The Madonnas of Leningrad

We amazed ourselves today by the size of our group and spent a  while trying to sort out the best arrangement for the tables.  By logic that large of a group should have been out of control, but once again, I love how everyone listens to each other and demonstrates genuine interest. Carolyn's college roommate Carol was in the area.  I say that loosely since Carolyn drove to Truckee to pick her up.  Once again she joined the discussion, prepared with ample notes and questions.  She also brought fudge from a confectioner in Truckee.  Between the tables and passing of the fudge, we had a delayed start, but we got right to it once we realized that Joanne had to leave in 45 minutes.

Most everyone said they enjoyed this book but there was plenty of criticism.  Kathy had a hard time with how fractured the stories were and felt she would have enjoyed it better if Dean had written it is "Marisa's Story."  I thought that made perfect sense and I too would have preferred a less artistic approach and more from Dean as the storyteller.  Several of you knew that she wrote the entire book, having never been to Russia which is really remarkable.  She wasn't able to go until after the book sold and the book paid for her trip.

Diana and Darlene both loved the descriptions of the art and were especially moved by her prose.  There was one thing we were in total agreement on.  When Marissa loved art so much and could describe it in such moving detail that even though it was absent, those on tour with her were moved to tears, how could she never have shared any of that with her daughter Helen who was struggling as an artist?  Marisa was always kind and thoughtful of others, even in dementia, but her children were not included in and knew nothing of their mother's past.  And Mary noted that Marisa's disposition in dementia was unusual.   Many elderly as they lose their self, they also lose their kindness.

Barbara took a lot of interest in the Alzheimer's segment of the story, because she has a friend who experienced a cerebral aneurysm two years ago while working her hospital nursing shift.  She is now in a nursing facility with limited recent memory.  Jenny said that's why Alzheimer's is call a pre-dementia condition - there is more to dementia.  It is a broad classification. So much of the book is about memory that memory became almost its own character.

We talked about the unwavering, sensitive and powerful relationship between Marisa and Dmitri.  The question most hotly contested was - who was Andre's father?   Was the naked man on the roof a hallucination?  Marisa claimed Andre was fathered by Zeus.  Carol believed that Dmitri was not the father and had quite a few notes supporting that position.  Several of us thought the whole episode on the roof was a hallucination and accepted the paternity of Dmitri.  Even Dmitri wasn't confident that he was the father.and wondered if she had been raped by a soldier.  Carolyn's question was - why would the author have introduced the naked man if that weren't important? 

A question from the publisher asked us to consider:  What do you think actually happened?  Is it a flaw or a strength of the novel that the author doesn't resolve this question?  We certainly got hung up on it for a time and I don't remember that we answered that question.  Our conversation segued into memory and our experiences with it, and with forgetfulness.  And from there it moved on to our changing bodies.  These are issues on our minds and it was good to laugh about them with friends "of a certain age."

Night Circus

We had a sizeable group today for the discussion.  Darlene and Carolyn read it for a second time and Jennifer said she really liked it.  This was the first fantasy we've read as a book group and the rest of us admitted that we wouldn't have read it, had it not been for book club.

We found the author's shuffling of years from chapter to chapter a little confusing.  Carolyn decided that since she had read it before, she'd go back and put the events in sequence.  She decided that actually diminished the fantasy - author created part of the illusion.

We all enjoyed the circus and the characters.  Jennifer really liked the early part with the dinners during the planning stages of the circus, but said she found the writing spotty with sections she liked much better than others.  We agreed.  We liked the world Morganstern created but would have like a more defined plot, and perhaps that's because we aren't accustomed to reading this genre.

Maureen had found and printed an interview with the author.  Darlene had watched several YouTube interviews, so both of them provided interesting elements that helped us understand the "why" of the book.  Morgenstern had developed the venue and characters before she had a plot.   Darlene said she admired the incarnations the author endured to achieve the final story.  We talked about the stories in us for a bit.  Claudia said she had always thought she had a story in her but was just too lazy to write it.  Isn't that the truth! 

 Darlene said the author does not have a sequel but the book is being made into a movie.  I think the biggest question we came away with was why, when this book has been so popular, did we not read it with the same enthusiasm.  I was finishing it on the airplane on our flight home yesterday.  My daughter flipped through it and asked to read it when I'm done. The book was reviewed as young adult by the School Library Journal.  Perhaps we were not the target audience, however I know it's not a book I'll forget.  So we have another reading adventure from the Tuesday Book Club~

Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving

I was worried after hearing from so many of the group that they were reading and loving this book that it might be one of those where we all agreed we liked it and there wasn't much else to say.  I'm happy to have been wrong.  The last time I saw Maureen, she told me she had been crying because of the book.  I hadn't started it yet and I felt a little panic. 

I don't think I've ever read anything like this.  I had to skip the accident and it appears that we all skimmed it and also that the Evison was vague in the telling.  He wrote this book as a catharsis to the memory of a road trip taken by his 16-year-old sister who never came back.  She was killed on her birthday and the event shattered his family. 

It was great to have Jennifer and Diana's perspectives as professional caregivers, what is required and expected.  Jennifer said a lot of the training is on right the job.  Diana added that it's physically demanding so CNAs end up with strained wrists and pulled backs.  So much is expected while so little is paid.  What an occupation for Ben Benjamin to enter after two years of depression and alcoholism to see that Trevor's bottom was deeper than his own.

And then we devolved into laughing at the antics and characters, two dads trying to reinsinuate themselves into lives of alienated teens.  And how can you not appreciate Bob who can't seem to control anything in his life, including his fly, yet takes a trip like Trevor's dream road trip and sends those perfect postcards.  Then the poor man drives into the only post along the highway and is stuck face down in the sofa bed he tried to prepare for his guests, only to rescued by them when they arrive.

One thing that struck a chord across the group from Ben:  "Listen to me: everything you think you know, every relationship you've ever taken for granted, every plan or possibility you've ever hatched, every conceit or endeavor you've ever concocted, can be stripped from you in an instant.  Sooner or later, it will happen.  So prepare yourself.  Be ready not to be ready.  Be ready to be brought to your knees and beaten to dust.  Because no stable foundation, no act of will, no force of cautious habit will save you from this fact: nothing is indestructible." 

We liked the honest ending, no slick new world for Ben Benjamen, but the promise of a new beginning - a different one.  He had shattered his old world on the road trip, taking chances, losing control and starting over, incorporating other lost characters in the journey.  We are left with no idea how the next chapter will start, only that there will be a next chapter.  I like redemption stories.

In an interview Evison said, it's a story of total collapse, and ultimately, reconstruction.  Before it is over, this calamitous journey will cover five states, resulting in one birth, two arrests, and one instance of cannibalism and including a dust storm, a hail storm, several shit storms, and a six-hundred-mile cat-and-mouse pursuit by a mysterious Buick Skylark. 

This goes on my top ten list, along with The Shipping News.

Dovekeepers

We had a little larger group than usual today and all said they enjoyed the book, some more enthusiastically than others.  Some breezed through it but a few of us felt that The Dovekeepers could have benefited from some tightening and perhaps less repetition of the magic, spells and incantations. 

 I wondered where the line was drawn between witchcraft, which was clearly an abomination in the Old Testament, and where the superstition and spells were accepted.  Joanne reminded us that in that time the Kabbalah was used to as a source of explanations, and it had it roots in Jewish mysticism.  As Mary said, either it was God's will, or it was not. 

Kareen is on vacation but wrote - "Funny, usually I can place myself into the book, as one of the characters or at least a bystander.  I couldn't in this book so never got emotionally involved."  She has been to Masada and said that the ramp built by the Romans was spectacular.  "One could tell they they were very determined to get into that fortress." 

We appreciated the tremendous research that Hoffman invested into writing this book, a five-year project.  She led us into the heart of a violent past with the personal and intimate interactions between the characters that would have made it impossible to feel immersed in the history otherwise.

Told in four parts, I think we favored the last one, though I agree with Carolyn that it was maybe too convenient that Shirah was Yael's nursemaid in the beginning.  Jennifer said the same about the ending, when it came to a surprisingly happy-ever-after conclusion .

The final discussion centered around the relationships between the mothers and daughters and why they made the decisions that they did, because secondary to the story of the zealots holed up in Masada is story of the women.  From there we digressed to the complex mother/daughter relationships and really didn't return to the book.  And a good time was had by all :)

The Sense of an Ending

One of our first comments today was how pleased we were to find such a short, well-written book.  The other thing we were in universal agreement on was our surprise at the ending.  So much of Tony's introspection was about memory and it's reliability. As one reviewer noted, "Mr. Barnes does an agile job...of unpeeling the onion layers of his hero's life while showing how Tony has sliced and diced his past in order to create a self he can live with. In doing so Mr. Barnes underscores the ways people try to erase or edit their youthful follies and disappointments, converting actual events into anecdotes, and those anecdotes into a narrative."  We were in for a ride.

Carolyn had marked and read this quote from Tony: "We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe.  We imagine we were being responsible but were only being cowardly.  What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them."  We only know Tony through his thoughts:  "What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully?  Who had neither won or lost, but just let life happen to him?"

Adrian remarked on it first in Old Joe Hunt's class:  “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."  He seemed to be old beyond his years and we couldn't help question that if when his mother abandonment him, she took his joy with her. I wondered after I got home if his attraction to Mrs. Ford might have been related to the absence and distance of his mom.

Tony's friendship with Adrian was really packed into a short span of time when you stop to think of it.  Adrian died at 22, yet it seems that Tony continued to look up to him:  "He took his own life" is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands - and then out of them."  Robson's suicide note was "Sorry Mum."  Adrian left a missive, yet ironically it appears their reasons for suicide might have been similar.

We spent a great deal of time trying to figure out Veronica.  Had she "suffered damage a long way back" or was that another of Tony's rationalizations?  We realized that we only knew anyone through Tony's eyes so Kathy said she was surprised to read in one review that Veronica was bookish and shy.  Tony showed her to us as aloof and a tease.  We questioned if he were ever in love with her.  He even asked her and she replied, if you have to ask, you weren't.  Then we wondered if he truly ever loved anyone or had friends.  He turned Margaret into a mother figure.  God knows where his mother was since his parents weren't part of his reflections.  Were this read in a college seminar, I'm sure the mother themes would be examined closely.

The first half of the book seemed to be Tony's recollections and rationalizations.  At one point he said, "Learning the new emotions that time brings.  Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been."  His musings seemed to substantiate his mediocrity and apathy in everything.  Finally I asked if anyone had liked Tony.  Carolyn and Peggy but said they did.  We were floating on his slightly self-congratulatory cloud when Veronica dropped his spiteful vitriolic letter on him, which changed everything.  It showed just how much of his past he had recreated and changed to make himself comfortable.

When Kathy asked about "blood money" we had to assume that it was somehow related to the letter - it implies buying someone off.  Why did Mrs. Ford leave him the money and the diary?  Peggy said she thought the mother's actions were evil and meant to punish.  We didn't understand why Veronica kept her meetings with Tony as the end unraveled.  I didn't know if any of it could be explained by the fact that she was the adult child of an alcoholic.  We certainly realized that she had been short-changed and wronged, but Tony gives us little else to go on.  Veronica wasn't exactly helpful.  "You don't get it," she kept saying with exasperation, like the clues were all that obvious.

I asked if anyone knew the meaning of the egg on the cover and Darlene did.  It was the egg that Mrs. Ford cooked for Tony, threw in the trash and made another.  He kept recalling that scene over and over.  You know this is going to be on college reading lists and boy would I love to be a fly on the wall during the discussions.  I came across a blog post from another reader addressing some of the same questions we had.  Click here to read her thoughts.  The writing was delicious and an opening into a promising reading year. 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

 We began arriving early because none of us could remember if we had said we'd meet at 12:30 or our usual 1:00 time.  Everyone was early but some of us were so early that the subsequent arrivals looked startled and asked, Am I late?  It was nice to be early, have the food area set up and then just sit down together and shoot the breeze.

Today was a unique book club meeting.  For the first time we combined a book and a movie and what a book and movie we chose. Not everyone had seen the movie so that helped us evaluate the book relative to the film.  It did follow the book closely though the playwright had combined a couple of the girls for the sake of simplicity, so that there were only four instead of eight. Mary MacGregor isn't the student who died fighting for Franco.  She died in a hotel fire at the age of 23, too "stupid" to select an exit and thus ended up running up and down the hall until the fire consumed her.  The ending was the greatest deviation.  The movie ends with Miss Brodie's dismissal, whereas in the book she lived a few more years and died of cancer.  We know this from Sandy who had become a nun, visited yearly the other Brodie girls.

Joann asked an interesting question.  Were there other Brodie girls like this clique?  Did she form a clique with each class in subsequent years?  Our answer was conjecture - we didn't know.  It was mentioned that in the movie, during the emotional slide show scene, all the girls adoring eyes were turned to her. 

Carolyn asked if Hugh was a real love or a fabrication.  It appeared that she embellished the story with each retelling.  Carolyn read from the book where her first love appears she was 14 and in love with an older man.  This lead to the conjecture that she was replicating her own experience by denying her love for the art teacher and trying to substitute one of her students in his bed.  Kareen said that at this point she was done with Miss Brodie, a blot on the face of education.  Muriel Sparks brilliant writing seemed to be reeling us in, along with Sandy who also determined at this point that she was a danger to her students.

Unfortunately, due to an inner ear infection, I am denied the benefits of caffeine and wasn't feeling like the sharpest knife in the dish washer.  No matter, the discussion went on.  We were affixed by the strangeness of Jean Brodie and her complete selfishness, however she thought of herself as a teacher first. Joann called her a hypocrite and Peggy reminded us of her statement that traditional education was a form of putting in, but she believed that education was a form of letting out.  Joann said, you see what I mean?  She was stuffing their brains.

Maggie Smith's portrayal of Miss Brodie brought her walking right out of the pages and onto the Oscar stage.  Several of the ladies are rewatching Downton Abby, getting ready for season three in January.  They reminded us of how similar her performance of Miss Brodie is to the Dowager Countess of Grantham.  Maureen laughed and said - she IS Maggie Smith.  That was so much fun.  We talked about trying to find another book and movie combo in the future.  Put on your thinking caps. 

My Antonia

I'm not sure why we laughed so much during our discussion of this a stalwart body of classic literature, but apparently the sound of eleven women talking and laughing was disruptive enough that for the first time, one of the library staff had to come and close the meeting room door. 

I first asked what we thought of the title, which led to a discussion on our confusion of the pronunciation.  Carolyn said she had listened to it and the narrator said Antoni'a.  Peggy recalled in the book the pronunciation was likened to Anthony, hence An'tonia.  I notice on this book cover, it demonstrates the latter, which we never could get our eye teeth around.  Kathy said we'd just call her Tony.  Then they decided that it was the right title, even though she only appeared in three of the books five sections.  That's what she was called by those near to her. 

I was aware that Cather was considered to be a lesbian and felt that the character of Lena was a little autobiographical.  We talked about how Cather's lifestyle might have influenced the females.  The strongest male characters were in the first half of the book and largely absent in the second half.  Even Jim Burden was undeveloped, though his connection to Tony we felt was likely to resume, perhaps in the form of an uncle. We felt the strongest male character was Mr. Shimerda, though not strong enough to not marry the "hired woman" he impregnated and not strong enough to stand up to her demands they move to American for a better life for Ambrosch. 

We were all confused by Jim and Tony's relationship, wondering if it would become romantic, but as Carolyn pointed out, her being four years old was a big thing in the 19th century when people didn't live all that long.  Kareen noted that the class difference was a huge barrier and her her pregnancy ended any possibility of a romantic connection.  Joanne felt their friendship was sealed on the train and further when Jim taught her to read English.  I was very confused by his declaration "I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister - anything that a woman can be to a man." 

We likened the conclusion of the book to that of So Big.  The protagonist stays in her circumstances but rises above them.  We felt that there would have been no more suitable and happy life for Tony than the one she had with Cuzak.  We all were surprised that she would return to the daily use of Bohemian., and that led to a conversation about the Midwest and the communities who still identify themselves with their nationalities.  I told of the TV show that Ian and I used to watch on RFDTV called the Polka Joe Show.  It was broadcast from various Midwest locations where Polka is still huge and where songs are still sung in their own language.  Jenny said they were visiting Hibbing, Minnesota where a huge polka festival was in full swing.  She said she was astonished that people would travel that far to play poker.  You have to realize that Jenny is a Brit and doesn't pronounce the 'er in poker.  When she says poker it sounds like polka.  That's the laughter that got our door closed.

We were of mixed opinions, but while many found the book a bit of a slog, I think we agreed that for a book published in 1918, it went against the conventional grain.  Cather wrote strong women who were clear in their intentions and some chose to remain unmarried and pursue careers.  A career then was for a woman to be a school teacher.  Carolyn said when a woman married, she was no longer allowed to teach.   We talked about possibly reading another one of Cather's books, but in the future.  We've just read three prairie books in one list:  So Big, Half Broke Horses and now My Antonia.  We seem to cluster our books by accident so Kathy offered to help me with our list next year with little descriptive paragraphs.  We were are talking about 2014 when we haven't started on 2013!

As always, this discussion is limited to my memory and we certainly covered a lot more ground than this.  We're fixing to get ready for our Christmas meeting and potluck.  The general consensus on our December book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is to watch the movie and appreciate Maggie Smith's Academy Award winning role as Best Actress.  And a good time was had by all.