brookworms - reviews (8)
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Someone mentioned that there is a readers guide to this book on the internet – which we didn’t have for the discussion – if you are interested, here it is: http://www.jonathanfranzen.com/correctionsguide.htm. As to whether we enjoyed the book as a group – I’m not sure. I am glad that I read it, but I’m not sure enjoyed is the right word. However, it certainly kept us talking for over an hour! Jonathan Franzen certainly has an eye for the minutiae and conversations of family life that made it very real. We could all recognise something in the book that was true of our own families. Are our own families as normal as we think they are? We found it interesting how the same actions and characteristics can seem so different according to who we were reading about at the time. Alfred was the only character not to have his own view put forward, and yet he seemed to be the centre of the book (according to Jonathan Franzen, Enid is the "hero" of the story, because of her capacity for hope). Alfred seemed so unsympathetic, and yet was a very moral, ethical man, for which he suffered. Was he anally retentive, hence all his nightmares about losing control of his body? We also talked about the number of references to Aslan and "The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe" throughout the book, and were sure they were significant, but not sure why. Finally, why was it called "The Corrections"? There were several references again throughout the book, correcting eating habits, financial corrections i.e. a fall in the stock market, manuscript corrections, penal corrections, the new wonder drug, Corektall, and the futility of trying to correct other peoples personalities. "Everyone's trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to."
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters - a
Victorian melodrama, "an extraordinary, ingenious tale of fraud, insanity and
secrets" shortlisted for both the 2002 Orange and Booker prizes. We were
all taken aback at the twists in the plot, and found it a real page-turner. I don’t
know about anyone else, but my brain started to hurt when considering complexities such as
Susan’s mother being a murderess, but as Susan & Maud had changed places,
Susan’s mother wasn’t, but neither was Maud’s – except that she may
have been at the end of the book! We wondered if Maud’s upbringing, and
constant exposure to her uncle’s books, had turned her against men, and we wondered
if Gentleman was gay. The madhouse scenes were scarily believable. We also had
a brief discussion on nature v. nurture, and whether you would love your own daughter, who
you hadn’t seen for 17 years, more than the girl you had raised as a daughter.
read Amazon's review
A Prayer
for Owen Meany by John Irving which we picked as it was one of the BBC’s Nation’s 100 Favourite
Books, and none of us had read it. It is about eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing
in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire, who hits a foul ball and kills his best
friend's mother. Owen does not believe in accidents and believes he is God's
instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and
terrifying. We were a bit stumped by "A Prayer for Owen Meany" as it
was such a wide ranging book that we were at a loss where to start. Some of us had loved
it – it has gone on my list of all-time favourites, and others disliked it so much
they didn’t finish reading it. As far as we could see the main themes of the
book were faith, doubt & armlessness. I was left with many unanswered questions,
was Owen Meany really a virgin birth? His faith was absolute and borne out, but he
did not believe the story of his birth. Why was his death necessary? Did he achieve
redemption for killing John’s mother? Did he speak from beyond the grave? With
his small stature and weird voice, how did he command so much presence and respect?
The funny bits were Bill Bryson funny, and it certainly made you think.
read Amazon's review
Adama by Turki Al-Hamad, a
coming-of-age tale set in 1970s Saudi Arabia, where new found prosperity and traditional
values conflict in a daring and intense struggle, both personal and political. We
had chosen to read this on the basis that it was a ground breaking and very controversial
book in its home country. It is banned in Saudi Arabia and in other Middle Eastern
countries, but nevertheless has sold 20,000 copies there, and it is so incendiary that 4
fatwas have been declared against the author. On the whole the group found it
interesting, though rather pedestrian. Most of us found the politics of the region
difficult to understand, though we were berated for then commenting that the Saudis seemed
to cut themselves off from the western world. We were universally glad not to be a
woman in Saudi Arabia, and noted that Hisham, while wanting to liberate his people from
oppressive regimes, did not seem to include the female half of the population in this!
We found the depiction of everyday life and journeys into the desert most absorbing
and the precociousness of the protagonist a little wearing.
For those who want to continue this trilogy, the second part, Shumaisi, is due to be published in August 2004. Thank goodness we live in a part of the world where we are free to think and express our thoughts as we wish! Finally, I was surprised to find a very readable and interesting letter to President Bush from Turki Al Hamad on the web, written in a very different style to "Adama". You can find it at http://www.arabworldbooks.com/arab/ramsis.htm. read Amazon's review
Voyageurs by Margaret Elphinstone set
in 1812 when Mark Greenhow, a young Quaker, leaves his small community in northern England
to embark upon a life-changing journey. His sister Rachel, a missionary travelling
in Canada, is lost and presumed dead somewhere in the uncharted wilderness - and Mark is
compelled to go and search for her. The book tells of his adventures with the
"voyageurs", the men who canoe the immense Canadian fur trade route. This
book is now out of print in the UK, although still being sold in Canada.
We had a good discussion, which left me appreciating the book a lot more than I had previously. One flash of inspiration came to us towards the end of the discussions, that the Indians had taken Rachel, not randomly, but because she was Alan’s wife and they disliked his warmongering. In fact Alan only survived, and Rachel rescued, because of Mark’s resolve to adhere to his Quaker principles: "we utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever, and this is our testimony to the whole world."
We liked the book – it made us think, and gave a vivid sense of what life must has been like back in 1812, when 6 months of the year was devoted to mere survival, and wars could have started months ago without people being aware of the fact. We felt it would make a marvellous film, even if (or perhaps because) Mark was quite an unlikely hero for whom we gained respect throughout the book.
There were a few minor aspects of the book we weren’t so keen on, particularly the footnotes, which we found broke our concentration on the story, and we wished the ending had not been so abrupt. We thought that Margaret Elphinstone had probably not, in reality, found this manuscript hidden in her attic, and felt that was an unnecessary device to introduce the story. Finally, we would have liked a better map (some of us didn’t find the one under the dust jacket) with the border changes marked! read Amazon's review
The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-time by Mark
Haddon - about Christopher, an intelligent 15 year old with Asperger’s
Syndrome. When the dog next door is killed with a garden fork, Christopher becomes quietly
persistent in his desire to find out what has happened and tugs away at the world around
him until a lot of secrets unravel messily.
We
had all enjoyed the book and found it a quick read. We were surprised to learn
that Mark Haddon had done no particular research into Asperger’s, other than a
spell working with children with varying disabilities over 20 years ago. Jane
pointed out that autism covers a wide spectrum of behaviour, and one affected
child may be totally different to another, and also said that children with
Asperger’s usually take things extremely literally, but are not generally
classed as having learning difficulties. Part of the power of this book was
that we could see Christopher as a person, rather than as a typical Asperger’s
sufferer. Mark Haddon won the Whitbread Novel Award with this book.
Brick Lane by Monica Ali,
which was shortlisted
for the 2003 Man Booker Prize and is apparently not going down too well with the real
Bangladeshi population of Brick Lane. The book is about Nazneen, a teenager from
Bangladesh forced into an arranged marriage with a man considerably older than her. She
moves to his high rise flat in the East End of London, speaking no English and totally
dependent on her depressive husband.
This gave us much to talk about, despite all of us agreeing that it was a “good book”. We thought the introduction about “how you were left to your fate” was great, and we sympathised with Nazneen’s life as a chattel
Change and opposites were themes of the book, and we compared Nazneen doing her duty in an arranged marriage, and eventually finding love, strength and freedom, with her sister who eloped with her lover, and sank deeper into poverty and servitude. We also compared Chanu – a failure in the outside world but with a supportive family, with Dr Aziz, a successful doctor, but whose home life was abysmal. Then there was the contrast in the sisters’ letters. Nazneen wrote very formally – but hid what her life was really like, while her sister poured her heart out ungrammatically. There was also the contrast of possessions. Nazneen was overwhelmed with useless possessions that seemed like vast wealth to her sister who had nothing but a broken picture frame.
We all grew to like Chanu, dispite finding him pretty physically repulsive. Did he know of the affair – we thought he probably did, but weren’t entirely sure. Did he leave because of it? Chanu seemed to want to be a part of both western and eastern worlds and so seemed accepted by neither. As the book progressed, Chanu seemed to diminish as Nazneen grew stronger.
We weren’t too sure about the affair – it was well described, but we weren’t sure that those two characters would really have fallen for each other. Karim seemed to lose stature and become younger as time went on, and we wondered if he was a drug pusher amongst his other activities.
We thought the daughters rang true – particularly to those of us with daughters – and that the secondary characters were very real – and a comparison was made between Mrs Islam and Lady Catherine de Burgh! We also liked Razia, a strong character with whom we had a lot of sympathy, especially when she was helping her son go “cold turkey”.
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