poker game to give Charlie a chance to hang out with “real people.” Cantabile and his brother Emil crashed the party and openly cheated; everyone noticed, except Charlie. Charlie thinks about asking his gentleman hoodlum friend, Vito Langobardi, at the Downtown Club what he thinks of Cantabile. But at the last minute, Charlie changes his mind because he does not want Vito to think less of him for mixing business and pleasure.

Chapters 8–10

Charlie takes a taxi to the Russian Bath. Inside, Mickey, who runs the concession, assures Charlie that George has already paid his weekly visit. Cantabile pulls up in a white Thunderbird, and Charlie tries to pay him but Cantabile has other plans. They get into the Thunderbird. As Cantabile is driving, Charlie remembers visiting his birth home in Appleton, Wisconsin. Charlie knocked on the door but no one answered so he peeked into the bedroom where he was born. He saw an old fat woman in her underwear. Her husband accosted Charlie, who managed to talk his way out of a beating.

Cantabile takes Charlie to the Playboy Club. They sit at a table with Mike Schneiderman, a gossip columnist, and Bill Latkin, who owes Cantabile a favor. Charlie is supposed to pay Cantabile back publicly, but he fumbles the cue, angering Cantabile. Their next stop is a jewelry dealer’s apartment in the Hancock Building. Charlie successfully pays Cantabile this time. They go to a construction site, and Cantabile flies all but two of the fifties from a girder high off the ground. They have dinner at a steakhouse, and Cantabile asks Charlie to help his wife Lucy with her doctoral thesis on Humboldt. Charlie refuses.

Chapters 11–12

Charlie takes the next morning off to recuperate. His latest big work is a series of essays on boredom. He is also increasingly fascinated with Dr. Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophy philosophy. Charlie takes out all of his Humboldt papers and lies down on his green sofa to think. He now knows that Humboldt was sane at the end of his life and regrets that he ran away that day on 46th Street. He recalls how the Times published a two-page obituary for Humboldt. Humboldt lived like Americans expect their poets to live: his great work was followed by personal decay and decline. Americans see poets as essentially useless; however, Humboldt would have been pleased to see his prominence temporarily renewed with such a long obituary.

Chapters 13–17

In November 1952, Humboldt is depressed that Stevenson lost the presidential election. He reveals a scheme to get himself a chair in modern literature at Princeton. Humboldt needs this stability because he is off-balance and cannot write poetry. Charlie agrees to help, and at Humboldt’s insistence, they form a blood-brother pact by exchanging blank checks.

Charlie makes the pitch to Professor Ricketts for Humboldt to be given a chair. Ricketts agrees wholeheartedly but says that there is no money. Defeated, Charlie reports this answer to Humboldt. Humboldt is inexplicably elated and leaves immediately for New York City. He visits Wilmoore Longstaff, head of the very rich Belisha Foundation. Longstaff likes Humboldt’s plan and promises him the money. Humboldt’s chair lasts a few months before the trustees of the Belisha Foundation reject Longstaff’s budget. Ricketts offers to find money to keep Humboldt on staff, but Humboldt resigns.

[1] Wikipedia.org: Humboldt's Gift

[2] eNotes.com: Humboldt's Gift Summary & Study Guide

Secret Scripture (James Tait Black Prize, Novel of the Year, and the Choice Award winner)

2010-08-29T01:41:00.000-07:00

The Secret Scripture is a novel written by Irish playwright, novelist, and poet Sebastian Barry (1955- ), published in 2008, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Book of the Year at the 2008 Costa Awards, and at the Irish Book Awards, it won Novel of the Year and the Choice Award.

Plot Summary [1]

The main character is a one-hundred year old woman, Roseanne McNulty, who now resides in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital. Having been a patient for some fifty years or more, Roseanne decides to write an autobiography. She calls it "Roseanne's testimony of herself" and charts her life and that of her parents, living in Sligo at the turn of the 20th Century. She keeps her story hidden under the loose floorboard in her room, unsure as yet if she wants it to be found. The second narrative is the "commonplace book" of the current chief Psychiatrist of the hospital, Dr Grene. The hospital now faces imminent demolition. He must decide who of his patients are to be transferred, and who must be released into the community. He is particularly concerned about Roseanne, and begins tentatively to attempt to discover her history. It soon becomes apparent that both Roseanne and Dr Grene have differing stories as to her incarceration and her early life, but what is consistent in both narratives is that Roseanne fell victim to the religious and political upheavals in Ireland in the 1920s – 1930s.

Review [2]

" [Barry writes] in language of surpassing beauty. . . . It is like a song, with all the pulse of the Irish language, a song sung liltingly and plaintively from the top of Ben Bulben into the airy night."
-Dinitia Smith, The New York Times

" Barry recounts all this in prose of often startling beauty. Just as he describes people stopping in the street to look at Roseanne, so I often found myself stopping to look at the sentences he gave her, wanting to pause and copy them down."
-Margot Livesey, The Boston Globe

"Luminous and lyrical."
-O, The Oprah Magazine

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Scripture#Plot_summary

[2] Amazon.com: The Secret Scripture

Now on Kindle:

Stories for Your Leisure Time [Kindle Edition]

The Corrections (National Book Award, James Tait Black Prize, ... winner)

2010-08-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

The Corrections is a novel by American novelist and essayist Jonathan Franzen (1959- ), published in 2001 and won the National Book Award in 2001 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2002; it was also shortlisted for numerous honors [for more details click here], making it one of the most honored works in recent history.

The Corrections revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-twentieth century to one last Christmas together near the turn of the millennium.

Alfred Lambert, the patriarch of a seemingly normal family living in the fictional town of St. Jude, suffers from Parkinson's disease and dementia. Enid, his long-suffering wife, suffers from Alfred's controlling, rigid behavior and her own embarrassment at what she perceives as her family's shortcomings. Their children all live in the Northeast. Gary, the eldest Lambert son, is a successful banker with clinical depression, caused by his wife and, as a result, becomes suspecting that his sons are conspiring against him. Chip, the middle child, is a brilliant college professor whose disastrous affair with a student sends his life into decline and lands him in the employ of a Lithuanian crime boss. Denise, the youngest of the family, is successful in her career as a chef. Circumstances lead her to become involved with her boss's wife. [1]

[1] Wikipedia.org: The Corrections

The Killer Angels (Pulitzer Prize winner)

2010-08-17T20:42:00.000-07:00

The Killer Angels is a historical novel by American writer of science fiction, sports fiction, and historical fiction Michael Shaara (1928-1988); published in 1974 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1975.

The Killer Angels received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Killer Angels has been required reading, at various times, at the US Army Officer Candidate School, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment Officer Qualification Course, and The Basic School for Marine Officers (TBS). It is one of only two novels on the U.S. Army's recommended reading list for Officer Professional Development. [1]

Amazon.com Review [2]

This novel reveals more about the Battle of Gettysburg than any piece of learned nonfiction on the same subject. Michael Shaara's account of the three most important days of the Civil War features deft characterizations of all of the main actors, including Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Buford, and Hancock. The most inspiring figure in the book, however, is Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, whose 20th Maine regiment of volunteers held the Union's left flank on the second day of the battle. This unit's bravery at Little Round Top helped turned the tide of the war against the rebels. There are also plenty of maps, which convey a complete sense of what happened July 1-3, 1863. Reading about the past is rarely so much fun as on these pages. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Library Journal [2]

The late Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (1974) concerns the battle of Gettysburg and was the basis for the 1993 film Gettysburg. The events immediately before and during the battle are seen through the eyes of Confederate Generals Lee, Longstreet, and Armistead and Federal General Buford, Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain, and a host of others. The author's ability to convey the thoughts of men in war as well as their confusion-the so-called "fog of battle"-is outstanding. This unabridged version is read clearly by award-winning actor George Hearn, who gives each character a different voice and effectively conveys their personalities; chapters and beginnings and ends of sides are announced. Music from the movie version adds to the drama. All this comes in a beautiful package with a battle map. Recommended for public libraries not owning previous editions from Recorded Books and Blackstone Audio (Audio Reviews, LJ 2/1/92 and LJ 2/1/93, respectively).
Michael T. Fein, Catawba Valley Community Coll., Hickory, N.C.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. [2]

1. THE SPY

He rode into the dark of the woods and dismounted. He crawled upward on his belly over cool rocks out into the sunlight, and suddenly he was in the open and he could see for miles, and there was the whole vast army below him, filling the valley like a smoking river. It came out of a blue rainstorm in the east and overflowed the narrow valley road, coiling along a stream, narrowing and choking at a white bridge, fading out into the yellowish dust of June but still visible on the farther road beyond the blue hills, spiked with flags and guidons like a great chopped bristly snake, the snake ending headless in a blue wall of summer rain.

The spy tucked himself behind a boulder and began counting flags. Must be twenty thousand men, visible all at once. Two whole Union Corps. He could make out the familiar black hats of the Iron Brigade, troops belonging to John Reynold's First Corps. He looked at his watch, noted the time. They were coming very fast. The Army of the Potomac had never moved this fast. The day was murderously hot and there was no wind and the dust hung above the army like a yellow veil. He thought: there'll be some of them die of the heat today. But they are coming faster than they ever came before.

He slipped back down into the cool dark and rode slowly downhill toward the silent empty country to the north. With luck he could make the Southern line before nightfall. After nightfall it would be dangerous. But he must not seem to hurry. The horse was already tired. And yet there was the pressure of that great blue army behind him, building like water behind a cracking dam. He rode out into the open, into the land between the armies.

There were fat Dutch barns, prim German orchards. But there were no cattle in the fields and no horses, and houses everywhere were empty and dark. He was alone in the heat and the silence, and then it began to rain and he rode head down into monstrous lightning. All his life he had been afraid of lightning but he kept riding. He did not know where the Southern headquarters was but he knew it had to be somewhere near Chambersburg. He had smelled out the shape of Lee's army in all the rumors and bar talk and newspapers and hysteria he had drifted through all over eastern Pennsylvania, and on that day he was perhaps the only man alive who knew the positions of both armies. He carried the knowledge with a hot and lovely pride. Lee would be near Chambersburg, and wherever Lee was Longstreet would not be far away. So finding the headquarters was not the problem. The problem was riding through a picket line in the dark.

The rain grew worse. He could not even move in under a tree because of the lightning. He had to take care not to get lost. He rode quoting Shakespeare from memory, thinking of the picket line ahead somewhere in the dark. The sky opened and poured down on him and he rode on: It will be rain tonight: Let it come down. That was a speech of murderers. He had been an actor once. He had no stature and a small voice and there were no big parts for him until the war came, and now he was the only one who knew how good he was. If only they could see him work, old cold Longstreet and the rest. But everyone hated spies. I come a single spy. Wet single spy. But they come in whole battalions. The rain began to ease off and he spurred the horse to a trot. My kingdom for a horse. Jolly good line. He went on, reciting Henry the Fifth aloud: 'Once more into the breech . . .'

Late that afternoon he came to a crossroad and the sign of much cavalry having passed this way a few hours ago. His own way led north to Chambersburg, but he knew that Longstreet would have to know who these people were so close to his line. He debated a moment at the crossroads, knowing there was no time. A delay would cost him daylight. Yet he was a man of pride and the tracks drew him. Perhaps it was only Jeb Stuart. The spy thought hopefully, wistfully: If it's Stuart I can ask for an armed escort all the way home. He turned and followed the tracks. After a while he saw a farmhouse and a man standing out in a field, in a peach orchard, and he spurred that way. The man was small and bald with huge round arms and spoke very bad English. The spy went into his act: a simple-minded farmer seeking a runaway wife, terrified of soldiers. The bald man regarded him sweatily, disgustedly, told him the soldiers just gone by were 'plu' soldiers, Yankees. The spy asked: What town lies yonder' and the farmer told him Gettysburg, but the name meant nothing. The spy turned and spurred back to the crossroads. Yankee cavalry meant John Buford's column. Moving lickety-split. Where was Stuart' No escort now. He rode back again toward the blue hills. But the horse could not be pushed. He had to dismount and walk.

That was the last sign of Yankees. He was moving up across South Mountain; he was almost home. Beyond South Mountain was Lee and, of course, Longstreet. A strange friendship: grim and gambling Longstreet, formal and pious old Bobby Lee. The spy wondered at it, and then the rain began again, bringing more lightning but at least some cooler air, and he tucked himself in under his hat and went back to Hamlet. Old Jackson was dead. Good night, sweet Prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest . . .

He rode into darkness. No longer any need to hurry. He left the roadway at last and moved out in to a field away from the lightning and the trees and sat in the rain to eat a lonely supper, trying to make up his mind whether it was worth the risk of going on. He was very close; he could begin to feel them up ahead. There was no way of knowing when or where, but suddenly they would be there in the road, stepping phantomlike out of the trees wearing those sick eerie smiles, and other men with guns would suddenly appear all around him, prodding him in the back with hard steel barrels, as you prod an animal, and he would have to be lucky, because few men rode out at night on good and honest business, not now, this night, in this invaded country.

He rode slowly up the road, not really thinking, just moving, reluctant to stop. He was weary. Fragments of Hamlet flickered in his brain: If it be not now, yet it will come. Ripeness is all. Now there's a good part. A town ahead. A few lights. And then he struck the picket line.

There was a presence in the road, a liquid Southern voice. He saw them outlined in lightning, black ragged figures rising around him. A sudden lantern poured yellow light. He saw one bleak hawkish grinning face; hurriedly he mentioned Longstreet's name. With some you postured and with some you groveled and with some you were imperious. But you could do that only by daylight, when you could see the faces and gauge the reaction. And now he was too tired and cold. He sat and shuddered: an insignificant man on a pale and muddy horse. He turned out to be lucky. There was a patient sergeant with a long gray beard who put him under guard and sent him along up the dark road to Longstreet's headquarters.

He was not safe even now, but he could begin to relax. He rode up the long road between picket fires, and he could hear them singing in the rain, chasing each other in the dark of the trees. A fat and happy army, roasting meat and fresh bread, telling stories in the dark. He began to fall asleep on the horse; he was home. But they did not like to see him sleep, and one of them woke him up to remind him, cheerily, that if there was no one up there who knew him, why, then, unfortunately, they'd have to hang him, and the soldier said it just to see the look on his face, and the spy shivered, wondering, Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?

Longstreet was not asleep. He lay on the cot watching the lightning flare in the door of the tent. It was very quiet in the grove and there was the sound of the raindrops continuing to fall from the trees although the rain had ended. When Sorrel touched him on the arm he was glad of it; he was thinking of his dead children.

'Sir? You asked to be awakened if Harrison came back.'

'Yes.' Longstreet got up quickly and put on the old blue robe and the carpet slippers. He was a very big man and he was full-bearded and wild-haired. He thought of the last time he'd seen the spy, back in Virginia, tiny man with a face like a weasel: 'And where will your headquarters be, General, up there in Pennsylvania' 'Tis a big state indeed.' Him standing there with cold gold clutched in a dirty hand. And Longstreet had said icily, cheerily, 'It will be where it will be. If you cannot find the headquarters of this whole army you cannot be much of a spy.' And the spy had said stiffly, 'Scout, sir. I am a scout. And I am a patriot, sir.' Longstreet had grinned. We are all patriots. He stepped out into the light. He did not know what to expect. He had not really expected the spy to come back at all.

The little man was there: a soggy spectacle on a pale and spattered horse. He sat grinning wanly from under the floppy brim of a soaked and dripping hat. Lightning flared behind him; he touched his cap.

'Your servant, General. May I come down?'

Longstreet nodded. The guard backed off. Longstreet told Sorrel to get some coffee. The spy slithered down from the horse and stood grinning foolishly, shivering, mouth slack with fatigue.

'Well, sir? 'the spy chuckled, teeth chattering' 'you see, I was able to find you after all.'

Longstreet sat at the camp table on a wet seat, extracted a cigar, lighted it. The spy sat floppily, mouth still open, breathing deeply.

'It has been a long day. I've ridden hard all this day.'

'What have you got?'

'I came through the pickets at night, you know. That can be very touchy.'

Longstreet nodded. He watched, he waited. Sorrel came with steaming coffee; the cup burned Longstreet's fingers. Sorrel sat, gazing curiously, distastefully at the spy.

The spy guzzled, then sniffed Longstreet's fragrant smoke. Wistfully: 'I say, General, I don't suppose you've got another of those? Good Southern tobacco?'

'Directly,' Longstreet said. 'What have you got?'

'I've got the position of the Union Army.'

Longstreet nodded, showing nothing. He had not known the Union Army was on the move, was within two hundred miles, was even this side of the Potomac, but he nodded and said nothing. The spy asked for a map and began pointing out the positions of the corps.

'They're coming in seven corps. I figure at least eighty thousand men, possibly as much as a hundred thousand. When they're all together they'll outnumber you, but they're not as strong as they were; the two-year enlistments are running out. The First Corps is here. The Eleventh is right behind it. John Reynolds is in command of the lead elements. I saw him at Taneytown this morning.'

'Reynolds,' Longstreet said.

'Yes, sir.'

'You saw him yourself?'

The spy grinned, nodded, rubbed his nose, chuckled. 'So close I could touch him. It was Reynolds all right.'

'This morning. At Taneytown.'

'Exactly. You didn't know any of that, now did you, General?' The spy bobbed his head with delight. 'You didn't even know they was on the move, did ye? I thought not. You wouldn't be spread out so thin if you knowed they was comin'.'

Longstreet looked at Sorrel. The aide shrugged silently. If this was true, there would have been some word. Longstreet's mind moved over it slowly. He said: 'How did you know we were spread out?'

'I smelled it out.' The spy grinned, foxlike, toothy. 'Listen, General, I'm good at this business.'

'Tell me what you know of our position.'

'Well, now I can't be too exact on this, 'cause I aint scouted you myself, but I gather that you're spread from York up to Harrisburg and then back to Chambersburg, with the main body around Chambersburg and General Lee just 'round the bend.'

It was exact. Longstreet thought: if this one knows it, they will know it. He said slowly, 'We've had no word of Union movement.'

The spy bobbed with joy. 'I knew it. Thass why I hurried. Came through that picket line in the dark and all. I don't know if you realize, General?'

Sorrel said coldly, 'Sir, don't you think, if this man's story was true, that we would have heard something?'

[From the Hardcover edition.]

[1] Wikipedia.org: The Killer Angels

[2] The Killer Angels: The Classic Novel of the Civil War

Savushun (a best-seller of all Persian novels)

2010-08-12T00:03:00.000-07:00

Savushun , published in 1969, is a novel by Simin Daneshvar, a Persian academic, renowned novelist, fiction writer and translator of literary works. Savushun is about settled and tribal life in and around the author's home-town of Shiraz. A best-seller of all Persian novels, it has undergone at least sixteen reprints and two translations, the second carrying the English title, A Persian Requiem: A Novel by Simin Danesvar. Tr. Roxane Zand. London: Peter Halban, 1991. [1]

Review [2]

"For Western readers the novel not only offers an example of contemporary Iranian fiction; it also provides a rare glimpse of the inner workings of an Iranian family." --- -Washington Post Book World

"Daneshvar lovingly details the old Persian customs and way of life. And the conflict between an understandable yearning for peace and tranquillity in the face of change and tragedy is movingly evoked. It is a sympathetic but never sentimental account of one woman's rite of passage." --- -Kirkus Reviews

"An engrossing chronicle of life in Persia-just-turned-Iran by Simin Daneshvar. Her compassionate vision of traditional folk ways surviving amid the threats of modernity (including Allied occupation) give her work a resonant universality. Recent events only strengthen her position as a writer deserving a wider audience." --- -USA Today

Book Description [2]

Savushun chronicles the life of a Persian family during the Allied occupation of Iran during World War II. It is set in Shiraz, a town which evokes images of Persepolis and pre-Islamic monuments, the great poets, the shrines, Sufis, and nomadic tribes within a historical web of the interests, privilege and influence of foreign powers; corruption, incompetence and arrogance of persons in authority; the paternalistic landowner-peasant relationship; tribalism; and the fear of famine. The story is seen through the eyes of Zari, a young wife and mother, who copes with her idealistic and uncompromising husband while struggling with her desire for traditional family life and her need for individual identity.
Daneshvar's style is both sensitive and imaginative, while following cultural themes and metaphors. Within basic Iranian paradigms, the characters play out the roles inherent in their personalities. While Savushun is a unique piece of literature that transcends the boundaries of the historical community in which it was written, it is also the best single work for understanding modern Iran. Although written prior to the Islamic Revolution, it brilliantly portrays the social and historical forces that gave pre-revolutionary Iran its characteristic hopelessness and emerging desperation so inadequately understood by outsiders.

The original Persian edition of Savushun has sold over half a million copies.

"An engrossing chronicle of life in Persia-just-turned-Iran by Simin Daneshvar. Her compassionate vision of traditional folk ways surviving amid the threats of modernity (including Allied occupation) give her work a resonant universality. Recent events only strengthen her position as a writer deserving a wider audience." (USA Today)

"Daneshvar lovingly details the old Persian customs and way of life. And the conflict between an understandable yearning for peace and tranquillity in the face of change and tragedy is movingly evoked. It is a sympathetic but never sentimental account of one woman's rite of passage." (Kirkus Reviews)

"For Western readers the novel not only offers an example of contemporary Iranian fiction; it also provides a rare glimpse of the inner workings of an Iranian family." (Washington Post)

"Folklore and myth are expertly woven into a modern setting in this powerfully resonant work." (Publishers Weekly)

[1] Wikipedia.org: Simin Daneshvar
[2] Savushun: A Novel About Modern Iran (Persian Classics) (Persian Classics) (Persian Classics)

The White Tiger (Man Booker Prize winner)

2010-08-03T22:03:00.000-07:00

The White Tiger is the debut novel by Indian journalist and author Aravind Adiga (1974- ). It was published in 2008 and won the Man Booker Prize in the same year.

The novel provides a dark comical view of modern day life in India through the narration of Balram Halwai, the main character. The overall main theme of the novel is the contrast between India's rise as a modern global economy and the working class people who live in crushing rural poverty. Other themes touched on include corruption endemic to Indian society and politics, familial loyalty versus independence, religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims, the experience of returning to India after living in America, globalization, and the tensions between India and China as superpower countries in Asia.[1]

Plot Summary [1]

The novel takes the form of a series of letters written late at night by Balram Halwai, the protagonist, to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, on the eve of his visit to India. In the letters, Balram describes his rise from lowly origins to his current position as an entrepreneur in Bangalore, as well as his views on India's caste system and its political corruption.

The protagonist Balram lived in the village of Laxmangarh, a fictional village in Bihar (not the village of Laxmangarh in Rajasthan), a community deep in the "Darkness" of rural India. The son of a rickshaw-puller; his family is too poor for him to be able to finish school, despite being brilliant and being promised a scholarship and instead he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables in Dhanbad. His parents originally named him “Munna”, but his schoolteacher Mr. Krishna wanted to give him a new name since Munna simply means “boy” in Hindi. He named him Balram. The name Balram refers to the brother of the Hindu god Krishna. His last name, Halwai, is derived from “sweet-maker” in the caste system.

In Dhanbad, he learns to drive after learning about the high salary paid to drivers. After learning how to drive, Balram gets his break when a rich man from his village, known simply as "The Stork" in his village because of his long nose, hires him as a chauffeur. Balram then drives for The Stork's son, who lives in the city of New Delhi, the 'Light' after recently migrating from America. The city is a revelation and eye-opening experience for Balram. As he drives his master and his wife to shopping malls and call centers, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that world. Through these experiences, Balram learns much about the world and later states that the streets of India provided him with all the education he needed.

Having recently returned from a stint in America, Ashok, one of the Stork's sons, is conflicted by the corruption and harshness of life in India. He also has to deal with his family’s unhappiness for marrying his current wife, Pinky Madam, as the two of them married in the US, not in India, which causes them to lose respect in the caste system. Ashok’s father also did not approve of the marriage because Pinky Madam is of another caste.

As Balram broods over his situation, he realizes that there is only one way he could become part of this glamorous new India — to murder his employer, Ashok, and escape from servitude. However, Ashok's participation in funding political corruption leads to his liberal and free-thinking spirit's demise and gives Balram a chance to become an entrepreneur. One day as Ashok is carrying seven hundred thousand rupees in cash as money bribes for politicians in New Delhi, Balram decides to murder him. The murder is a success as Ashok’s throat is slashed, propelling Balram to flee to Bangalore with his cousin Dharam. With the seven hundred thousand rupees he stole, Balram creates his own taxi company and changes his name to Ashok Sharma. Thus he becomes a wealthy entrepreneur in India's new technological society and emerges as a part of the top caste in the Indian society of the Light, namely the world belonging to rich people who live in large urbanized cities.

Review [2]

"Compelling, angry, and darkly humorous, The White Tiger is an unexpected journey into a new India. Aravind Adiga is a talent to watch." -- Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

"An exhilarating, side-splitting account of India today, as well as an eloquent howl at her many injustices. Adiga enters the literary scene resplendent in battle dress and ready to conquer. Let us bow to him." -- Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook

"The perfect antidote to lyrical India." - Publishers Weekly

"This fast-moving novel, set in India, is being sold as a corrective to the glib, dreamy exoticism Western readers often get...If these are the hands that built India, their grandkids really are going to kick America's ass...BUY IT." - New York Magazine

"Darkly comic...Balram's appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations of the social order are both winning and unsettling."- The New Yorker

"Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger is one of the most powerful books I've read in decades. No hyperbole. This debut novel from an Indian journalist living in Mumbai hit me like a kick to the head -- the same effect Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man had. - USA Today

"Extraordinary and brilliant... At first, this novel seems like a straightforward pulled-up-by-your-bootstraps tale, albeit given a dazzling twist by the narrator's sharp and satirical eye for the realities of life for India's poor... But as the narrative draws the reader further in, and darkens, it becomes clear that Adiga is playing a bigger game... Adiga is a real writer - that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision. There is the voice of Halwai - witty, pithy, ultimately psychopathic... Remarkable... I will not spoil the effect of this remarkable novel by giving away ... what form his act of blood-stained entrepreneurship takes. Suffice to say that I was reminded of a book that is totally different in tone and style, Richard Wright's Native Son, a tale of the murderous career of a black kid from the Chicago ghetto that awakened 1940s America to the reality of the racial divide. Whether The White Tiger will do the equivalent for today's India - we shall see." - Adam Lively, The Sunday Times (London)

"Fierce and funny...A satire as sharp as it gets." - Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

"There is a new Muse stalking global narrative: brown, angry, hilarious, half-educated, rustic-urban, iconoclastic, paan-spitting, word-smithing--and in the case of Aravind Adiga she hails from a town called Laxmangarh. This is the authentic voice of the Third World, like you've never heard it before. Adiga is a global Gorky, a modern Kipling who grew up, and grew up mad. The future of the novel lies here." - John Burdett, author of Bangkok 8

"Adiga's training as a journalist lends the immediacy of breaking news to his writing, but it is his richly detailed storytelling that will captivate his audience...The White Tiger echoes masterpieces of resistance and oppression (both The Jungle and Native Son come to mind) [and] contains passages of startling beauty...A book that carefully balances fable and pure observation." - Lee Thomas, San Francisco Chronicle

[1] The White Tiger, en.wikipedia.org

[2] The White Tiger, Amazon.com

The Have-Nots (German Book Prize winner)

2010-07-28T22:38:00.000-07:00

The Have-Nots is a novel by German author Katharina Hacker (1967- ) published in 2006, won the German Book Prize in the same year, and was praised by the jury for having confronted our age's most pressing issues.

From Publishers Weekly [1]

Hacker (Morpheus; The Lifeguard) entwines the lives of three unusual households in post-9/11 suburban London. Isabelle and Jakob are 30-something German newlyweds who move to Britain after Jakob takes the job of a colleague killed on 9/11. Jakob is an attorney and Isabelle is an artist and wanderer, and their relationship, built hastily in the aftermath of 9/11 (Jakob was at the Trade Center on September 10 for business, and he met Isabelle the next day back in Germany; his colleague stayed behind in New York), has trouble reaching equilibrium. Next door lives Sara, a young girl with developmental problems who is abused by her parents and finds comfort in her cat, Polly. Meanwhile, Jim, a gruff drug dealer squatting in a house down the block, has taken a fancy to Isabelle, who reminds him of his missing girlfriend. Hacker plumbs the dark psyches of her characters—their capacities for violence, their desires and uncertainties and their guilt and shame—as Sara's home life worsens, eventually involving the neighbors. Hacker's prose, aided by Atkins's pristine translation, soars, particularly in her treatment of city and bourgeois life, and though her characters sometimes act inexplicably, she admirably explores modern urban life from the unsettled haves to the desperate have-nots. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved [1].

About the Author

Katharina Hacker is a German author best known for her award-winning novel Die Habenichtse (The Have-Nots). Hacker studied philosophy, history and Jewish studies at the University of Freiburg and the University of Jerusalem. Since 1996 she has been living as a freelance writer in Berlin. In 2006 she was the second writer to be awarded the German Book Prize for Die Habenichtse [2].

Katharina Hacker's previous books, Morpheus (2003) and The Lifeguard (2000), have earned her a reputation as one of the most discerning and elegant stylists in contemporary German literature. Born in 1967 in Frankfurt, she has lived in Berlin since 1996 [1].

[1] The Have-Nots, Amazon . com/gp/product/1933372419

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_Hacker

Lolita (on the list of the 100 best ... and TIME's 100 Best ...)

2010-07-24T23:40:00.000-07:00

Lolita is a novel by multilingual Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), published in 1955. It is fourth on the Modern Library's 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century and is included on TIME's 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

This book is internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle-aged Humbert Humbert, who becomes obsessed and sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl named Dolores Haze [1].

After its publication, Nabokov's Lolita attained a classic status, becoming one of the best-known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature. The name "Lolita" has entered pop culture to describe a sexually precocious girl. The novel was adapted to film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne [1].

Plot Summary [1]

Lolita is divided into two parts and 36 short chapters. It is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar born in 1910 to a Swiss father and an English mother in Paris, who is obsessed with what he refers to as "nymphets". Humbert suggests that this obsession results from the death of a childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh. In 1947, Humbert moves to Ramsdale, a small New England town, to write. He rents a room in the house of Charlotte Haze, a widow. While Charlotte tours him around the house, he meets her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores (also known as Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo, and L), with whom he falls in love at first sight. Humbert stays at the house only to remain near her. While he is infatuated with Lolita, a highly intelligent and articulate, albeit tempestuous, teenage girl, he disdains her preoccupation with contemporary American popular culture, such as teen movies and comic books.

While Lolita is away at summer camp, Charlotte, who has fallen in love with Humbert, tells him that he must either marry her or move out. Humbert reluctantly agrees in order to continue living near Lolita. Charlotte is oblivious to Humbert's distaste and pity for her, as well as his lust for Lolita, until she reads his diary. Upon learning of Humbert's true feelings and intentions, Charlotte is appalled. She makes plans to flee with Lolita, and threatens to expose Humbert's perversions. But as she runs across the street in a state of shock, she is struck and killed by a passing car.

Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, pretending that Charlotte is ill in a hospital. He does not return to Charlotte's home out of fear that the neighbors will be suspicious. Instead, he takes Lolita to a hotel, where he meets a strange man (later revealed to be Clare Quilty), who seems to know who he is. Humbert attempts to use sleeping pills on Lolita so that he may molest her without her knowledge, but they have little effect on her. Instead, she initiates sex. He discovers that he is not her first lover, as she had sex with a boy at summer camp. Humbert reveals to Lolita that Charlotte is actually dead; Lolita has no choice but to accept her stepfather into her life on his terms.

Lolita and Humbert drive around the country, moving from state to state and motel to motel. Humbert initially keeps the girl under control by threatening her with reform school; later he bribes her for sexual favors, though he knows that she does not reciprocate his love and shares none of his interests. After a year touring North America, the two settle down in another New England town, where Lolita is enrolled in school. Humbert is very possessive and strict, forbidding Lolita to take part in after-school activities or to associate with boys; the townspeople, however, see this as the action of a loving and concerned, while old fashioned, parent.

Lolita begs to be allowed to take part in the school play; Humbert reluctantly grants his permission in exchange for more sexual favors. The play is written by Clare Quilty. He is said to have attended a rehearsal and been impressed by Lolita's acting. Just before opening night, Lolita and Humbert have a ferocious argument, which culminates in Lolita saying she wants to leave town and resume their travels.

As Lolita and Humbert drive westward again, Humbert gets the feeling that their car is being tailed and he becomes increasingly paranoid, suspecting that Lolita is conspiring with others in order to escape. She falls ill and must convalesce in a hospital; Humbert stays in a nearby motel, without Lolita for the first time in years. One night, Lolita disappears from the hospital; the staff tell Humbert that Lolita's "uncle" checked her out. Humbert embarks upon a frantic search to find Lolita and her abductor, but eventually he gives up.

One day in 1952, Humbert receives a letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert goes to see Lolita, giving her money in exchange for the name of the man who abducted her. She reveals the truth: Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of Charlotte's and the writer of the school play, checked her out of the hospital and attempted to make her star in one of his pornographic films; when she refused, he threw her out. She worked odd jobs before meeting and marrying her husband, who knows nothing about her past.

Humbert asks Lolita to leave her husband and return to him, apologizing for the unpleasantness between them and promising her a good life, but she refuses, and Humbert breaks down in tears. He leaves Lolita and kills Quilty at his mansion, shooting him to death in an act of revenge. He then is arrested for driving on the wrong side of the road and swerving. The narrative closes with Humbert's final words to Lolita in which he wishes her well, and reveals the novel in its metafiction to be the memoirs of his life, only to be published after he and Lolita have both died.

According to the novel's fictional "Foreword", Humbert dies of coronary thrombosis upon finishing his manuscript. Lolita dies giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day, 1952.

[1] Lolita

Advise and Consent (Pulitzer Prize winner)

2010-07-12T01:10:00.000-07:00

Advise and Consent is a political novel by U.S. novelist Allen Drury (1918–1998), published in 1959 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960.

Plot Summary [1]

The story details how a U.S. President (unnamed, but much like Franklin Roosevelt and a fictional contemporary of the Eisenhower era) decides to name a new Secretary of State in attempting rapprochement with the U.S.S.R. His nominee is Robert Leffingwell, the darling of the liberal media, establishment and academia. However, Leffingwell is viewed as an appeaser to the Soviet Union by many of the more conservative senators who must vote on his nomination, while others have serious doubts about his character due to past performances before Senatorial committees. Shepherding the nomination through the Senate is Majority Leader Robert Munson of Michigan, who is trying to ensure that the President's nominee is confirmed while also massaging the egos of his fellow senators, both in the majority and the minority.

Drury never uses the words "Democrat" or "Republican" in any novel, but given that the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate for all but four years of the 1940s, the 1950s, and through the 1960s and the 1970s, it can be assumed that Drury means "Democrat" when he writes "Majority" and "Republican" when he writes "Minority".

Leffingwell's nomination proceeds smoothly, despite tough questioning from hawks such as South Carolina's senior Senator Seabright (Seab) Cooley, when the Foreign Relations sub-committee handling the nomination summons a minor bureaucrat named Herbert Gelman to testify. Under oath, Gelman says that he and Leffingwell were in a Communist cell when in college. The cell was four men, one of whom is dead, Leffingwell, Gelman, and someone named James Morton. Leffingwell cross-examines Gelman, demonstrating that he (Leffingwell) had gone out of his way to help Gelman obtain federal employment after Gelman had suffered a nervous breakdown. The sub-committee deems Gelman's testimony far-fetched, and the chairman, Senator Brigham Anderson of Utah, is about to send the nomination to the full Foreign Relations Committee when a member of the President's sub-cabinet calls Senator Anderson to tell him that he once was known as "James Morton". Anderson holds open his sub-committee hearings, an action which enrages the President. The President orders Munson to buy off Anderson, or to possibly find something to make him get out of the way. Munson replies that he can't conceive of anything that the President could use to threaten Anderson.

As it turns out, Anderson does have something to hide. While he was in Hawaii on R&R late in World War II, Senator Anderson had a month-long love affair with another man. The novel never uses the word "homosexual," but it is clearly obvious that Senator Anderson has been struggling with accepting his homosexual orientation throughout his life, despite having a wife and child and being a Mormon. The only evidence of the affair is a picture of the two men together, taken in Hawaii, which Anderson's maid gives to him along with other items she had cleaned out of the attic. The picture is in a sealed and forgotten envelope, and no one else, not even Anderson's wife Mabel, has any idea about his past homosexual liaison, although Mabel has on occasion complained tearfully that she does not feel loved in their marriage. While driving to the Capitol, he picks up Associate Supreme Court Justice Tommy Davis, who solidly supports Leffingwell's nomination and gently chides Anderson about his opposition to Leffingwell. As Anderson drops Davis off at the Supreme Court, the envelope with the picture falls from the car. Davis finds and opens it, revealing the weapon needed to ensure that Anderson permits Leffingwell's nomination to proceed. However, Davis lacks the fortitude to use the picture, so instead passes it over to the Majority Leader. At first, Munson rejects the picture, bitterly castigating Justice Davis for even suggesting blackmail of a Senator who is trying to do his job, but in the end, Munson lets his loyalty to the President override his sense of decency, and he keeps the photograph.

The following evening, all of the principal characters attend the White House Correspondents' dinner, where the President, departing from tradition, tells the reporters that he will have news for them that evening. He firmly tells them that he stands one hundred per cent behind his Secretary of State nominee. He leaves the dinner and invites his bumbling Vice President, Harley Hudson, former Michigan Governor (in the movie version of Advise and Consent, Hudson is identified as a governor of Delaware), back to the White House for a nightcap. Senators Munson and Anderson also are invited, and the President finally discovers what information Anderson has about Leffingwell. Amazingly, the President decides that the best course of action is to get James Morton out of town while the nomination proceeds. Anderson vehemently objects, stating that the honorable thing to do at that point is to withdraw the nomination. The President appears to agree with that sentiment, but, as Anderson and Vice President Hudson leave the White House, the President orders Senator Munson to remain with him.

During the Correspondents' dinner, Justice Davis passed a note to the President, informing him the Majority Leader has "a picture of Brig that you ought to see". Munson reluctantly gives the picture to the President, who in turn gives it to Senator Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming, head of the Committee On Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce (COMFORT), and who bitterly despises Anderson because of the senatorial respect and prestige he enjoys.

Van Ackerman and his COMFORT allies begin a whispering campaign about Senator Anderson. Van Ackerman drops hints of it to some journalists, and alludes to it in a speech at a nationally-televised COMFORT rally. Confronted by his wife, Anderson admits his homosexual past. Mabel reacts badly to the revelation, leaving Anderson feeling more alone than ever. Making his situation worse, Anderson receives a phone call that night from the man with whom he had the affair, who admits that he sold his story to someone because he needed the money.

The next morning, the editor of the Washington Post visits Anderson with a copy of a column that breaks the story on the affair. The editor tears up the column in front of Anderson, saying that the newspaper won't publish it, nor will any other Washington newspaper (there were three Washington DC dailies in the 1950s). But, the editor adds, sooner or later some small-town newspaper will run the column, prompting the wire services to pick it up, and then the Post and the others will be forced to either run the story or simply carry the wire service story uncommented. That afternoon, feeling trapped and alone, Anderson decides there is only one way to maintain his honor and dignity; he pens a letter to his best friend and mentor, Senator Orrin Knox of Illinois, explaining everything that has happened, returns to his office in the Senate Office Building and shoots himself in the head.

Senator Anderson's death turns the majority of the Senate against the President and the Majority Leader. Senator Knox becomes the de facto leader of the opposition, and vows to defeat the Leffingwell nomination. The Senate unanimously censures Van Ackerman for contributing to Senator Anderson's death; after the vote, Van Ackerman leaves town for an "extended vacation", his standing in the Senate all but gone.

Senator Munson, feeling responsible for events, makes a speech linking Senator Anderson's death to the Leffingwell nomination and resigns as majority leader. Later, he is re-elected to the post, but declares that any promises made to him to support the nomination are null and void. The President summons Knox, a two-time presidential candidate who had been his main primary rival seven years previous, to the White House and promises to back him for the party's nomination next year if he will allow the Leffingwell nomination to go through. Knox dares him to put this promise in writing; to his shock, the President does just that. The President also tells Knox that the Soviets have just launched a manned mission to the Moon and that he will need a good Secretary of State to deal with the Soviets after their technological triumph. Knox takes the note and discusses it with his colleagues and his wife, Beth, but ultimately decides to abide by his principles and oppose the Leffingwell nomination. Before the Senate votes on Leffingwell, the Soviet moon-mission cosmonauts address the world via radio, stating that the Soviets now have a permanent station on the moon, which they claim for the Soviet Union, and stand ready to repel all capitalist imperialist invaders. The Soviet Premier then invites (almost commands, in fact) the President to come to Geneva, Switzerland for a summit meeting. The U.S. launches its own moon mission and the President addresses the nation and the world, telling them that no one owns the moon, and that despite his misgivings, he will go to meet the Soviet leader in Geneva. Finally, the Senate votes on the Leffingwell nomination, which is defeated by a vote of 74-24 (two members were absent: Van Ackerman, in post-censure exile, and terminally ill Reverdy Johnson of Alabama). That same night, after the vote, the President dies of a heart attack; Vice President Harley Hudson becomes President of the United States.

President Hudson addresses a joint session of Congress after the late President's funeral, saying he will not be a candidate for his party's nomination next year, that he will honor the late President's promise to go to Geneva, and that he will nominate Orrin Knox as Secretary of State. Advise and Consent ends with Knox's speedy confirmation as Secretary of State, and President Hudson's departure to Switzerland for the political summit meeting.

[1] Advise and Consent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advise_and_Consent

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2010-07-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

The Edge of Sadness is a novel by the US author Edwin O'Connor (1918 - 1968); published in 1961 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1962. The story of the book is about a middle-aged Catholic priest in New England.

The Edge of Sadness (Pulitzer Prize winner)

Breathing Lessons is a novel by the US author Anne Tyler (1941- ); published in 1988, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 and was Time Magazine's book of the year in 1988.

Breathing Lessons is Tyler's eleventh book. It is the story of the ordinary and run-of-the-mill marriage of a couple (Ira and Maggie Moran). The story describes the joys, pains and tribulations of marriage while Maggie and Ira travel from Baltimore to a funeral and home in one day.

Breathing Lessons (Pulitzer Prize winner & Time Magazine's book of the year)

them (styled as them and not Them) a novel by the US author Joyce Carol Oates (1938 - ), the third novel in The Wonderland Quartet, was first published in 1969. them received the National Book Award in 1970.

them describes the hard and complex struggles of American lives through three people, Loretta, Maureen and Jules, who are trying to get all embracing dreams through life, marriage and money.

them (National Book Award winner)

The Idiot is a novel written by 19th century Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881); first published serially in Russky Vestnik between 1868 and 1869. The Idiot is ranked as one of the most brilliant literary achievements of the Russian Golden Age of Literature.

Part I: Chapter I

Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows.

Some of the passengers by this particular train were returning from abroad; but the third-class carriages were the best filled, chiefly with insignificant persons of various occupations and degrees, picked up at the different stations nearer town. All of them seemed weary, and most of them had sleepy eyes and a shivering expression, while their complexions generally appeared to have taken on the colour of the fog outside.

When day dawned, two passengers in one of the third-class carriages found themselves opposite each other. Both were young fellows, both were rather poorly dressed, both had remarkable faces, and both were evidently anxious to start a conversation. If they had but known why, at this particular moment, they were both remarkable persons, they would undoubtedly have wondered at the strange chance which had set them down opposite to one another in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw Railway Company.

One of them was a young fellow of about twenty-seven, not tall, with black curling hair, and small, grey, fiery eyes. His nose was broad and flat, and he had high cheek bones; his thin lips were constantly compressed into an impudent, ironical--it might almost be called a malicious--smile; but his forehead was high and well formed, and atoned for a good deal of the ugliness of the lower part of his face. A special feature of this physiognomy was its death-like pallor, which gave to the whole man an indescribably emaciated appearance in spite of his hard look, and at the same time a sort of passionate and suffering expression which did not harmonize with his impudent, sarcastic smile and keen, self-satisfied bearing. He wore a large fur--or rather astrachan--overcoat, which had kept him warm all night, while his neighbour had been obliged to bear the full severity of a Russian November night entirely unprepared. His wide sleeveless mantle with a large cape to it--the sort of cloak one sees upon travellers during the winter months in Switzerland or North Italy--was by no means adapted to the long cold journey through Russia, from Eydkuhnen to St. Petersburg.

The wearer of this cloak was a young fellow, also of about twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, slightly above the middle height, very fair, with a thin, pointed and very light coloured beard; his eyes were large and blue, and had an intent look about them, yet that heavy expression which some people affirm to be a peculiarity. as well as evidence, of an epileptic subject. His face was decidedly a pleasant one for all that; refined, but quite colourless, except for the circumstance that at this moment it was blue with cold. He held a bundle made up of an old faded silk handkerchief that apparently contained all his travelling wardrobe, and wore thick shoes and gaiters, his whole appearance being very un-Russian.

His black-haired neighbour inspected these peculiarities, having nothing better to do, and at length remarked, with that rude enjoyment of the discomforts of others which the common classes so often show:

"Cold?"

"Very," said his neighbour, readily. "and this is a thaw, too. Fancy if it had been a hard frost! I never thought it would be so cold in the old country. I've grown quite out of the way of it."

"What, been abroad, I suppose?"

"Yes, straight from Switzerland."

"Wheugh! my goodness!" The black-haired young fellow whistled, and then laughed.

The conversation proceeded. The readiness of the fair-haired young man in the cloak to answer all his opposite neighbour's questions was surprising. He seemed to have no suspicion of any impertinence or inappropriateness in the fact of such questions being put to him. Replying to them, he made known to the inquirer that he certainly had been long absent from Russia, more than four years; that he had been sent abroad for his health; that he had suffered from some strange nervous malady--a kind of epilepsy, with convulsive spasms. His interlocutor burst out laughing several times at his answers; and more than ever, when to the question, " whether he had been cured?" the patient replied:

"No, they did not cure me."

"Hey! that's it! You stumped up your money for nothing, and we believe in those fellows, here!" remarked the black-haired individual, sarcastically.

"Gospel truth, sir, Gospel truth!" exclaimed another passenger, a shabbily dressed man of about forty, who looked like a clerk, and possessed a red nose and a very blotchy face. "Gospel truth! All they do is to get hold of our good Russian money free, gratis, and for nothing. "

"Oh, but you're quite wrong in my particular instance," said the Swiss patient, quietly. "Of course I can't argue the matter, because I know only my own case; but my doctor gave me money--and he had very little--to pay my journey back, besides having kept me at his own expense, while there, for nearly two years."

"Why? Was there no one else to pay for you?" asked the black- haired one.

"No--Mr. Pavlicheff, who had been supporting me there, died a couple of years ago. I wrote to Mrs. General Epanchin at the time

(she is a distant relative of mine), but she did not answer my letter. And so eventually I came back."

"And where have you come to?"

"That is--where am I going to stay? I--I really don't quite know yet, I--"

Both the listeners laughed again.

"I suppose your whole set-up is in that bundle, then?" asked the first.

"I bet anything it is!" exclaimed the red-nosed passenger, with extreme satisfaction, "and that he has precious little in the luggage van!--though of course poverty is no crime--we must remember that!"

It appeared that it was indeed as they had surmised. The young fellow hastened to admit the fact with wonderful readiness.

"Your bundle has some importance, however," continued the clerk, when they had laughed their fill (it was observable that the subject of their mirth joined in the laughter when he saw them laughing); "for though I dare say it is not stuffed full of friedrichs d'or and louis d'or--judge from your costume and gaiters--still--if you can add to your possessions such a valuable property as a relation like Mrs. General Epanchin, then your bundle becomes a significant object at once. That is, of course, if you really are a relative of Mrs. Epanchin's, and have not made a little error through--well, absence of mind, which is very common to human beings; or, say--through a too luxuriant fancy?"

"Oh, you are right again," said the fair-haired traveller, "for I really am ALMOST wrong when I say she and I are related. She is hardly a relation at all; so little, in fact, that I was not in the least surprised to have no answer to my letter. I expected as much."

"H'm! you spent your postage for nothing, then. H'm! you are candid, however--and that is commendable. H'm! Mrs. Epanchin--oh yes! a most eminent person. I know her. As for Mr. Pavlicheff, who supported you in Switzerland, I know him too--at least, if it was Nicolai Andreevitch of that name? A fine fellow he was--and had a property of four thousand souls in his day."

"Yes, Nicolai Andreevitch--that was his name," and the young fellow looked earnestly and with curiosity at the all-knowing gentleman with the red nose.

This sort of character is met with pretty frequently in a certain class. They are people who know everyone--that is, they know where a man is employed, what his salary is, whom he knows, whom he married, what money his wife had, who are his cousins, and second cousins, etc., etc. These men generally have about a hundred pounds a year to live on, and they spend their whole time and talents in the amassing of this style of knowledge, which they reduce--or raise--to the standard of a science.

During the latter part of the conversation the black-haired young man had become very impatient. He stared out of the window, and fidgeted, and evidently longed for the end of the journey. He was very absent; he would appear to listen-and heard nothing; and he would laugh of a sudden, evidently with no idea of what he was laughing about.

"Excuse me," said the red-nosed man to the young fellow with the bundle, rather suddenly; "whom have I the honour to be talking to?"

"Prince Lef Nicolaievitch Muishkin," replied the latter, with perfect readiness.

"Prince Muishkin? Lef Nicolaievitch? H'm! I don't know, I'm sure! I may say I have never heard of such a person," said the clerk, thoughtfully. "At least, the name, I admit, is historical. Karamsin must mention the family name, of course, in his history- -but as an individual--one never hears of any Prince Muishkin nowadays."

"Of course not," replied the prince; "there are none, except myself. I believe I am the last and only one. As to my forefathers, they have always been a poor lot; my own father was a sublieutenant in the army. I don't know how Mrs. Epanchin comes into the Muishkin family, but she is descended from the Princess Muishkin, and she, too, is the last of her line."

"And did you learn science and all that, with your professor over there?" asked the black-haired passenger.

"Oh yes--I did learn a little, but--"

"I've never learned anything whatever," said the other.

"Oh, but I learned very little, you know!" added the prince, as though excusing himself. "They could not teach me very much on account of my illness. "

"Do you know the Rogojins?" asked his questioner, abruptly.

"No, I don't--not at all! I hardly know anyone in Russia. Why, is that your name?"

"Yes, I am Rogojin, Parfen Rogojin."

"Parfen Rogojin? dear me--then don't you belong to those very Rogojins, perhaps--" began the clerk, with a very perceptible increase of civility in his tone.

"Yes--those very ones," interrupted Rogojin, impatiently, and with scant courtesy. I may remark that he had not once taken any notice of the blotchy-faced passenger, and had hitherto addressed all his remarks direct to the prince.

"Dear me--is it possible?" observed the clerk, while his face assumed an expression of great deference and servility--if not of absolute alarm: "what, a son of that very Semen Rogojin-- hereditary honourable citizen--who died a month or so ago and left two million and a half of roubles?"

"And how do YOU know that he left two million and a half of roubles?" asked Rogojin, disdainfully, and no deigning so much as to look at the other. "However, it's true enough that my father died a month ago, and that here am I returning from Pskoff, a month after, with hardly a boot to my foot. They've treated me like a dog! I've been ill of fever at Pskoff the whole time, and not a line, nor farthing of money, have I received from my mother or my confounded brother!"

"And now you'll have a million roubles, at least--goodness gracious me!" exclaimed the clerk, rubbing his hands.

"Five weeks since, I was just like yourself," continued Rogojin, addressing the prince, "with nothing but a bundle and the clothes I wore. I ran away from my father and came to Pskoff to my aunt's house, where I caved in at once with fever, and he went and died while I was away. All honour to my respected father's memory--but he uncommonly nearly killed me, all the same. Give you my word, prince, if I hadn't cut and run then, when I did, he'd have murdered me like a dog."

"I suppose you angered him somehow?" asked the prince, looking at the millionaire with considerable curiosity But though there may have been something remarkable in the fact that this man was heir to millions of roubles there was something about him which surprised and interested the prince more than that. Rogojin, too, seemed to have taken up the conversation with unusual alacrity it appeared that he was still in a considerable state of excitement, if not absolutely feverish, and was in real need of someone to talk to for the mere sake of talking, as safety-valve to his agitation.

As for his red-nosed neighbour, the latter--since the information as to the identity of Rogojin--hung over him, seemed to be living on the honey of his words and in the breath of his nostrils, catching at every syllable as though it were a pearl of great price.

"Oh, yes; I angered him--I certainly did anger him," replied Rogojin. "But what puts me out so is my brother. Of course my mother couldn't do anything--she's too old--and whatever brother Senka says is law for her! But why couldn't he let me know? He sent a telegram, they say. What's the good of a telegram? It frightened my aunt so that she sent it back to the office unopened, and there it's been ever since! It's only thanks to Konief that I heard at all; he wrote me all about it. He says my brother cut off the gold tassels from my father's coffin, at night because they're worth a lot of money!' says he. Why, I can get him sent off to Siberia for that alone, if I like; it's sacrilege. Here, you--scarecrow!" he added, addressing the clerk at his side, "is it sacrilege or not, by law?'

"Sacrilege, certainly--certainly sacrilege," said the latter.

"And it's Siberia for sacrilege, isn't it?"

"Undoubtedly so; Siberia, of course!"

"They will think that I'm still ill," continued Rogojin to the prince, "but I sloped off quietly, seedy as I was, took the train and came away. Aha, brother Senka, you'll have to open your gates and let me in, my boy! I know he told tales about me to my father--I know that well enough but I certainly did rile my father about Nastasia Philipovna that's very sure, and that was my own doing."

"Nastasia Philipovna?" said the clerk, as though trying to think out something.

"Come, you know nothing about HER," said Rogojin, impatiently.

"And supposing I do know something?" observed the other, triumphantly.

"Bosh! there are plenty of Nastasia Philipovnas. And what an impertinent beast you are!" he added angrily. "I thought some creature like you would hang on to me as soon as I got hold of my money. "

"Oh, but I do know, as it happens," said the clerk in an aggravating manner. "Lebedeff knows all about her. You are pleased to reproach me, your excellency, but what if I prove that I am right after all? Nastasia Phillpovna's family name is Barashkoff--I know, you see-and she is a very well known lady, indeed, and comes of a good family, too. She is connected with one Totski, Afanasy Ivanovitch, a man of considerable property, a director of companies, and so on, and a great friend of General Epanchin, who is interested in the same matters as he is."

"My eyes!" said Rogojin, really surprised at last. "The devil take the fellow, how does he know that?"

"Why, he knows everything--Lebedeff knows everything! I was a month or two with Lihachof after his father died, your excellency, and while he was knocking about--he's in the debtor's prison now--I was with him, and he couldn't do a thing without Lebedeff; and I got to know Nastasia Philipovna and several people at that time."

"Nastasia Philipovna? Why, you don't mean to say that she and Lihachof--" cried Rogojin, turning quite pale.

"No, no, no, no, no! Nothing of the sort, I assure you!" said Lebedeff, hastily. "Oh dear no, not for the world! Totski's the only man with any chance there. Oh, no! He takes her to his box at the opera at the French theatre of an evening, and the officers and people all look at her and say, 'By Jove, there's the famous Nastasia Philipovna!' but no one ever gets any further than that, for there is nothing more to say."

"Yes, it's quite true," said Rogojin, frowning gloomily; "so Zaleshoff told me. I was walking about the Nefsky one fine day, prince, in my father's old coat, when she suddenly came out of a shop and stepped into her carriage. I swear I was all of a blaze at once. Then I met Zaleshoff--looking like a hair-dresser's assistant, got up as fine as I don't know who, while I looked like a tinker. 'Don't flatter yourself, my boy,' said he; 'she's not for such as you; she's a princess, she is, and her name is Nastasia Philipovna Barashkoff, and she lives with Totski, who wishes to get rid of her because he's growing rather old--fifty- five or so--and wants to marry a certain beauty, the loveliest woman in all Petersburg.' And then he told me that I could see Nastasia Philipovna at the opera-house that evening, if I liked, and described which was her box. Well, I'd like to see my father allowing any of us to go to the theatre; he'd sooner have killed us, any day. However, I went for an hour or so and saw Nastasia Philipovna, and I never slept a wink all night after. Next morning my father happened to give me two government loan bonds to sell, worth nearly five thousand roubles each. 'Sell them,' said he, 'and then take seven thousand five hundred roubles to the office, give them to the cashier, and bring me back the rest of the ten thousand, without looking in anywhere on the way; look sharp, I shall be waiting for you.' Well, I sold the bonds, but I didn't take the seven thousand roubles to the office; I went straight to the English shop and chose a pair of earrings, with a diamond the size of a nut in each. They cost four hundred roubles more than I had, so I gave my name, and they trusted me. With the earrings I went at once to Zaleshoff's. 'Come on!' I said, 'come on to Nastasia Philipovna's,' and off we went without more ado. I tell you I hadn't a notion of what was about me or before me or below my feet all the way; I saw nothing whatever. We went straight into her drawing-room, and then she came out to us.

"I didn't say right out who I was, but Zaleshoff said: 'From Parfen Rogojin, in memory of his first meeting with you yesterday; be so kind as to accept these!'

"She opened the parcel, looked at the earrings, and laughed.

"'Thank your friend Mr. Rogojin for his kind attention,' says she, and bowed and went off. Why didn't I die there on the spot? The worst of it all was, though, that the beast Zaleshoff got all the credit of it! I was short and abominably dressed, and stood and stared in her face and never said a word, because I was shy, like an ass! And there was he all in the fashion, pomaded and dressed out, with a smart tie on, bowing and scraping; and I bet anything she took him for me all the while!

"'Look here now,' I said, when we came out, 'none of your interference here after this-do you understand?' He laughed: 'And how are you going to settle up with your father?' says he. I thought I might as well jump into the Neva at once without going home first; but it struck me that I wouldn't, after all, and I went home feeling like one of the damned."

"My goodness!" shivered the clerk. "And his father," he added, for the prince's instruction, "and his father would have given a man a ticket to the other world for ten roubles any day--not to speak of ten thousand!"

The prince observed Rogojin with great curiosity; he seemed paler than ever at this moment.

"What do you know about it?" cried the latter. "Well, my father learned the whole story at once, and Zaleshoff blabbed it all over the town besides. So he took me upstairs and locked me up, and swore at me for an hour. 'This is only a foretaste,' says he;

'wait a bit till night comes, and I'll come back and talk to you again.'

"Well, what do you think? The old fellow went straight off to Nastasia Philipovna, touched the floor with his forehead, and began blubbering and beseeching her on his knees to give him back the diamonds. So after awhile she brought the box and flew out at him. 'There,' she says, 'take your earrings, you wretched old miser; although they are ten times dearer than their value to me now that I know what it must have cost Parfen to get them! Give Parfen my compliments,' she says, 'and thank him very much!' Well, I meanwhile had borrowed twenty-five roubles from a friend, and off I went to Pskoff to my aunt's. The old woman there lectured me so that I left the house and went on a drinking tour round the public-houses of the place. I was in a high fever when I got to Pskoff, and by nightfall I was lying delirious in the streets somewhere or other!"

"Oho! we'll make Nastasia Philipovna sing another song now!" giggled Lebedeff, rubbing his hands with glee. "Hey, my boy, we'll get her some proper earrings now! We'll get her such earrings that--"

"Look here," cried Rogojin, seizing him fiercely by the arm, "look here, if you so much as name Nastasia Philipovna again, I'll tan your hide as sure as you sit there!"

"Aha! do--by all means! if you tan my hide you won't turn me away from your society. You'll bind me to you, with your lash, for ever. Ha, ha! here we are at the station, though."

Sure enough, the train was just steaming in as he spoke.

Though Rogojin had declared that he left Pskoff secretly, a large collection of friends had assembled to greet him, and did so with profuse waving of hats and shouting.

"Why, there's Zaleshoff here, too!" he muttered, gazing at the scene with a sort of triumphant but unpleasant smile. Then he suddenly turned to the prince: "Prince, I don't know why I have taken a fancy to you; perhaps because I met you just when I did. But no, it can't be that, for I met this fellow " (nodding at Lebedeff) "too, and I have not taken a fancy to him by any means. Come to see me, prince; we'll take off those gaiters of yours and dress you up in a smart fur coat, the best we can buy. You shall have a dress coat, best quality, white waistcoat, anything you like, and your pocket shall be full of money. Come, and you shall go with me to Nastasia Philipovna's. Now then will you come or no?"

"Accept, accept, Prince Lef Nicolaievitch" said Lebedef solemnly; "don't let it slip! Accept, quick!"

Prince Muishkin rose and stretched out his hand courteously, while he replied with some cordiality:

"I will come with the greatest pleasure, and thank you very much for taking a fancy to me. I dare say I may even come today if I have time, for I tell you frankly that I like you very much too. I liked you especially when you told us about the diamond earrings; but I liked you before that as well, though you have such a dark-clouded sort of face. Thanks very much for the offer of clothes and a fur coat; I certainly shall require both clothes and coat very soon. As for money, I have hardly a copeck about me at this moment."

"You shall have lots of money; by the evening I shall have plenty; so come along!"

"That's true enough, he'll have lots before evening!" put in Lebedeff.

"But, look here, are you a great hand with the ladies? Let's know that first?" asked Rogojin.

"Oh no, oh no! said the prince; "I couldn't, you know--my illness--I hardly ever saw a soul."

"H'm! well--here, you fellow-you can come along with me now if you like!" cried Rogojin to Lebedeff, and so they all left the carriage. more ...

The Idiot (one of the most brilliant of the Russian Golden Age of Literature)

The Blind Side of the Heart (original name in German: Die Mittagsfrau) is a novel by the German author Julia Franck (1970 - ), published in 2007 and won the German Book Prize in the same year.

Full Description for The Blind Side of the Heart [1]
Amid the chaos of civilians fleeing West in a provincial German railway station in 1945 Helene has brought her seven-year-old son. Having survived with him through the horrors and deprivations of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns. Many years earlier, Helene and her sister Martha's childhood in rural Germany is abruptly ended by the outbreak of the First World War. Her father, sent to the eastern front, comes home only to die. Their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. Helene calls the condition blindness of the heart, and fears the growing coldness of her mother, who hardly seems to notice her daughters any more. In the early 1920s, after their father's death, she and Martha move to Berlin. Helene falls in love with Carl, but when he dies just before their engagement, life becomes meaningless for her and she takes refuge in her work as a nurse. At a party she meets Wilhelm, an ambitious civil engineer who wants to build motorways for the Reich and to make Helene his wife. Their marriage, which soon proves disastrous, takes Helene to Stettin, where her son is born. She finds the love and closeness demanded by the little boy more than she can provide, and soon she cannot shake off the idea of simply disappearing. Finally she comes to a shocking decision. "The Blind Side of the Heart" tells of two World Wars, of hope, loneliness and love, and of a life lived in terrible times. It is a great family novel, a powerful portrayal of an era, and the story of a fascinating woman.

[1] http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780099524236/The-Blind-Side-of-the-Heart?b=-3&t=-20#Fulldescription-20

The Bone People is a 1984 novel by New Zealand author Keri Hulme (1947- ) published in 1984 and won the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, the Booker Prize (The Man Booker Prize for Fiction) in 1985, and The Pegasus Prize for Literature in 1985.

The folowing plot summary is quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bone_People:

The book is divided into two major sections, the first involving the characters interacting, and the second half involving their individual travels. In the first half, 8-year-old Simon shows up at the hermit Kerewin’s tower on a dark and stormy night. Simon is mute and thus is unable to explain his motives. When Simon’s adoptive father Joe comes to thank Kerewin, she learns their unusual story. Simon was found washed up on the beach years earlier with no memory and very few clues as to his identity. Joe and his wife Hana take in Simon, despite his apparently dark background, and attempt to raise him. However, both Hana and their infant son die soon after, leaving Joe alone to raise the wild boy Simon.

Kerewin finds herself developing a relationship with both the boy and the father, becoming more involved in their lives and stories. However, it gradually becomes clear that Simon is a severely traumatised boy, whose behaviours Joe is unable to cope with. Kerewin eventually finds that, despite a constant and intense love between them, Joe is physically abusing Simon. There are hints that Joe was also abused as a child.

Following a catalyst event, the three are driven violently apart. Simon witnesses a violent death and goes to Kerewin, but she is angry with him for stealing some of her possessions and will not listen. He reacts by kicking in the side of her guitar, a much prized gift from her estranged family, whereupon she throws him out. He then goes to the town and breaks a series of public property windows. When he is returned home by the police, Joe beats him severely, fracturing his skull and breaking his jaw. Simon however has concealed a piece of glass and stabs his father with it, resulting in the hospitalization of both.

In the second half of the novel, Simon is in the hospital, Joe is being sent to jail for assault, and Kerewin has developed stomach cancer. Simon's wardship is being taken from Joe, a move strongly resisted by all three of the trio, despite their violent relationship. Simon is sent to a children's home, Joe to jail, and Kerewin deconstructs her tower and leaves, expecting to be dead within the year.

All three experience life-changing events, strongly interlaced with Maori mythology and legend, eventually leading to their healing and return. Kerewin is miraculously healed and adopts Simon, to keep him both near to and protected from Joe, while Joe is able to contact Kerewin's family and bring them back for a reunion of forgiveness. In the final segment of the book, Kerewin adopts a blind cat known as Li, or balance, seemingly representing the path they have travelled.

Life of Pi is a novel written by Spanish-born Canadian author Yann Martel (1963- );
first published in 2001; won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002 and the 2003 Boeke Prize, was chosen for CBC Radio's Canada Reads 2003, and its French translation (L'Histoire de Pi) was chosen in the French version of the reading competition (Le combat des livres).

Life of Pi Plot Summary

The novel begins with the author describing in an author’s note his travels to India, where he meets a man named Francis Adirubasamy in a coffeehouse in Pondicherry. His response to the author’s claim that he needs inspiration is “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” After which he refers the author to Piscine Patel in Toronto, who immediately begins to tell his own story, starting in Chapter 1.

As a teenager in Pondicherry, India, Pi Patel describes his family – himself, his parents, and his brother Ravi. He is constantly exploring new opportunities and learning many odd and exciting things. His father is the proprietor of the Pondicherry Zoo, where Pi learns much of the workings and raising of animals. Pi’s mother is an avid reader and introduces to him numerous literary works from which he learns the joys of numerous schools of thought. His school is filled with amazing teachers, one of whom, Mr. Kumar is an inspiration to Pi.

Deriving his full name (Piscine) from a world famous swimming pool in France, his parents are good friends with Francis Adirubasamy (from the author’s note), a world class swimmer who often goes on about the Piscine Molitor in Paris. He goes by Pi instead because his schoolmates make a big deal out of calling him “pissing” instead as it sounds similar. They all take to the name and from that point on, his name is no long Piscine but Pi.

Pi grew up a Hindu, but discovered the Catholic faith at age 14 from a priest by the name of Father Martin. He is soon baptized. He then meets Mr. Kumar, a Muslim of some standing and converts to Islam. Therefore, he openly practices all three religions avidly. When the three religious teachers meet up with his parents at the zoo, they demand that he choose a single religion, to which he announces he cannot. Throughout this section, Pi discusses numerous religious matters as well as his thoughts on culture and zoology.

At age 16, Pi’s father decides that Mrs. Gandhi’s (the leader of India) political actions are unsavory and closes up the zoo to move to Toronto. He sells off a majority of the zoo animals to various zoos in America. The animals are loaded onto the same boat that the family will take to reach Winnipeg, Canada. On the journey to North America, the boat sinks.

As the only survivor of the shipwreck, he’s stuck in a lifeboat with a dying zebra and a hyena. Pi sees another survivor floating in the water and only after throwing them a life preserver and pulling them aboard does he realize that “Richard Parker” is actually the 400 pound tiger from his father’s zoo. He immediately jumps overboard until he realizes that there are sharks nearby.

So, upon reentering the boat, he wedges the tarpaulin up with an oar and decides he might survive if he can stay on top and keep Richard Parker beneath it. Over the next week an Orangutan arrives as well and the four animals interplay carefully, eating each other until there is only Richard Parker left.

Over the course of the next 7 months aboard the lifeboat, Pi hides on a makeshift raft behind the boat and begins the process of taming Richard Parker with a whistle and treats from the sea, as well as marking his portion of the boat. He begins to get close to the tiger, developing the kind of bond a zookeeper does with his menagerie. After a while, Pi learns to kill and eat from the sea, sharing with the tiger. The two do not eat nearly enough though and as time passes, they become quite ill.

At a certain point, the two become so hungry and ill that they lose their sight and come across another blind man amazingly floating along in the ocean as well. The two talk for a bit about food and eventually the blind man tries to board Pi’s boat, intent on eating him. However, when he boards the boat the unsuspecting man is attacked by Richard Parker and eaten. The tears from the situation eventually clear up Pi’s vision and they continue on alone in the boat.

Still floating along alone and desperate, the two come across an island made of algae. They disembark and Pi begins eating the algae, regaining his strength during the day and sleeping on the boat. Richard Parker regains his strength from eating the meerkats who live on the island, sleeping in the trees during the night. Eventually, Pi realizes that they leave at night because of an acid produced by the island during the night hours. He eventually notices a tooth among the algae, evidence of another man having died on the island. They leave quickly as the island is apparently carnivorous.

Finally, after more time spent floating along in the ocean, Pi sights land in Mexico and disembarks. Richard Parker immediately runs off into the woods and Pi is recovered by two men from the shipping company who owned the boat that sank with his family on it. He relates to them the story of his 227 days on the boat, but they do not quite believe his fantastic tale of surviving with a Bengal Tiger and meeting a blind man in the ocean.

So, Pi relays to them a second story instead of his mother, a sailor with a broken leg and a cannibalistic cook, with no animals and no magical islands this time around. The story closely parallels the first story without all of the fancy involved, and one of the men points this out. However, the two ignore the final story in favor of the better story and write it up in their report after Pi mentions that it does not matter as both lead to the same outcome.

The above plot summary is quoted from http://www.wikisummaries.org/Life_of_Pi.

The Snow Queen is a novel by American science fiction author Joan D. Vinge (1948- ), published in 1980, and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1981 (it was also nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1980).

The Snow Queen (novel)

Plot Summary:

The residents of Tiamat are split into two clans: "Winters" who advocate technological progress and trade with offworlders, and "Summers" who depend on their folk traditions and rigid social distinctions to survive on this marginal planet. Every 150 years, the sun's orbit around the black hole dramatically impacts the planetary ecology and to keep the uneasy peace, the government switches from Winter rule to Summer rule under a matriarchal monarch. Interstellar travel between Tiamat and the Hegemony is only possible during the 150 years of Winter rule, and a single woman rules the entire planet: a "Snow Queen" in Winter, a "Summer Queen" in Summer.

The reason for the Hegemony's interest in Tiamat has to do with the "mers," sentient sea-dwelling creatures whose blood provides the "water of life," a substance that totally inhibits physical aging. The most valuable substance in the galaxy, mer hunts go on as frequently as possible during the Winter years, to the point of extinction. This also allows the Snow Queen to reign for the entire 150-year season, and it is with the Snow Queen, Arienrhod, that the story begins. She has secretly implanted several Summer women with embryos, clones of herself, in the hopes of extending her rule past her ritual execution at the end of Winter.

The novel follows the only one of these clones, Moon, to survive to adolescence. She and her cousin Sparks are lovers, both sharing the distinctive status of being "merry-begots", children conceived during the planetary festivals held every 20 years to remind Tiamat of the cycle of power. Moon becomes a sibyl, a position of high status among the Summer people, since they are keepers of knowledge freely available to anyone who asks. Sibyls enter a trance and by mysterious means, can answer questions. Sparks, unable to join her among the sibyl mystics and curious about his offworld heritage, travels to Carbuncle, Tiamat's capital, where he is immediately caught up by Arienrhod and eventually becomes the "Starbuck," her lover—a position that not only requires him to do away with the previous Starbuck (Herne) but orchestrates the mer hunts, a capital crime in the summer islands.

Moon manages to secure transport to Carbuncle, where sibyls are proscribed, and is eventually smuggled off-world, a one-way trip for a Tiamatan citizen, as the Hegemony forbids Tiamat full access to their worlds. She is taken to the capital planet, Kharemough, and discovers that the prejudice against sibyls is a political tool used by the Hegemony to keep the balance of power on Tiamat skewed in their favor. Sibyls are also highly respected throughout the eight planets of the Hegemony, only on Tiamat, due to a careful reinforcement of superstitions during the reign of Winter, are they considered dangerous and mentally unstable. Eventually, despite the waning window of safe travel offered by Tiamat's orbit, she negotiates a return after finding out from a trance that Sparks is in danger.

After being derailed by a crash landing and short sojourn as a captive by an outback tribe of Winter fugitives in the north, Moon returns to Carbuncle and confronts Arienrhod for the fate of her beloved Sparks. Here she discovers the truth of her heritage and that Arienrhod considers her a failure; she wanted a clone in spirit, not just in body, a clone who would keep the Summers from throwing all the technical advances offworld trade brings to Tiamat into the sea during The Change. Moon proves her wrong by participating in the ritual competition for the Summer Throne, and winning. The Change will proceed, and Winter will end—but with an enlightened queen, preparing Tiamat to face the Hegemony as a peer when the 150 years of summer end and interstellar travel is again possible through the black hole.

The above plot summary is quoted from: en.wikipedia.org.

The Tsar's Dwarf (Zarens dværg in Danish) is a 2006 novel by Danish novelist Peter H. Fogtdal (1956- ) transl ted in English by American author and translator Tiina Nunnally.

"Like 'The Elephant Man' by David Lynch, Peter H. Fogtdal's novel celebrates the life and the dignity of those who were considered sub-humans. It's a wonderful novel where the pursuit of human dignity is narrated with a masterly mixture of drama and humour." Sergio Luis de Carvalho, Portuguese novelist.

"It's immensely liberating to read this grotesque novel far out of the fringes of fiction. It has been many years since Danish literature produced such a phantasmagorical novel that brushes so closely to plausible historical reality." Niels Houkjær, Berlingske Tidende, Denmark

The Tsar's Dwarf

Sørine is a rich and deeply realized character, but she is also often a difficult one to connect with. There’s a very good reason for this: not only has she been dropped within a set of almost farcically terrible circumstances, but, as a result of the lifelong mockery and abuse that she has experienced, her demeanor is caustic and aggressive, cynical and frequently quite cruel. She further compounds the distance between herself and other characters by referring to “human beings” as almost an entirely different species from herself. In putting the burden of empathy on the reader, and forcing one to fully consider the emotional consequences of the treatment that Sørine has received, however, Fogtdal uses his heroine’s alienation to the narrative’s advantage.

This process of learning to empathize with another is actually twofold: as the reader is learning how to empathize with Sørine, Sørine is also learning to empathize with others. Where at the novel’s start she’s equally spiteful towards “human beings,” dwarfs, and “goodfolk,” by its end, she’s arrived at a place of acceptance towards those who have wronged her.

Sørine’s world is one in which everyone has their own share of suffering and everyone has been wronged. Tsar’s sons are murdered by their own fathers. Infants die of plagues. Dwarfs are forcibly married for the amusement of aristocrats and displayed in museums. The Tsar’s Dwarf is a novel that shows us that regardless of the form that it takes, it is suffering that binds us together. And ultimately, it is this shared experience that makes it possible to be compassionate towards individuals who at first, seem impossibly different from ourselves.[1]

[1] Three Percent, University of Rochester

The Old Capital (in Japanese 古都) is a novel by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata originally published in 1962. The Old Capital was one of the three novels cited by the Nobel Committee in awarding the 1968 Prize for Literature to Kawabata (the other two were Snow Country and Thousand Cranes).

In the The Old Capital, Chieko Sada is the daughter of Takichiro and Shige, who operate a kimono wholesale business in Kyoto. Now twenty, Chieko has known for years that she was a foundling adopted by Takichiro and Shige. Soon after a chance encounter at Yasaka Shrine, Chieko learns of a twin sister Naeko, who had remained in her home village in Kitayama working in the mountain forests north of the city. The identical looks of Chieko and Naeko confuse Hideo, a traditional weaver, who is a potential suitor of Chieko. The novel, one of the last that Kawabata completed before his death, examines themes common to much of his literature: the gulf between the sexes and the anxiety its recognition brings.

The novel was adapted in 1963 into a Japanese feature film known in English under the title Twin Sisters of Kyoto. Directed by Noboru Nakamura, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. A second film adaptation was made in 1980 by director Kon Ichikawa. The movie was the last in which actress Momoe Yamaguchi appeared before she retired to marry her co-star, Tomokazu Miura [1].

[1] Wikipedia

The Journey of Ibn Fattouma is a novel written and published by Nobel Prize-winning, Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) in 1983. It was translated from Arabic into English in 1992.

Plot Summary [1]:

Ibn Fattouma, also known by his birth name Qindil Muhammad al-Innabi, is a Muslim man disillusioned by the corruption in his home city. When he asks his teacher, a Sufi, why a land whose people obeys the tenets of Islam suffers so, Ibn Fattouma is told the answer he seeks lies far away from the city. Since travel broadens one's horizons, the teacher encourages Ibn Fattouma to seek the land of Gebel, where such problems have been solved. The teacher tried to travel there himself, but civil war in neighboring lands and the demands of family ultimately prevented him from completing the journey. Also, no documents exist about Gebel and no one is known to have traveled there and come back.

Ibn Fattouma says farewell to his mother and proceeds with a camel train out of his home city to the land of Mashriq. In this sexually libertine society (by Ibn Fattouma's standards), the women and men do not marry, they share sexual partners and they share power over their children. Nevertheless, Ibn Fattouma settles in Mashriq with a woman named Arousa and they have five children as husband and wife. Because of Ibn Fattouma's insistence upon teaching his eldest son Islam, he is exiled from Mashriq and prohibited from seeing Arousa or their children again. Ibn Fattouma then travels to the land of Haïra. The invasion of Mashriq by militaristic Haïra further separates Ibn Fattouma from his family, and when the annexation of Mashriq is finished, Arousa is brought to Haïra as a slave. The chamberlain of the god-king of Haïra wants Arousa as his wife and arranges for Ibn Fattouma to be jailed. Twenty years pass in Haïra before the god-king is overthrown, and the chamberlain (who was also jailed) tells Ibn Fattouma to look in the neighboring land of Halba for his wife and son.

In Halba, the freedom of the individual is the greatest good. All religions peacefully coexist and openly encourage freedom of inquiry. The Halbans are also aggressive promoters of their philosophy of life in other nations; preparations are underway as Ibn Fattouma arrives for a war with neighboring Aman. Ibn Fattouma is reunited with Arousa, who thought him lost and had since married a Buddhist. There Ibn Fattouma meets and marries Samia, a pediatrician in Halba's hospital. With his wife's reluctant approval, Ibn Fattouma decides to continue his journey before war makes such travel impossible.

In the land of Aman, justice is held as the greatest good, and every citizen is encouraged to spy on every other to maintain order. He leaves just as Aman and Halba prepare to fight. His next stop, the land of Ghuroub, finds Ibn Fattouma questioned to the depths of his being. Does he earnestly desire to go to Gebel, and why? Ibn Fattouma states as he has many times before that he seeks to learn Gebel's secret of perfection in life and share it with the people of his homeland. He and the other seekers of Gebel are driven from Ghuroub by an invading army from Aman, and after months of travel, they sight Gebel itself from a mountain peak. As Ibn Fattouma descends to continue his journey, the story ends without the reader learning whether he finds the perfection he seeks.
__________________________

[1] The Journey of Ibn Fattouma Wikipedia

Man Gone Down is the debut novel of U.S. author Michael Thomas (? - ). It is:

- Winner of the 2009 International Dublin/IMPAC Literary Award (a prize of €100,000)
- New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2007
- New York Times Notable Books of 2007
- San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2007
- Spring/Summer 2008 Book Sense Best Reading Group title

The book was praised by the judges, who included James Ryan, for its "energy and warmth" and for being "tuned urgently to the way we live now".[1]

The novel is about an African-American man estranged from his white wife and their children, and who must come up with a sum of money within four days to have them returned. It focuses on an attempt to achieve the American Dream. Thomas describes Man Gone Down as having a "gallows humour".[2]

Man Gone Down: A Novel

[1] "Debut novel by US writer wins Impac". The Irish Times. 2009-06-11. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0611/breaking49.htm. Retrieved 2009-06-11.
[2] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Gone_Down

Budapest (Budapeste) is a novel by Brazilian writer, singer, guitarist, composer, dramatist, and poet Francisco Buarque de Hollanda (1944- ), published in 2003 and won the Prêmio Jabuti award (the most important and well-known literary award in Brazil).

See the Editorial Reviews here.

The Shipping News is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novel by E. Annie Proulx (1935- ), published in 1993, and adapted into a film of the same name released in 2001.

The Shipping News

Plot Summary[1]

The story centers on Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper reporter from upstate New York whose father emigrated from Newfoundland. Shortly after his parents' suicide, Quoyle's unfaithful and abusive wife Petal, and her lover, leave town. Days later, Petal sells their two daughters to a 'black market adoption agency' for $6,000. Soon thereafter, Petal and her lover are killed in a car accident; the young girls are located by police and returned to Quoyle. Despite his daughters' safe return, Quoyle's life is collapsing, and his paternal aunt, Agnis Hamm, convinces him to return to Newfoundland for a new beginning. Their ancestral home is located on Quoyle's Point.

He obtains work as a traffic accident reporter for the Gammy Bird, the local newspaper in Killick-Claw, a small town. The Gammy Bird's editor also asks him to document the shipping news, arrivals and departures from the local port, which soon grows into Quoyle's signature articles on boats of interest in the harbour.

Quoyle gradually makes friends within the community, learns about his own troubled family background, and begins a relationship with a local woman, Wavey. Quoyle's growth in confidence and emotional strength, as well as his ability to be comfortable in a loving relationship, become the book's main focus. Quoyle learns deep and disturbing secrets about his ancestors that emerge in strange ways.

[1] Wikipedia.org

Movie:

Alfred and Emily, published in 2008, is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning, Iranian-born British author Doris Lessing (1919- ).

From Bookmarks Magazine: In Alfred & Emily, groundbreaking author Doris Lessing returns to the subject matter explored in her 1994 autobiography, Under My Skin. Fans will recognize common themes and details, but Lessing’s outlook and tone have softened. Critics were touched by her genuine attempt to understand her overbearing, self-absorbed mother, though her writing is still tinged with resentment. Lessing’s fictional novella is no fairy tale, but most critics found it unconvincing. Why invent a fictional life if it isn’t compelling? They much preferred the memoir: its somber tone and gritty details bring the unhappy couple wrenchingly and heartrendingly to life, its fractured, unconventional structure reminiscent of that of The Golden Notebook. While Lessing has penned a powerful and unsparing portrait of a marriage framed by the physical and psychological damages of war, a few critics suggest that general readers might do best to start with Under My Skin, The Golden Notebook, or another of Lessing’s novels.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Review

“A clever, moving coupling of fiction and nonfiction. ALFRED & EMILY is...a testament to [Lessing’s] ongoing literary vitality.” (Washington Post Book World )

“A stirring exploration . . . gently yet deeply moving” (Minneapolis Star Tribune )

“A truly intriguing piece of work...the book is also an interesting glimpse of an empire and an era.” (Christian Science Monitor )

“Alfred and Emily reveals why Lessing deserved literature’s highest honor. There is a remarkable level of courage, honesty, and wisdom in Alfred and Emily. . . . Lessing, nearing 90, continues to surprise.” (USA Today )

“An intriguing work . . . [that] shimmers with precisely remembered details.” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times )

“An odd and powerful excursion into lost time. . . . a powerful reminder not only of Lessing’s past but also of how each of us can return to our own and come back with something precious.” (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review )

“Laced with the subtlest of observations and the wryest of wit...This unusual marriage of fiction and memoir (and family photographs) results in a book at once spellbinding, rueful, and tragic.” (Booklist (starred review) )

“Lessing’s taste for discomfiting truths is as evident as ever…as bracing and engaging as anything she has written.” (Kirkus Reviews )

“She has never displayed her potent imagination to better effect, or her gift for probing realism . . . a profoundly moving memoir and portrait of a marriage.” (Wall Street Journal )

Olive Kitteridge (also known as On the Coast of Maine), a novel by American author Elizabeth Strout (1956- ), published in 2008, is a collection of thirteen connected short stories about a woman named Olive and her immediate family and friends in the town of Crosby in coastal Maine. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Olive Kitteridge

Stories Included in the Collection:
Pharmacy
Incoming Tide
The Piano Player
A Little Burst
Starving
A Different Road
Winter Concert
Tulips
Basket of Trips
Ship in a Bottle
Security
Criminal
River

The Color Purple is a novel by American author Alice Walker (1944- ). It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The Color Purple

The Color Purple was adapted into a film and musical of the same name.

Plot Summary

The story is told in the form of diary entries and letters. Celie is a poor uneducated young black woman in 1930s Georgia who, aged only fourteen, is raped and impregnated twice by a man she calls Pa. Her children both disappear; Celie assumes their father has murdered them, until she meets a small girl in town to whom she bears a strong resemblance. Celie is forced into a marriage against her will, to Mr. Johnson, a man who originally approaches her father to ask permission to marry her younger sister, Nettie. Shortly after moving into her new home, she is joined by Nettie, who is also seeking to escape the unpleasant conditions at home. After Celie's husband tries to seduce her and fails he forces Nettie to leave and, following Celie's advice, she goes to the home of a local pastor, promising to write to Celie. As time passes, no letters arrive and so Celie assumes that Nettie is dead.

In her writings, Celie deferentially refers to her husband as "Mr.__", and it is far into the tale before we find out his first name is Albert. One of his sons, Harpo, falls in love with and marries a strong-willed and physically imposing woman named Sofia. Though both Harpo and "Mr." attempt to treat her as an inferior, Sofia fights back. Celie initially encourages this bullying behaviour, as being second to a man is the only way she has ever known to live, but when confronted by Sofia she realises her error. Celie is both envious of and intimidated by Sofia's strong spirit and florid defiance of her husband's absolute authority.

"Mr." has a long-term mistress, a singer named Shug Avery. She comes to live with the family due to poor health. Like "Mr.", Shug at first has little respect for Celie and the life she lives. She copies her lover, abusing Celie and adding to her humiliation. Celie feels intrigued and excited by this effervescent, liberated version of femininity. Through her relationship with Shug, Celie realizes that she is worthy of being loved and respected. When Shug discovers that "Mr." beats Celie, she decides to remain in the house for a short time in order to protect her.

After a few years of constant fighting, Sofia leaves Harpo, taking their children with her. At the same time, Celie and Shug become intimate and a strong bond grows between them. Shug helps Celie discover her sexuality as a woman. When Sofia returns to town for a visit, she becomes involved in a fight with Harpo's new girlfriend, Mary Agnes, who is nicknamed "Squeak" because of her high-pitched voice.

One day, the mayor’s wife, Miss Millie, asks Sofia to work as her maid. When Sofia declines with the words, "Hell, no," the mayor slaps her, not reckoning with her fiery temper. She returns the blow, knocking the mayor down, and is arrested for hitting a white man. Sofia is severely beaten in jail and is later sentenced twelve years in prison. The separation from her family and the loss of her freedom breaks her spirit. After some intervention from Squeak, who is raped by a white prison warden to whom she is related for her trouble, Sofia's sentence is altered and she serves as the mayor's wife's maid for the remainder of her time.

Having left on a singing tour, Shug returns, married to a man named Grady. Celie is initially hurt by this relationship, as she feels betrayed, but grows to accept it. Other than Nettie, Shug is the only person who has ever truly loved Celie.

One night, when Shug asks Celie about Nettie, Celie says that she believes her sister to be dead, since she had promised to write but Celie had never received any letters. Shug informs Celie that she has seen "Mr." hide numerous mysterious letters in a trunk and suggests that they investigate. When they do so, they find dozens of letters written by Nettie to Celie over the years. These tell of Nettie's travels to Africa with a missionary couple, Samuel and Corrine, and their adopted children, Olivia and Adam. When Corrine becomes ill, Samuel tells Nettie how they came to adopt their children and that his wife has suspected that Nettie was their biological mother due to their close resemblance. It transpires that Olivia and Adam are Celie's long-lost children, and that she is their aunt. She also learns that Alphonso was not her and Celie's father but rather their stepfather. Their biological father, a store-owner, had been lynched by a mob of white men because they believed he was too successful. After Corrine's acceptance of Nettie's story, she dies, and Samuel and Nettie discover that they are deeply in love; they eventually marry.

Having read the letters and learned the truth about her children as well as her biological father, Celie visits Alphonso to confirm the story, which he does. Celie finds a new sense of empowerment, and at dinner one night she releases her pent-up anger at "Mr.", cursing him for the years of abuse that she has had to endure. Shug, Celie, and Squeak decide to move to Tennessee, where Celie begins a lucrative business designing and sewing tailored pants together. She returns to Georgia for a visit and finds that not only has "Mr." reformed himself and his ways, but Alphonso has died. She finds out that the shop, house and land she thought was his had been willed to her and Nettie when their mother died. Celie decides to move back, relocating her business. Soon after, Shug falls for nineteen-year-old Germaine and travels with him across the country in a last hurrah for her youth.

Meanwhile, Nettie and Samuel are preparing for their return to America. Adam falls in love with and marries an African girl named Tashi, who undergoes the painful rituals of female genital cutting and facial scarification. Adam also goes through the facial scarring ritual in solidarity. Nettie writes to Celie to let her know that the family is on their way.

Celie is now an independent woman. Celie and "Mr." eventually reconcile, but remain friends rather than lovers. He helps her with her business, sewing with her as they sit on the porch. Sofia and Harpo reconcile, and Sofia also works for Celie at her pants-making shop. Shug returns, satisfied with her last fling and ready to settle down. Nettie and Samuel return with the children, and Celie and her sister are happily reunited. [Reference]

Movive (The Color Purple):

The Sweetness of Life (Die Suesse des Lebens) is a 2006 novel by Austrian psychiatrist and writer Paulus Hochgatterer (1961- ). It won The European Union Prize for Literature in 2009.

Synopsis

This novel takes us through the lives of a group of damaged people living in a pleasant and seemingly tranquil Austrian village. It’s a village where nothing dramatic occurs, until one Christmas…

It’s the Christmas holiday, the presents have been opened, and a six-year-old girl is drinking cocoa and playing Ludo with her grandfather when the doorbell rings. Her grandfather goes to the door, talks to someone there, gets his coat, and goes out.

When her grandfather doesn’t come back, the little girl puts on her new green quilted jacket with a squirrel on it and goes out to find him. She follows some footprints and finds her grandfather’s body on the ramp that leads to their barn. There is no doubt it is his body - the clothes are his - but his head has been crushed to a bloody pulp. The little girl goes home and says nothing for the next few days.

However, the body is discovered the morning after the murder, and detective superintendent Ludwig Kovacs - a middle-aged divorcé who loves gazing at the stars, has a daughter he can’t communicate with and is beginning a new relationship with a local woman - has to solve this case and the spate of animal killings - chickens, ducks, hamsters and 16 hives’ worth of bees - which follow.

On a basic level, this novel is about a horrific crime and the investigation which follows. But it’s really about far more than this. It’s about harming children through trauma, violence and cruelty, and it’s about the pain that parents and elders can cause. Hochgatterer pulls back the veil of normality and reveals the part of life going on beneath the surface. [Reference]

Empire Falls is a novel written by Richard Russo (1949- ); published in 2001 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.

A small, fictional mill town in Maine called Empire Falls, though once booming in industry, is quickly deteriorating. Dominated by the powerful Whiting family, the town can no longer sustain itself. Seen through the eyes of Miles Roby, the manager of the Empire Grill, which is also owned by Mrs. Whiting, his struggles with family, including his divorce and the life of his teenage daughter, Christina (nicknamed "Tick"), greatly mirror the condition of the town. His soon-to-be ex-wife Janine is going out with and preparing to marry the owner of a fitness center in town. As prospects for the town's future dwindle, the past is visited to explain Miles' history as well as those around him and the town itself. A subplot of the novel involves a school shooting carried out by a poor high school student, who is orphaned after the death of his grandmother, and bullied by the rest of the school's students, particularly Tick's ex-boyfriend, Zack. [Reference]

Empire Falls

Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by American author Jeffrey Eugenides (1960- ) published in 2002.

Despite slow initial sales, the book became a bestseller. Its characters and events are loosely based on the author's life and his observations on his Greek heritage. Eugenides developed the idea of writing Middlesex after he read the memoir Herculine Barbin, and was unsatisfied with its lack of discussion about hermaphrodites' anatomy and emotions.

The novel begins with the narrator, aged 41, recounting how the recessive gene, 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, caused him to be born with the characteristics of a female. He is christened with a female name Calliope and nicknamed Callie. After learning about the syndrome in his adolescence, he changes his name to the masculine name Cal. The narration periodically returns to the frame story of present-day Cal, who is bearded, male and interested in women, foreshadowing the personal revelations of Callie. The narration briefly explains how Desdemona, Cal's grandmother, predicted her grandchild to be male while Callie's parents had already made preparations for the birth of a daughter.

The story starts again further back in time, in a small village in Asia Minor, with the protagonist's Greek paternal grandparents. Eleutherios "Lefty" Stephanides and Desdemona Stephanides are orphaned siblings who share a close bond that begins to develop into a romantic relationship, despite their misgivings. Soon, in the aftermath of the 1922 war between Greece and Turkey, and amid graphic scenes of the Great Fire of Smyrna, the siblings are forced to seek refuge by emigrating to America. On the eve of their departure, Desdemona agrees to marry her brother. The marriage is possible because no one in America knows they are siblings and, as such, the legal and social prohibitions against marriage between siblings are not a risk. They reach the United States, and settle in Detroit, Michigan, home of their cousin Sourmelina "Lina" Zizmo, hinted to be a closeted lesbian, their American sponsor, and her husband Jimmy. Lefty soon goes into an alcohol-smuggling business run by Jimmy. In time, Desdemona gives birth to a son, Milton, while Lina gives birth to a daughter, Theodora, called "Tessie". Desdemona is made aware of the potential for disease in children due to consanguinity and becomes anxious about her pregnancy and the morality of her sexual relationship with Lefty. With the quality of his marriage declining, Lefty decides to open a bar and gambling room, calling it the Zebra Room.

Lefty and Desdemona's son, Milton, marries Lina's daughter, Tessie. Milton and Tessie, who are second cousins, have two children, Chapter Eleven and Callie. Chapter Eleven (a reference to the fact that he eventually becomes bankrupt) is a biologically "normal" boy, while Callie is intersexed. However, the family does not know this for many years, and Callie is consequently raised as a girl.

At 14, Callie falls in love with her female best friend, who is referred to in the novel as the "Obscure Object" (is a reference to the 1977 film That Obscure Object of Desire directed by Luis Buñuel). Callie has her first sexual experiences with both genders, the Obscure Object and the Obscure Object's brother. After Callie is injured by a tractor, a doctor discovers that Callie is intersexed, and she is taken to a clinic in New York where she undergoes a series of tests and examinations. Faced with the prospect of sex reassignment surgery, Callie runs away and takes the male identity of Cal. Cal hitchhikes cross-country, finally arriving in San Francisco, where he becomes an attraction in a burlesque show.

The club where Cal works is raided by police, and Cal is returned to Chapter Eleven's custody. Desdemona sees Cal as male for the first time, and the book ends when Desdemona confesses to Cal that Lefty was her brother. After learning that Milton had been killed in a car accident, Cal stands in the doorway to the family's Middlesex home (a male-only Greek tradition thought to keep spirits of the dead out of the family home) while Milton's funeral takes place. As an adult, Cal becomes a diplomat and is stationed in Berlin. He meets Julie Kikuchi, a Japanese-American woman with whom he starts a relationship. [1]

[1]. Wikipedia.org

Gilead is a novel written by American author Marilynne Robinson (1943- ), published in 2004 and won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Gilead

Plot [1]: The book is an account of the memories and legacy of John Ames as he remembers his experiences of his father and grandfather to share with his son. All three men share a vocational lifestyle and profession as Congregationalist ministers in Gilead, Iowa. Ames' father was a Christian pacifist, but his grandfather was a radical abolitionist who carried out guerrilla actions with John Brown before the American Civil War, served as a chaplain with the Union forces in that war, and incited his congregation to join up and serve in it; as Ames remarks, "He preached this town into the war." The grandfather returned from the war maimed with the loss of his right eye. Hereafter he was given the distinction that his right side was holy or sacred in someway, that it was his link to commune with God and he was notorious for a piercing stare with the one eye he had left. The grandfather's other eccentricities are recalled in his youth; the practice of giving all and any of the family's possessions to others and preaching with a gun in a bloodied shirt. The true character and intimate details of the father are revealed in context with anecdotes regarding the grandfather, and mainly in the search for the grave of the grandfather. One event that is prevalent in the narrators orations is the memory of receiving communion of sorts from his father at the remains of a Baptist church, burned by lightning. Ames recalls this as an invented memory adapted from his father breaking an ashy biscuit for lunch. In the course of the story, it quickly emerges that Ames's first wife, Louisa, died while giving birth to their daughter, Rebecca (a.k.a. Angeline) who also died soon after. Ames reflects on the death of his family as the source of great sorrow for many years with special reference to the growing family of his dear and lifelong friend, Boughton. Many years later Ames meets his second wife, Lila, a less-educated woman who appears in church. Eventually Ames baptizes Lila and their relationship develops culminating in her proposal to him. As Ames writes, John Ames Boughton (whose father is the local Presbyterian minister and Ames' lifelong friend) reappears in the town after leaving it in great disgrace following his seduction and abandonment of a girl from a poverty-stricken family near his university. The daughter of this relationship died when she was three years old despite the efforts of the Boughton family to look after her. Young Boughton, the apple of his parents' eye but deeply disliked by Ames, seeks Ames out; much of the tension in the story results from Ames's mistrust of young Boughton and particularly of his relationship with Lila and their son. In the dénouement, however, it turns out that Boughton is himself suffering from his forced separation from his own common-law wife, an African American from Tennessee, and their son; the family are not allowed to live together because of segregationist laws, and her family utterly rejects Boughton. It is implied that Boughton's understanding with Lila lies in their common sense of tragedy as she prepares for the death of Ames, who has given her a security and stability she has never known before.

Although there is action in the story, its mainspring lies in Ames' theological struggles on a whole series of fronts: with his grandfather's engagement in the Civil War, with his own loneliness through much of his life, with his brother's clear and his father's apparent loss of belief, with his father's desertion of the town, with the hardships of people's lives, and above all with his feelings of hostility and jealousy towards Boughton, whom he knows at some level he has to forgive. Ames's struggles are illustrated by numerous quotations from the Bible, from theologians (especially Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion), and from philosophers, especially the atheist Feuerbach, whom Ames greatly respects. It is unusual that a book with so much of this kind of content should be so widely recognized as a successful novel, and should achieve such acclaim from a secular audience. However the abstract and theological content is made meaningful because it is seen through the eyes of Ames, who is presented in a deeply sympathetic manner, and writes his memoir from a position of serenity despite suffering while always remaining conscious of his limitations and failings. In the closing pages of the book, Ames learns of Boughton's true situation, and is able to offer him the genuine affection and forgiveness he has never before been able to feel for him. Although it is not stated, there is an implication that he dies in his sleep, or at his prayers, after reaching this resolution.

[1]. Wikipedia.org

The Time Traveler's Wife is the debut novel of American author Audrey Niffenegger (1963- ), published in 2003 and won the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize and a British Book Award (millions of copies sold in the United States and the United Kingdom).

Plot summary [1]

Using alternating first-person perspectives, the novel tells the stories of Henry DeTamble (born 1963), a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and his wife, Clare Abshire (born May 24, 1971), an artist who makes paper sculptures. Henry has a rare genetic disorder, which comes to be known as Chrono-Displacement, that causes him to involuntarily travel through time. When 20-year-old Clare meets 28-year-old Henry at the Newberry Library in 1991 at the opening of the novel, he has never seen her before, although she has known him most of her life.

Henry begins time traveling at the age of five, jumping forward and backward relative to his own timeline. When he leaves, where he goes, or how long his trips will last are all beyond his control. His destinations are tied to his subconscious—he most often travels to places and times related to his own history. Certain stimuli such as stress can trigger Henry's time traveling; he often goes jogging to keep calm and remain in the present. He also searches out pharmaceuticals in the future that may be able to help control his time traveling. He also seeks the advice of a geneticist, Dr. Kendrick. Henry cannot take anything with him into the future or the past; he always arrives naked and then struggles to find clothing, shelter and food. He amasses a number of survival skills including lock-picking, self-defense and pickpocketing. Much of this he learns from older versions of himself.

Once their timelines converge "naturally" at the library—their first meeting in his chronology—Henry starts to travel to Clare's childhood and adolescence in South Haven, Michigan, beginning in 1977 when she is six years old. On one of his early visits (from her perspective), Henry gives her a list of the dates he will appear and she writes them in a diary so she will remember to provide him with clothes and food when he arrives. During another visit, he inadvertently reveals that they will be married in the future. Over time they develop a close relationship. At one point, Henry helps Clare frighten and humiliate a boy who abused her. Clare is last visited in her youth by Henry in 1989, on her eighteenth birthday, during which they make love for the first time. They are then separated for two years until their meeting at the library.

Clare and Henry marry, but Clare has trouble bringing a pregnancy to term because of the genetic anomaly Henry may presumably be passing on to the fetus. After five miscarriages, Henry wishes to save Clare further pain and has a vasectomy, not before impregnating Clare for the sixth time which results in another miscarraige. Clare is impregnated for the seventh time and gives birth to their daughter Alba when Henry time travels forward in time when he is 33 to Clare's bedside. Alba is diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement as well but, unlike Henry, she has some control over her destinations when she time travels. Before she is born, Henry travels to the future and meets his ten-year-old daughter on a school field trip and learns that he died when she was five years old.

When he is 43, during what is to be his last year of life, Henry time travels to a Chicago parking garage on a frigid winter night where he is unable to find shelter. As a result of the hypothermia and frostbite he suffers, his feet are amputated when he returns to the present. Henry and Clare both know that without the ability to escape when he time travels, Henry will certainly die within his next few jumps. On New Year's Eve 2006 Henry time travels into the middle of the Michigan woods in 1984 and is accidentally shot by Clare's brother, a scene foreshadowed earlier in the novel. Henry returns to the present and dies in Clare's arms.

Clare is devastated by Henry's passing. She later finds a letter from Henry asking her to "stop waiting" for him, but which describes a moment in her future when she will see him again. The last scene in the book takes place when Clare is 82 years old and Henry is 43. She is waiting for Henry, as she has done most of her life, and when he arrives they clasp each other for what may or may not be the last time.

[1] Wikipedia.org

The Great Gatsby (regarded as a paragon of the Great American Novel)

2010-07-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

The Great Gatsby is a novel by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940); first published in 1925. After its republishing in 1945 and 1953, it quickly found a wide readership and is today widely regarded as a paragon of the Great American Novel, and a literary classic. The Great Gatsby has become a standard text in high school and university courses on American literature in countries around the world, and is ranked second in the Modern Library's lists of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century [1].

The Great Gatsby

Plot Summary [1]

Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a young bachelor from a patrician Midwestern family, who graduates from Yale in 1915. After fighting in The Great War he returns to the Midwest before settling in New York City to "learn the bond business."

Nick explains that in 1922 he rented a bungalow between two mansions in West Egg, a wealthy community on Long Island Sound. Across the bay was East Egg, inhabited by the "old aristocracy," including Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is Nick's second cousin once removed and Nick knew of Tom, a football player at New Haven. Nick describes the Buchanans in a visit to their East Egg mansion: although phenomenally wealthy, Tom's glory days are behind him; he is a dilettante. Daisy, although engaging and attractive, is pampered and superficial with a largely ignored two-year-old daughter. Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, a well-known female golfer, shows an interest in Nick and tells him that Tom has a mistress in New York City.

One day Tom and Nick take a train ride together to New York and on the way they stop at a shabby garage owned by George Wilson, where Nick is introduced to the owner's wife, Myrtle (Tom's mistress). Nick accompanies Tom and Myrtle to their Manhattan love-nest, where Myrtle presides over a pretentious party that includes her sister and several others. Nick finds the evening increasingly unbearable but does not leave until Tom breaks Myrtle's nose in a spat.

Nick learns that his next-door neighbor, who throws lavish parties hosting hundreds of people, is the wealthy, mysterious Jay Gatsby. Nick receives an invitation one weekend and attends, finding the party wild and fun. However, he also discovers the guests do not know much about Gatsby and that rumors about the man are contradictory. Nick runs into Jordan Baker, who invites him to join her. While looking for Gatsby, they run into a man with large "Owl Eye" glasses admiring Gatsby's collection of books. Later, a man strikes up a conversation with Nick, claiming to recognize him from the US Army's Third Division during the Great War. Nick mentions his difficulty in finding the host, and the man reveals himself to be Gatsby. An odd, yet close, friendship between Nick and Gatsby begins.

One day, Gatsby drives Nick to New York City. Gatsby presents a clichéd description of his life as a wealthy dilettante and war hero to an incredulous Nick, but the latter is convinced when Gatsby displays a war medal and photograph. In New York, Gatsby introduces a bemused Nick to underworld figure Meyer Wolfsheim (based on Arnold Rothstein). Nick then sees Tom and tries to introduce Gatsby, but finds that Gatsby has disappeared.

Jordan Baker later reveals to Nick that Gatsby had fallen in love with Daisy in 1917 as an Army Lieutenant stationed near Daisy's hometown, Louisville. After the war, Gatsby came east and bought his mansion near Daisy and Tom, where he hosts parties hoping she will visit. Jordan says Gatsby would like Nick to arrange a meeting with Daisy. Nick agrees, and invites Daisy and Gatsby to his house. The reunion is initially awkward, but Gatsby and Daisy begin a love affair. An affair also begins for Nick and Jordan, but Nick predicts their relationship will be superficial.

Daisy invites Gatsby and Nick to her mansion, where Tom discovers that Gatsby loves Daisy and, accompanied by Tom and Jordan, they depart for the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. Tom insists he and Gatsby switch cars; as he stops by Wilson's garage for gas he flaunts Gatsby's roadster. At the hotel Tom confronts Gatsby about their affair. Gatsby urges Daisy to say she never loved Tom; Daisy says that although she did love Tom "once," she loved Gatsby "too." Tom mockingly tells Gatsby nothing can happen between him and Daisy. Gatsby retorts that the reason Daisy married Tom was because he (Gatsby) was too poor to marry Daisy. Tom visibly loses composure and reveals that Gatsby is a bootlegger. Gatsby tries to defend himself to Daisy. However, Tom knows Daisy's superficial nature very well and by taking away Gatsby's air of financial security, Daisy is now beyond his reach. With the situation between Tom and Gatsby tense, Daisy runs out of the hotel, with Gatsby following her, to Gatsby's car, where she insists on driving home as it will calm her nerves. Tom, believing he has bested Gatsby, leaves with Nick and Jordan.

George Wilson, also suspicious that his wife is having an extramarital affair, argues with her. Myrtle runs outside as Gatsby's roadster approaches (believing it to be Tom), only to be struck and killed by the car. Daisy and Gatsby speed away. Later, Tom, Jordan and Nick notice a commotion by Wilson's garage on their way to East Egg, and stop. While George mourns, moaning over his wife's body, a bystander tells of having seen a yellow car strike Myrtle. As George takes in this information, Tom, tells George the car wasn't his, but George doesn't seem to listen and Tom, Jordan, and Nick leave.

Later that night Nick learns the truth of the accident from Gatsby — Daisy was driving when the car struck Myrtle. The next morning Nick finds Gatsby depressed, unsure whether Daisy still loves him, and awaits a call from her. Seeing himself as Gatsby's closest friend, Nick advises Gatsby to leave for a week. "They're [Daisy, Tom, Jordan] a rotten crowd," Nick says, "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."

Having tracked the owner of the roadster, Wilson appears at Gatsby's mansion with a gun. George finds Gatsby floating in his pool and kills him before committing suicide.

Despite Nick's efforts, few people attend Gatsby's funeral. In the end, only Nick, Gatsby's father, and the "owl-eyed" man who admired the books in Gatsby's library show up at his funeral.

Nick severs connections with Jordan (who claims to be engaged to another man, although Nick believes she is lying). Also, Nick has a run-in with Tom, who admits that he revealed that Gatsby was the owner of the roadster to George Wilson, leading the deranged man to find and kill Gatsby.

Nick returns permanently to the Midwest, reflecting on Gatsby's dreams and the sad and cyclical nature of the past.

[1] The Great Gatsby, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Pulitzer Prize winner)

2010-06-28T21:47:00.000-07:00

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a novel by American author Michael Chabon (1963- ), published in 2000 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001.

Plot Summary [1]

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Besides having a shared interest in drawing, the two are also fans of the Jewish stage magician Harry Houdini, and share several connections to Houdini: Kavalier (like comics legend Jim Steranko) has actually studied escapology, which aided him in his departure from Europe, and Klayman is the son of the Mighty Molecule, a strongman on the vaudeville circuit.

Klayman gets Kavalier a job as an illustrator for a novelty products company which, due to the recent success of Superman, is attempting to get into the comic-book business. Renaming himself Sam Clay, Klayman starts writing adventure stories, and the two recruit several other Brooklyn teenagers to produce Amazing Midget Radio Comics (named to promote one of the company's novelty items). The magazine features their character the Escapist, an anti-fascist superhero who combines traits of (among others) Captain America, Harry Houdini, Batman, the Phantom, and the Scarlet Pimpernel; the Escapist becomes tremendously popular, but, as often happens, the writers and artists get a minimal share of the publisher's success. Kavalier and Clay are slow to realize that they are being exploited, as they have private concerns: Kavalier is trying to help his family escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, and has fallen in love with a bohemian girl with her own artistic aspirations, while Clay is battling with his sexual identity.

Kavalier, driven by grief over the murder of one family member by the Nazis and the internment of the balance of his family, enlists in the navy, unaware that his would-be fiancée is pregnant. He returns from service and an extended self-imposed exile only to find his cousin and former love a married couple; the remainder of the novel follows the three characters' attempts to reconstitute a family, and to find a new creative direction for comics.

Many events in the novel are based on the lives of actual comic-book creators including Jack Kirby (to whom the book is dedicated in the afterword), Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Joe Simon, Will Eisner, and Jim Steranko. Other historical figures play minor roles, including Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, and Fredric Wertham. The novel's time span roughly mirrors that of the Golden Age of Comics itself, starting from shortly after the debut of Superman and concluding with the Kefauver Senate hearings, two events often used to demarcate the era.

[1] The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Fixer (Pulitzer Prize winner)

2010-06-22T00:14:00.000-07:00

The Fixer is a novel by one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century Bernard Malamud (1914-1986); published in 1966 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967.

The Fixer is set in tsarist Russia amid the turmoil of a violent outbreak of anti-Semitism. The novel tells Yakov Bok’s story - how a harmless Jewish handyman is blamed for the sadistic murder of a Russian youth. After being ostracized by the community, Bok leaves his village for the first time in his life to go seek a way to make a living in Kiev. To be able to get a job, he must deny his Jewish heritage. Then, ironically, he finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society.

When a boy is found lifeless in the cave with almost all of his blood drained away, the Jews are accused of murdering him in some ritual sacrifice. Bok is then arrested and thrown in prison where, despite the guards' encouragement, he will not confess to a crime that he had nothing to do with. While in prison, Yakov is helped by a Gentile who risks his own life to help him. When Yakov must walk through the street on the way to his trial, he is a chained man but not a broken one. Along the road, some people wave at him and a few even shout his name; it is amazing to realize what courage this would take in those circumstances. It is the least and at the same time the most that they can do. To Yakov, those few shouts are precious, for it means he is one of them.

The plotting and pacing of the novel is excellent. The characters are all well-written, but Yakov is a masterpiece character, the kind you cry for at the end of the story. The settings are very important in conveying feeling of oppression. The dialogue indicates the world-weary attitude of the people of Kiev. If you like historical novels, you will love The Fixer. It is in fact a classic. [1]

1. CurledUp.com

Ulysses (ranked first on the list of the 100 best English-language novels ...)

2010-06-20T09:35:00.000-07:00

Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce (1882–1941). One of the most important works of Modernist literature, it has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement" [1]. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Structure [1]

Part I: The Telemachiad

Episode 1, Telemachus
It is 8 a.m. Buck Mulligan (a callous, verbally aggressive and boisterous medical student) calls Stephen Dedalus (a young writer first encountered in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) up to the roof of the Martello tower in Sandycove where they both live. Stephen is highly introspective and there is palpable tension between him and Mulligan, stemming from a cruel remark Stephen has overheard Mulligan making about his dead mother and from the fact that Mulligan has invited an English student, Haines, to stay with them. The three men eat breakfast and walk to the shore, where Mulligan goes swimming - although not before demanding the key to the tower and to be lent money. Departing, Stephen declares that he will not return to the tower tonight, citing Mulligan as a "Usurper." The episode introduces the Hamlet parallels which will recur throughout the novel, with the character of Stephen - dressed in black, brooding, tormented by ghosts - clearly echoing the character of Shakespeare's prince. The parallels with Homer are also evident here, with the young Telemachus oppressed by the unruly suitors usurping his home, consuming his wealth and estate, and seeking to woo his mother Penelope.

Episode 2, Nestor
Stephen is teaching a history class on the victories of Pyrrhus of Epirus. The class is visibly bored, unconcerned with the subject and not disciplined. Before seeing the boys out of the classroom, Stephen tells the students a cryptic and impenetrable riddle about a fox burying his grandmother under a bush, which falls flat. One student, Sargent, stays behind so that Stephen can show him how to do a set of arithmetic exercises. Stephen indulges him, but looks at the aesthetically unappealing Sargent and tries to imagine Sargent's mother's love for him. Afterwards, Stephen visits the anti-Semitic school headmaster, Mr. Deasy, from whom he collects his pay and a letter to take to a newspaper office for printing. Deasy lectures Stephen on the satisfaction of money earned and the importance of efficient money management. This scene is the source of some of the novel's most famous lines, such as Dedalus's claim that "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" and that God is "a shout in the street." He rejects Deasy's biased recollection of past events, which he uses to justify his prejudices. At the end of this episode, Deasy makes another derogatory remark against the Jews, stating that Ireland has never extensively persecuted the Jews because they were never let in to the country.

Episode 3, Proteus
In this chapter, characterised by its stream of consciousness narrative style, the action is presented to the reader through the prism of Stephen's interior monologue. He finds his way to Sandymount Strand and mopes around for some time, mulling various philosophical concepts, his family, his life as a student in Paris, and again, his mother's death. As Stephen reminisces and ponders, he lies down among some rocks, watches a couple and a dog, scribbles some ideas for poetry, picks his nose, and urinates behind a rock.

Part II: The Odyssey
Episode 4, Calypso
The narrative shifts abruptly. The time is again 8 a.m., but the action has moved across the city to Eccles Street and to the second protagonist of the book, Leopold Bloom, a part-Jewish advertising canvasser. Bloom lives at No. 7 Eccles Street and is preparing breakfast at the same time as Mulligan in the tower. He walks to a butcher to buy a pork kidney for breakfast. He brings breakfast and the mail to his wife Molly as she lounges in bed. One of the letters (addressed in over-familiar fashion to Mrs Marion Bloom) is from her concert manager Blazes Boylan, whom she will welcome into her bed later that day. Bloom reads a letter from their daughter, Milly. The chapter closes with Bloom defecating in the outhouse.

Episode 5, Lotus Eaters
Bloom makes his way to Westland Row post office (by an intentionally indirect route), where he receives a love letter from one 'Martha Clifford' addressed to his pseudonym, 'Henry Flower'. He meets an acquaintance, C. P. M'Coy; while they chat, Bloom attempts to ogle a woman wearing stockings, but is prevented by a passing tram. Next, he reads the letter and tears up the envelope in an alley. He wanders into a Catholic church service and muses on theology. He goes to a chemist, Sweny's in Lincoln place, where he buys a bar of lemon soap. He then meets another acquaintance, Bantam Lyons, to whom he unintentionally gives a racing tip for the horse Throwaway. Finally, Bloom heads towards the baths.

Episode 6, Hades
The episode begins with Bloom entering a funeral carriage with three others, including Stephen's father Simon Dedalus. They drive to Paddy Dignam's funeral at Glasnevin cemetery, making small talk on the way. The carriage passes both Stephen and Blazes Boylan. There is discussion of various forms of death and burial, and Bloom is preoccupied by thoughts of his dead son, Rudy and the suicide of his father. They enter the chapel into the service and subsequently leave with the coffin cart. Bloom sees a mysterious man wearing a macintosh during the burial. Bloom continues to reflect upon death, but at the end of the episode rejects morbid thoughts to embrace 'warm fullblooded life'.

Episode 7, Aeolus
At the office of the Freeman's Journal, Bloom attempts to place an ad. After initial encouragement from the editor, Myles Crawford, he is unsuccessful. Stephen arrives bringing Deasy's letter about 'foot and mouth' disease, but the two do not meet. Stephen leads Crawford and others to the pub, telling an anecdote on the way about 'two Dublin vestals'. The episode is broken up into short sections by newspaper-style headlines, and is characterised by an abundance of rhetorical figures and devices.

Episode 8, Lestrygonians
Bloom's thoughts are peppered with references to food as lunchtime approaches. He meets an old flame, Josie Breen, and hears news of Mina Purefoy's labour. He enters the restaurant of the Burton Hotel where he is revolted by the sight of men eating like animals. Heading instead to Davy Byrne's, Bloom is greeted by Nosey Flynn. He consumes a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy, and muses upon the early days of his relationship with Molly and how the marriage has declined: 'Me. And me now.'. After Bloom leaves the restaurant, Nosey Flynn talks to other patrons about Bloom's sober character. Bloom heads towards the National Museum to look at the statues of Greek goddesses, and, in particular, their bottoms. Bloom suddenly spots Boylan across the street and, panicking, rushes into the museum.

Episode 9, Scylla and Charybdis
At the National Library, Stephen explains to various scholars his biographical theory of the works of Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, which he claims are based largely on the posited adultery of Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway. Bloom enters the National Library to look up the Keyes ad. He encounters Stephen briefly and unknowingly at the end of the episode.

Episode 10, Wandering Rocks
In this episode, nineteen short vignettes depict the wanderings of various characters, major and minor, through the streets of Dublin. The episode ends with an account of the cavalcade of the Lord Lieutenant, William Humble, Earl of Dudley, through the streets, where it is encountered by the various characters we have met in the novel, although neither Stephen nor Bloom are among them.

Episode 11, Sirens
In this episode, dominated by motifs of music, Bloom has dinner with Stephen's uncle Richie Goulding at the Ormond Hotel, while Molly's lover, Blazes Boylan, proceeds to his rendezvous with her. While dining, Bloom watches the seductive barmaids Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy and listens to the singing of Simon Dedalus and others.

Episode 12, Cyclops
This chapter is narrated largely by an unnamed denizen of Dublin, although his style of speech is heavily modelled on John Joyce, Joyce's father. He runs into Joe Hynes and they enter a pub for a drink. At the pub, they meet Alf Bergan and a character referred to only as the 'Citizen', who is largely modeled on Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association. Eventually, Leopold Bloom enters waiting to meet Martin Cunningham. The citizen is discovered to be a fierce Fenian and begins berating Bloom. The atmosphere quickly becomes anti-Semitic and Bloom escapes upon Cunningham's arrival. The chapter is marked by extended digressions made outside the voice of the unnamed narrator: hyperboles of legal jargon, Biblical passages, Irish mythology, etc., with lists of names often extending half a page. The episode title Cyclops refers both to the narrator, who is often quoted with 'says I', and to the Citizen, who fails to see the folly of his narrow-minded thinking. The episode ends with the Citizen hurling a biscuit tin at the swiftly exiting Bloom, who has cheekily reminded the Citizen that his Saviour was a Jew.

Episode 13, Nausicaa
The episode begins from the perspective of Gerty McDowell, a young woman on Sandymount strand contemplating love, marriage and femininity as night falls. The reader is gradually made aware that Bloom is watching her from a distance, and as she exposes her legs and underwear to him it is unclear how much of Gerty's narrative is actually Bloom’s sexual fantasy. Bloom’s masturbatory climax is echoed by the fireworks at the nearby bazaar. After Bloom’s orgasm and Gerty’s departure he grows pensive, brooding again on Molly and deciding to visit Mina Purefoy at the hospital. In the first half of the chapter the style parodies the cheap romantic magazines for women and feminine novelettes that were popular in the early 20th Century; precursors to 'chick-lit', the prose style of such publications was over-written and florid, full of cliches and hackneyed phrases. When the perspective switches to Bloom, the style reverts to the stream-of-consciousness manner familiar from earlier passages of the novel.

Episode 14, Oxen of the Sun
Bloom visits the maternity hospital where Mina Purefoy is giving birth, and finally meets Stephen, who is drinking with Buck Mulligan and his medical student friends. They continue on to a pub to continue drinking, following the successful birth of the baby. This chapter is remarkable for Joyce's wordplay, which seems to recapitulate the entire history of the English language to describe a scene in an obstetrics hospital, from the Carmen Arvale

Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.
to something resembling alliterative Anglo-Saxon poetry

In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin. Full she dread that God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins. Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe infare under her thatch. That man her will wotting worthful went in Horne's house.
and on through skillful parodies of, among others, Malory, the King James Bible, Bunyan, Pepys, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Sterne, Goldsmith, Junius, Gibbon, Lamb, De Quincey, Landor, Dickens, Newman, Ruskin and Carlyle, before concluding in a haze of nearly incomprehensible slang, bringing to mind American English employed in advertising. Indeed, Joyce organised this chapter as three sections divided into nine total subsections, representing the trimesters and months of gestation.

This extremely complex chapter can be further broken down structurally. It consists of sixty paragraphs. The first ten paragraphs are parodies of Latin and Anglo-Saxon language, the two major predecessors to the English language, and can be seen as intercourse and conception. The next forty paragraphs, representing the 40 weeks of gestation in human embryonic development, begin with Middle English satires; they move chronologically forward through the various styles mentioned above. At the end of the fiftieth paragraph, the baby in the maternity hospital is born, and the final ten paragraphs are the child, combining all the different forms of slang and street English that were spoken in Dublin in the early part of the 20th century.

Episode 15, Circe
Episode Fifteen takes the form of a play script with stage directions and descriptions, with characters’ names appearing above their dialogue. The majority of the action of the episode occurs only as drunken hallucinations. This episode is the longest in the novel yet occurs within a rather short time-frame.

The episode opens on Mabbot Street, or what Joyce––following journalistic practice––calls "Nighttown", one of the entranceways to Dublin's red-light district. Stephen and Lynch walk toward a brothel. Bloom attempts to follow Stephen and Lynch to Nighttown, but soon loses them. Here, the episode's first hallucination begins, in which Bloom is confronted by family members, such as Molly Bloom and his parents, and also by Gerty MacDowell, in regards to various offences.

Awakening from this hallucination, Bloom feeds a dog. This act leads onto another hallucination in which Bloom is questioned by a pair of Night-Wardens. From here, Bloom then imagines facing trial, accused of a variety of outlandish crimes, including forgery and bigamy, possibly alluding to a subconscious guilt over his marital duplicity. Bloom is accused and testified against by recognisable figures like Myles Crawford, and Paddy Dignam. Mary Driscoll states that Bloom made inappropriate advances towards her when she was under his employment. Shaking off this fantasy, Bloom is approached by Zoe Higgins, a local prostitute. Zoe tells him Stephen is currently in the brothel that she works in. Another fantasy ensues, in which Bloom gives a campaign speech. Attracting the attention and subsequent admiration of both the Irish and Zionists, he is subsequently hailed as the leader of "Bloomusalem." The hallucination turns more surreal and unpredictable when Bloom is accused of yet more outlandish offenses and for having rumoured sexual abnormalities. Bloom is then declared a woman, and spontaneously gives birth to eight children. Zoe then reappears, signalling the end of the hallucination, with only a second having actually passed since she last spoke.

After Bloom is led inside the brothel and sees Stephen, another hallucination begins with the arrival of Lipoti Virag, who lectures Bloom about sexual attitudes and conduct. Then, the owner of the brothel, Bella Cohen, appears and soon turns into a male version of herself "Bello," who proceeds to dominate and humiliate Bloom, who is conversely referred to in the feminine. In this hallucination, Bloom proceeds to "die". After his "death" he converses with the nymph from the picture in the Blooms’ bedroom, who berates Bloom for his fallibility. Bloom, regaining a degree of triumphant confidence, stands up to the nymph, questioning her own sexual attitudes.

Bloom then returns to reality, finding Bella Cohen before him. Bloom takes his lucky potato from Zoe and Stephen pays for the services received, in his drunken state, paying far more than necessary. Seeing this, Bloom confiscates the rest of Stephen's money. Another hallucination starts, involving Bloom watching Boylan and Molly fornicate. Returning to consciousness, Bloom finds Stephen dancing to the pianola. Another hallucination then starts, this time Stephen's, in which the rotting cadaver of his mother rises up from the floor to confront him, a manifestation of his own guilt and lingering uncertainty over his role in his mother's death. Terrified, Stephen uses his walking stick to smash a chandelier. Bloom quickly repays Bella, who demands more than is fair for the damage, then runs after Stephen, worried for his safety.

Bloom quickly finds Stephen engaged in a heated argument, and Dedalus gets punched and knocked out. The police arrive and the crowd disperses. Bloom tends on and checks Stephen, as an apparition of Rudy, Bloom's deceased child, appears, underlining the parental feelings Leopold has built up toward the younger Stephen.

Part III: The Nostos
Episode 16, Eumaeus
Bloom and Stephen go to the cabman's shelter to restore the latter to his senses, where they encounter a drunken sailor, D. B. Murphy. The episode is dominated by the motif of confusion and mistaken identity, with Bloom, Stephen and Murphy's identities being repeatedly called into question. The rambling and laboured style of the narrative in this episode reflects the nervous exhaustion and confusion of the two protagonists. Leaving the shelter with Bloom, Stephen meets Corley, familiar to readers of the Dubliners story "Two Gallants".

Episode 17, Ithaca
Bloom returns home with Stephen, who refuses Bloom's offer of a place to stay for the night. The two men urinate in the backyard, Stephen departs and wanders off into the night, and Bloom goes to bed. The episode is written in the form of a rigidly organised catechism, and was reportedly Joyce's favourite episode in the novel.

Episode 18, Penelope
The final episode, which also uses the stream of consciousness technique seen in Episode 3, consists of Molly Bloom's Soliloquy: eight great run-on sentences (without punctuation) expressing the viewpoint of Bloom's wife.

The first sentence begins with Molly's thoughts of annoyance and surprise that Bloom has asked her to serve him breakfast in bed, as it is he that usually does this for her (as in the fourth episode, Calypso). She guesses that Bloom has had an orgasm today, and is reminded of his past possible infidelity with other women. In turn, she thinks of her afternoon spent with Boylan, whose conventional and masculine lovemaking technique provided a welcome change after a decade of celibacy and Bloom's strange lovemaking techniques. Yet, Molly feels Bloom is more virile than Boylan and remembers how handsome Bloom was when they were courting. Reminded of Josie's and the mentally unstable Denis Breen's marriage, Molly feels that she and Bloom are lucky, despite their current marital difficulties.

In Molly's second sentence, she reflects upon her previous and current admirers: Boylan; the tenor Bartell D’Arcy, who kissed her in a church; Lt. Gardner, who died during the Boer War. Molly then thinks about her husband's underwear fetish. She then thinks about seeing Boylan on Monday and their upcoming trip to Belfast alone. She then thinks of her career: concert singing, and Bloom's help. Thinking about her future meetings with Boylan, Molly decides that she must lose weight. She reflects that Bloom should quit his advertising job at Freeman and get better paid work elsewhere, say in an office, but then remembers having to plead with Mr. Cuffe, a previous employer, to get Bloom's job back after he was fired. Cuffe refused.

In the third sentence, Molly thinks of the time Bloom suggested she pose naked in exchange for money, and of pornographic imagery, which she associates with the nymph painting that Bloom used to explain the concept of metempsychosis earlier this morning. Her thoughts again turn to Boylan and of her orgasm earlier.

Molly's fourth sentence begins with a train whistle and her childhood in Gibraltar, her companions there, and recollections of how she had resorted to writing herself letters after they left, out of boredom and loneliness. Molly thinks about how Milly sent her a card this morning, whereas her husband received a whole letter. She imagines that she may receive another love letter from Boylan, as she did earlier.

This line of thought leads to the next sentence, in which she recalls her first love letter, from Lieutenant Mulvey, whom she kissed under the bridge in Gibraltar. She later lost contact with him and wonders what he would be like now. Her thoughts turn again to her career, and she remains dismissive of silly girl singers. Molly wonders what path her career could have taken had she not married Bloom.

In her sixth sentence, Molly thinks again about Milly and how it was Bloom's idea to send Milly to Mullingar to learn photography, because he sensed Molly's and Boylan's impending affair. She feels that Milly has become as Molly used to be. Molly senses the start of her period, confirmation that her tryst with Boylan has not caused a pregnancy. Events of the day spent with Boylan run through her mind.

In her seventh sentence, Molly climbs quietly back into bed and thinks of the times she and Bloom have had to relocate. Their financial situation makes Molly worry that Leopold may have wasted money on another woman, or on the Dignam family out of pity. Her mind then turns to Stephen, whom she met during his childhood. She conjectures that Stephen is probably not stuck-up, and is most likely clean. She fantasises about future sexual encounters with him, including fellatio. Molly resolves to study before meeting him so he will not look down upon her.

In her eighth sentence, Molly thinks of her husband's strange habits, how he never embraces her, instead kissing her bottom, as he did earlier. Molly speculates that the world would be much improved if it consisted of Matriarchal Societies, run exclusively by women. She thinks again of Stephen, and of his mother's death, and that of Rudy's death, she then ends this line of thought as it is making her depressed. Molly thinks about arousing Bloom in the morning, then revealing the details of her affair with Boylan to make him realise his culpability. Molly then decides to procure some flowers, in case Stephen Dedalus decides to come around. Thinking of flowers, Molly thinks of the day she and Bloom spent at Howth, his marriage proposal, and her response, reaffirming her love for Leopold, even during a period of turbulence within the marriage.

The concluding period following the final words of her reverie is one of only three punctuation marks in the chapter, the others being after the fourth and eighth "sentences." When written this episode contained the longest "sentence" in English literature, 4,391 words expressed by Molly Bloom.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)

Blindness (one of the most famous works of Nobel Prize-winning ...)

2010-06-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

Blindness is a novel by Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, playwright and journalist José Saramago (1922–2010 [18 June 2010; he passed away yesterday]).

Plot Summary [1]

Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The novel follows the misfortunes of a handful of characters who are among the first to be stricken and centers around a doctor and his wife, several of the doctor’s patients, and assorted others, thrown together by chance. This group bands together in a family-like unit to survive by their wits and by the unexplained good fortune that the doctor’s wife has escaped the blindness. The sudden onset and unexplained origin and nature of the blindness cause widespread panic, and the social order rapidly unravels as the government attempts to contain the apparent contagion and keep order via increasingly repressive and inept measures.
The first part of the novel follows the experiences of the central characters in the filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined. Hygiene, living conditions, and morale degrade horrifically in a very short period, mirroring the society outside.
Anxiety over the availability of food, caused by delivery irregularities, act to undermine solidarity; and lack of organization prevents the internees from fairly distributing food or chores. Soldiers assigned to guard the asylum and look after the well-being of the internees become increasingly antipathetic as one soldier after another becomes infected. The military refuse to allow in basic medicines, so that a simple infection becomes deadly. Fearing a break out, soldiers shoot down a crowd of internees waiting upon food delivery.
Conditions degenerate further, as an armed clique gains control over food deliveries, subjugating their fellow internees and exposing them to rape and deprivation. Faced with starvation, internees do battle and burn down the asylum, only to find that the army has abandoned the asylum, after which the protagonists join the throngs of nearly helpless blind people outside who wander the devastated city and fight one another to survive.
The story then follows the doctor and his wife and their impromptu “family” as they attempt to survive outside, cared for largely by the doctor’s wife, who still sees (though she must hide this fact at first). The breakdown of society is near total. Law and order, social services, government, schools, etc., no longer function. Families have been separated and cannot find each other. People squat in abandoned buildings and scrounge for food; violence, disease, and despair threaten to overwhelm human coping. The doctor and his wife and their new “family” eventually make a permanent home and are establishing a new order to their lives when the blindness lifts from the city en masse just as suddenly and inexplicably as it struck.

Criticism [1]

Following the increased notoriety of the novel upon the release of the 2008 film adaptation, the US National Federation of the Blind (NFB) criticized Saramago's work. In a banquet speech at the organization’s annual convention on July 4, 2008, in Dallas, Texas, NFB President Dr. Marc Maurer criticized the novel and its film adaptation as negatively portraying the blind.
A novel entitled "The Sight Sickness" by Christine Faltz Grassman, was published by Iuniverse in March, 2009. Written by a blind woman, it is a polemic "anti-sequel" to Saramago's book (ISBN 9780595531561), and contains Grassman's response to the age-old literal and figurative use of blindness in a negative manner in literature and other media.

[1] wikipedia.org

Brave New World (one of the most important books ...)

2010-06-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

Brave New World is a novel by English writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), written in 1931 and published in 1932. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.[1]

Plot Summary [2]

Brave New World opens in the year 2495 at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, a research facility and factory that mass-produces and then socially-conditions test-tube babies. Such a factory is a fitting place to begin the story of mass-produced characters in a techno-futurist dystopia, a world society gone mad for pleasure, order, and conformity. The date is A.F. 632, A.F. — After Ford — being a notation based on the birth year (1863) of Henry Ford, the famous automobile manufacturer and assembly line innovator who is worshipped as a god in Huxley's fictional society.

Five genetic castes or classes inhabit this futurist dystopia. In descending order they are named for the first five letters of the Greek alphabet: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. While upper castes are bred for intellectual and managerial occupations, the lower castes, bred with less intelligence, perform manual labor. All individuals are conditioned by electric shock and hypnopaedia (sleep conditioning) to reject or desire what the State dictates. For example, infants are taught to hate flowers and books, but encouraged to seek out sex, entertainment, and new products. Most importantly, they are conditioned to be happiest with their own caste and to be glad they are not a member of any other group. For instance, while eighty Beta children sleep on their cots in the Conditioning Centre, the following hypnopaedic message issues from speakers placed beneath the children's pillows:

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able."

The director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.

"They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson."

The story begins in the London Hatchery's employee locker room where Lenina Crowne, a Beta worker, discusses men with another female coworker, Fanny Crowne. The subject of their conversation is Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus who is considered abnormally short, a defect rumored to be from an excess of alcohol added to the "blood surrogate" surrounding his developing embryo. Generally perceived as antisocial and melancholic, Bernard is unusually withdrawn and gloomy, despite the fact that social coherence and mood enhancement — especially through promiscuity and regular dosages of the drug "soma" — is State-sanctioned and encouraged. Still, despite Bernard's oddness, Lenina finds him "cute" and wants to go out with him. After all, Lenina has been going out with the Centre's research specialist, Henry Foster, for four months — unusually long in that society. In need of a change from the places they always go — the feelies, which are like films with the sense of touch, and dance clubs with music produced from scent and color instruments — Lenina and Bernard go on holiday to the New Mexico Savage Reservation, a "natural" area populated by "sixty thousand Indians and half-breeds" living without television, books, and hot water, still giving birth to their own children, and still worshiping an assortment of Christian and pagan gods. To prevent the "savages" from escaping, the whole reservation is surrounded by an electrified fence.

Wandering around the Reservation, Lenina is horrified by the sight of mothers nursing their own infants, elderly people who actually look their age because they have not been chemically treated, and a ritual of sacrifice in which a boy is whipped, his blood scattered on writhing snakes. After witnessing this ceremony, Lenina and Bernard meet John, who, unlike them and all they know, was not born from a test tube. His mother, Linda, gave birth to him on the Reservation. On a previous visit from civilization to the Reservation years before, Linda, while pregnant with John, was abandoned by John's father, who returned to civilization after Linda disappeared and was thought to have died. Bernard realizes that John's father is none other than Bernard's archenemy, the Director of Hatching and Conditioning, the man who has tried to exile Bernard to Iceland for being a nonconformist. John's mother, Linda, has always resented the Reservation, and John, though he wants to become a part of "savage" society, is ostracized because he is white, the son of a civilized mother, and because he reads books, especially Shakespeare's works.

John's status as an outcast endears him to Bernard. John, meanwhile, is becoming infatuated with Lenina, and like Linda, he is excited about going to civilization. At Bernard's request, John and Linda go with Bernard and Lenina to, as John puts it (quoting from Shakespeare's The Tempest), the "brave new world" of London. Bernard wonders if John might be somewhat hasty calling London a "brave new world."

Back in London, Bernard suddenly finds himself the center of attention: he uses Linda's impregnation and abandonment, and her son, to disgrace the Director. He then introduces the exotic John (now known as "the Savage," or "Mr. Savage") to Alpha society, while Linda begins to slowly die from soma abuse. John comes to hate the drug that destroys his mother, and he becomes increasingly disenchanted with this "brave new world"'s open sexuality, promiscuity, and contempt for marriage. When John finally confesses his love to Lenina, she is overjoyed and makes overt sexual advances. Because he is appalled at the idea of sex before marriage, however, John asks Lenina to marry him. Now it is her turn to be shocked. "What a horrible idea!" she exclaims.

In the aftermath of this aborted romance, John must face another crisis. He rushes to the Park Lane Hospital in time to see his mother die, and he is shocked when a class of children come in for their conditioning in death acceptance. Lenina's rejection and his mother's death finally drive John over the edge. At the hospital, he begins ranting in the hallways, and then he takes the staff's daily soma ration and dumps it out a window. The angry soma-dependent staff of 162 Deltas attack John. Bernard's friend, Helmholtz Watson, rushes to John's defense as Bernard timidly watches. The police arrive in time to quell the disturbance, arrest the three nonconformists, and deliver them to the office of the Controller, Mustapha Mond. The Controller tells John he must remain in civilization as an ongoing experiment. Bernard and Helmholtz, on the other hand, are to be exiled to separate islands because, says Mond, "It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own."

In the last portion of the novel, John, unable to tolerate the Controller's judgment, flees to the countryside to live a life close to nature without incessant and artificial happiness, a life with a bit of truth, beauty, and even pain. But John is seen one day ritually whipping himself and becomes the center of overwhelming media attention. In a final welter of events, John succumbs to the temptation of the crowd's spontaneous orgy of violence, sex, and soma. The next day, unable to live with himself in this brave new world, John hangs himself.

Amazon's Editorial Reviews: [3]

“One of the most important books to have been published since the war.”
—Daily Telegraph

“Such ingenious wit, derisive logic and swiftness of expression, Huxley’s resources of sardonic invention have never been more brilliantly displayed.”
—The Times --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

References:
[1] "100 Best Novels". Random House. 1999.
[2] Answers.com
[3] Brave New World, Editorial Reviews, Amazon.com

The Known World (Pulitzer Prize, NBCC Award, and International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner)

2010-05-29T23:41:00.000-07:00

The Known World is a historical novel by American author Edward P. Jones (1951- ); published in 2003 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, a National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (the world's literary prize with the largest purse) in 2005.

Plot Summary [1]

Henry Townsend is born a slave, but dies as a prosperous slave owner, leaving his widow Caldonia a significant legacy to deal with. Like his father Augustus, Henry is extraordinarily talented and uses his gifts to buy his freedom. Unlike his father, Henry accepts that slavery is legal and purchases a number of slaves from his ex-master William Robbins, the first of whom, cruel Moses, he makes overseer. The revelation of this situation causes a break between father and son, healed only as Henry nears death.

Robbins, the largest and most powerful landowner in Manchester County, Virginia, is unhappily married to a white woman and involved for the second time with a slave, whom he comes to love dearly. He dotes on his black children, providing for their education from a black female teacher, Fern Elston, which connects them with Henry and Caldonia during their student years. Robbins also provides ongoing advice to Henry on the obligations and demands of slave owning, and controls who will serve as sheriff in the county.

John Skiffington becomes sheriff after his long-tenured predecessor disappoints Robbins. John, a fervent Bible reader, is personally determined not to hold slaves, but dedicated to maintaining a social institution he believes both civil and divine laws bless and guarantee. He and his wife, Winifred, are given Minerva as wedding present by his cousin Counsel. They feel Minerva will fare worse in any situation other than remaining with them, and they treat her as a daughter. As Minerva nears adulthood, John is ashamed and fearful to find himself lusting after her.

John's duties are few in this peaceful county until slaves begin disappearing from Caldonia's plantation. John suspects that the overseer Moses is involved, as indeed he is. Moses is determined to marry his widowed mistress and sends his wife and son away, in the company of the crazy slave Alice. The sheriff suspects Moses has murdered them and organizes an intensive search. John's fortunes further decline when his slave patrols illegally strip Augustus of his freedom and sell hip to a wandering speculator. Finally sold on the Georgia/Florida border, Augustus is murdered by his new master as he begins the long walk back north. Moses oversteps his bounds with Caldonia, realizes his plans have failed, and he also takes flight.

Realizing Robbins has lost faith in him, the sheriff discovers where Moses must be hiding, and while trying to shake off the agony of a toothache in order to do his sworn duty, he sets off with his deputy/cousin to Mildred's home. Moses is there, taken in by Mildred, who stands with a rifle and refuses to surrender him. Pain prevents John from keeping his usual calm, civil demeanor, and he lashes out at the poor widow Mildred. John accidentally shoots Mildred dead, and is in turn gunned down by Counsel, who believes he has found the treasure that will restore his lost fortunes. Moses surrenders to Counsel, who intends to blame the two dead people for each other's murder. Moses is taken back to town, and savagely hobbled by the patrollers en route, to prevent him from ever wandering off again. Moses lives out his declining days cared for by the new overseer's cripple wife, for whose miscarriage he is responsible.

Robbins's white and black daughters meet after he suffers a stroke. Winifred and Minerva move to Philadelphia, but there they become parted. Caldonia remarries and remains with Robbins's black son, Louis Cartwright, on the plantation. Caldonia also learns from her brother Calvin, who has moved to Washington, D.C., that Celeste, Jamie, and Alice did not perish in the Manchester woods as many people thought, but are flourishing in the big city on the eve of the Civil War. Alice, no longer a crazy woman, has created two magnificent pieces of art depicting life in Manchester County and on the Townsend plantation.

[1] http://litsum.com/known-world

The Time Traveler's Wife (the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize and a British Book Award winner)

2010-05-24T01:33:00.000-07:00

Plot summary [1]

Gilead (Pulitzer Prize & National Book Critics Circle Award winner)

2010-05-18T22:49:00.000-07:00

Gilead is a novel written by American author Marilynne Robinson (1943- ), published in 2004 and won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Gilead

Middlesex (Pulitzer Prize winner)

2010-05-09T23:59:00.000-07:00

Empire Falls (Pulitzer Prize winner)

2010-05-02T23:48:00.000-07:00

Empire Falls

The Sweetness of Life (European Prize winner)

2010-04-24T01:05:00.000-07:00

The Sweetness of Life (Die Suesse des Lebens) is a 2006 novel by Austrian psychiatrist and writer Paulus Hochgatterer (1961- ). It won The European Union Prize for Literature in 2009.

Synopsis

The Color Purple (Pulitzer Prize & National Book Award winner)

2010-04-16T23:26:00.000-07:00

The Color Purple is a novel by American author Alice Walker (1944- ). It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The Color Purple

Movive (The Color Purple):

Olive Kitteridge (Pulitzer Prize winner)

2010-04-15T00:26:00.000-07:00

Olive Kitteridge

Stories Included in the Collection:
Pharmacy
Incoming Tide
The Piano Player
A Little Burst
Starving
A Different Road
Winter Concert
Tulips
Basket of Trips
Ship in a Bottle
Security
Criminal
River

Alfred and Emily

2010-04-10T23:34:00.000-07:00

Alfred and Emily, published in 2008, is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning, Iranian-born British author Doris Lessing (1919- ).

The Shipping News (Pulitzer Prize winner)

2010-04-06T23:53:00.000-07:00

The Shipping News is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novel by E. Annie Proulx (1935- ), published in 1993, and adapted into a film of the same name released in 2001.

The Shipping News

Movie:

Budapest (Prêmio Jabuti winner)

2010-04-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

Man Gone Down (international award winner)

2010-03-30T06:14:00.000-07:00

Man Gone Down: A Novel

The Journey of Ibn Fattouma

2010-03-26T23:37:00.000-07:00

The Journey of Ibn Fattouma is a novel written and published by Nobel Prize-winning, Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) in 1983. It was translated from Arabic into English in 1992.

Plot Summary [1]:

[1] The Journey of Ibn Fattouma Wikipedia

The Old Capital (Nobel Prize for Literature)

2010-03-25T06:20:00.000-07:00