The Lincoln Reviews

Poetry Reading

2011-06-09T07:02:00.000-07:00

Griffin Prize winner at poetry reading June 16

Posted 10 hours ago

COBOURG -The Cobourg Poetry Workshop's Third Thursday Readings resume on June 16 with another poetic coup -the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize winner, Karen Solie, headlining an anticipated evening of fine poetry at Meet At 66 King East.

Solie has completed what could be called the Triple Crown of Canadian poetry, also winning the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry as well as the 2010 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, all for her latest book, Pigeon. The Griffin is the world's largest prize for a single collection of poetry in English, with one award of $65,000 for a Canadian book of poetry and a similar award for an international poet.
Solie came to prominence in 2002 as a finalist for that year's Griffin Prize for her collection, Short Haul Engine, which went on to win the 2002 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Livesay, one of Canada's premier early poets, first published in 1928, went on to win two Governor General's Awards for Poetry in 1944 and 1947. The award in her name was established in 1986.
Joining Solie at the Thursday reading will be Cobourg writer Linda Hutsell-Manning, recently celebrating publication of her latest novel, and David Sheffield, who will be making his reading debut.
Doors open at 7 p.m. with the readings commencing half an hour later. Admission is free. Go to www.poetrycobourg.cafor further details.

What Price World Book Night? | The Spectator

2011-03-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

What Price World Book Night? | The Spectator

The New Dr Who......

2010-04-04T05:11:00.000-07:00

Image by lisby1 via Flickr

The new Dr Who started on TV yesterday........

Matt Smith an immediate hit......

Tesco Movies

2010-01-24T12:15:00.000-08:00

Tesco sets up film studio to adapt hit novels

Chain will base movies on books by authors including Jackie Collins, Philip Pullman and Dick Francis

Vanessa Thorpe, Arts and Media Correspondent
The Observer, Sunday 24 January 2010
Article history

There is an unlikely new player in the British film industry with ambitions to change the world of entertainment. Tesco, the supermarket giant, has moved into movie mogul territory this weekend with the launch of a multi-million-pound production arm poised to make films of books by a slew of bestselling authors.

The first release from the Tesco studio will be Paris Connections, a tweaked Jackie Collins tale being shot on location in Paris early next month. Set in the glamorous world of fashion shows and rival couturiers, it tells of investigative journalist Madison Castelli's efforts to uncover the truth behind a series of murders of Size Zero models.

Directed by Harley Cokliss and starring Anthony Delon, it will go straight to DVD after a number of cinema preview screenings. The film will then be sold exclusively in Tesco stores and has been specially adapted by Collins for the chain from her 1999 bestselling murder mystery LA Connections.

"Jackie has rewritten the book for us, which is fantastic, because we thought Paris would be the most glamorous location to film in. But all the other stories we are adapting are closely based on existing books," said Ileen Maisel, of Amber Entertainment, the production company making the films in collaboration with Tesco. Next in line for production are titles by Dick Francis, Jacqueline Wilson, Philip Pullman and Judy Blume.

"We are able to involve the writers at every stage, even with the casting decisions. And Tesco sells an enormous amount of books, of course; so for an author to have his DVDs on the shelf alongside his books and to sell them simultaneously sounds like a very good thing," said Maisel.

The American-born producer, formerly a top executive at New Line Cinema, has produced a number of big-budget films, including the screen adaptation of Pullman's novel Northern Lights. She is now in Paris with her colleague Lawrence Elman, choosing locations that already include the Paris Opera and a pleasure cruiser on the Seine.

"Ileen has been working with high-profile authors for a long time," said Elman, a former television producer. "Normally when an author works with a film-maker, they just sign on the dotted line and then shake hands, before they are told, 'Thank you very much. See you at the premiere.' Instead, we have offered them a partnership and it is very enticing for them."

For Tesco, the appeal of the deal was the roster of big-name writers that Amber could deliver. "We liked Amber's idea because it brings us authors who are ideal for this," said Rob Salter, Tesco's entertainment director. "It had to be a project that needed no explanation. When you say 'Jackie Collins', it doesn't need any explanation. The fact they had a number of people they could sign up who are among the best-known authors out there was obviously a big thing."

Tesco describe the multi-million-pound deal with Amber as one that "makes the most of what each company does best", with the film company in charge of production and Tesco running the marketing.

The shift into film production is part of Tesco's effort to make the most of its growing influence as a retailer of mainstream books and home entertainment.

Salter explains that the deal with Amber is part of a project to make Tesco's entertainment brand more potent: "A deal such as this means we can work on projects much earlier and have involvement while the film is being made. An exclusive title is a great driver to bring people to our stores anyway, but if we are involved in the film from the start we can involve our customers much earlier. We can run a competition to take people out to the set in Paris, for example, and we can set up blogs about the shooting process and run interviews with the stars and with Jackie Collins."

Editorially, Salter assures fans of the work of Francis, Pullman and Collins et al that there is no direction from the supermarket chain about the content of the screenplay. "Apart from telling the film-makers what I don't want to see in Tesco, then there is no interference in the subject matter. Of course, I don't want anything too risqué. Nothing that would be 18-rated and that would not sit well on our shelves.

"Other than that, though, there is no editorial involvement from us. We have been sent a script of the first film, so we know the story. That's it."

Tesco has already dipped its toe into the film industry in a deal struck with the Miramax production company over the 2009 Zac Efron film, Me and Orson Welles, which gave Tesco exclusive DVD sales rights, and in another Christmas deal with Dreamworks, giving it sole rights to sell the animated short film Merry Madagascar.

"The Madagascar Christmas DVD, promoted in the way we did, sold four times as many copies as it would have done if it was on the shelf with all the other DVDs we sell at Christmas. Our choice of the books for these new films is based on what we feel our customers would find most interesting," said Salter.

The volume of books sold is not dented by rival DVD sales on the opposite aisle, according to research carried out by Amber Entertainment. "In fact, the opposite is true," said Maisel. "People buy books when they have seen the film. When the public saw a film of the children's book Inkheart, which did not do as well in the cinema as had been hoped, the book still went into the children's bestsellers list after the film came out."

The Jacqueline Wilson title The Worry Website will be filmed in Britain, as will the selected Dick Francis thriller. A screenplay of the revered American children's author Judy Blume's 1981 novel, Tiger Eyes, is also in development, as is one of the novels from Pullman's Sally Lockhart children's adventure series.

Make him an offer......

2010-01-07T04:06:00.000-08:00

The Godfather

Avatar - the movie

2010-01-07T04:03:00.000-08:00

"Avatar" to Become Second Highest Grossing Film, After "Titanic"

Posted: January 7th, 2010 byWorstPreviews.com Staff

"Avatar" is still knocking films off the biggest worldwide earners list. It is now in third place with $1.1 billion (through Tuesday), surpassing "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," which took in $1.07 billion in 2006.

The James Cameron-directed sci-fi epic is also quickly gaining on the second top grosser "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," which is currently sitting with $1.12 billion worldwide total.

If "Avatar" overtakes "Lord of the Rings," that means that the only film that will stand in its way is Cameron's other monster hit "Titanic." But it's very unlikely that "Avatar" would be able to break $1.84 billion.

Read more:http://www.worstpreviews.com/headline.php?id=16328&count=0#ixzz0bvYA6VG8

Best programme over Xmas????????????????????????????

2010-01-01T06:25:00.000-08:00

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Dr Who! Dr Who! Dr Who!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The BBC Wales programme Dr Who was a quite outstanding Xmas programme when compared to the rest of the rubbish put out by all TV channels.

The Triffids are back.....not as good as the book

2010-01-01T06:18:00.000-08:00

The Day of the Triffids

More asbo cacti than killer plants, these new triffids were not remotely scary, says Sam Wollaston

- Sam Wollaston
- The Guardian, Wednesday 30 December 2009
- Article history

The triffids were weedy, but not as wooden as Joely Richardson Photograph: BBC/Power/BBC / Power

In the land of the blind, Gordon Brown should be king. But he doesn't even seem to be prime minister any more; he is nowhere to be seen, Downing Street has been deserted and Eddie Izzard has taken over. That could make for a refreshing change. Should we worry for the economy?

Eddie was snoozing on a 747 with an eye mask on when the Big Flash happened, so he got to keep his sight; then he survived the plane crash by locking himself in the loo with a load of inflated life jackets (would that even work?). Now, inspired by Winston Churchill's statue in Parliament Square, he's gone power crazy. There are a few other lucky ones, including Joely Richardson, who kept her sight but appears to have lost the ability to act, and Dougray Scott, who's still going to fall for her – as well as trying to save the world. Otherwise, it's just the blind . . . well, you know who they're leading. Plus the killer plants, of course, whose day this is.

We met them – the killer plants – early in part one of The Day of the Triffids (BBC1) on Monday night, after which it became very hard to take any of it very seriously. No screen adaptation of John Wyndham's classic post-apocalyptic novel can ever really compete with the book: when it comes to creating menacing flora, special effects and computer graphics still lag a long way behind the human imagination. These triffids are laughable. They seem to be based on quite a common species of cactus (I don't know the name, but I've definitely seen them in the plant section of Homebase). Then, rising from the centre of the plant, is a kind of red hoodie – possibly playing, like a Daily Mail editorial, to our fear of modern feral youths. The Day of the Asbo Cacti. Pah! They don't frighten me: they're cute, I want one, for my conservatory. Well, I call it a conservatory . . .

The triffids' collective performance is still better, and less wooden, than Joely's. In last night's second and concluding part, her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, attempted to restore some dignity to the family's reputation with a spirited performance as the mother superior of a rural convent. Dougray has ended up there, injured and in need of help if he's to save mankind, though Vanessa turns out not to be the saint she appears to be. (Was anyone else concerned about the wound by Dougray's right eye, I wonder, and the way it seemed to appear and disappear? Maybe that's just symptomatic of a triffid sting).

Anyway, the convent is a beautiful place, filmed – I think – at the Hospital of St Cross in Hampshire, with St Catherine's Hill covered in snow (and waving triffids) behind. I enjoyed all the locations, and trying to identify them – the views over London, the Gherkin in the City, the Ark at Hammersmith, the A4, Cobstone Windmill (possibly) in the Chilterns. This was a big-name, all-singing, all-dancing, big-budget production and, hoodie triffids aside, it looked fabulous.

It was also pretty faithful to the novel, in terms of character and plot. So they modernised it a bit, gave it a new eco makeover, with the triffids being grown as a source of renewable, clean energy, instead of something to do with the Soviet Union. And it's a loony plant-rights activist who liberates the triffids in the first place – for which he pays, as he should do, with his life.

Under these bodywork modifications though, the chassis is basically the same. I'm glad they kept the ending, too – the Isle of Wight and an uncertain future for mankind – instead of the happy discovery that seawater works as a triffidicide, which is what one screen adaptation had.

But – and it's a big but – what it doesn't do is anything the book doesn't. In fact, it does a lot less – there is none of that feeling of foreboding or doom. Maybe it's because I was (much) younger when I read it, but I remember a certain darkness. I'd like to have tried it out on some children, but unfortunately there weren't any to hand. I've been more scared watching Doctor Who. I don't think I'm even going to have a problem going to the plant section of Homebase.

The Day of the Triffids - New TV show in UK

2010-01-01T06:10:00.000-08:00

What rubbish has been served up this Xmas & New Year on TV in the UK! Poor repeats, old films, ineffectual interviews, extraordinarily bad music and programmes destined to be on the rubbish heap within minutes of being shown. "The day of the Triffids" was one of these - poorly scripted with acting beyond creditable belief. What a show to serve up at prime time. Wake up all you programmers. We are an intelligent audience!

Oh Happy Days........

2009-12-30T08:44:00.001-08:00

Happy Xmas Reading.....

2009-12-25T01:26:00.001-08:00

Image by Christopher Chan via Flickr

Xmas reading and seeing.......

Bollywood

2009-12-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

Bollywood looks to Aamir Khan to end 2009 on a high

By Shail Kumar Singh (AFP) – 11 hours ago

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MUMBAI — Bollywood is looking to Aamir Khan to bring festive cheer to the industry after a disappointing 2009 hit by a producers' strike, swine flu fears and a lack of box office success.

The actor-producer-director's heavily-marketed "3 Idiots", based on Chetan Bhagat's best-selling debut novel "Five Point Someone" about three struggling students at a business school, is released on Friday, Christmas Day.

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Bollywood watchers hope Khan -- known for only making one big film per year in an industry where leading actors can be working on several films at the same time -- can replicate his previous year-end successes.

His 2008 Christmas offering, "Ghajini", became Bollywood's highest grossing film and followed the acclaimed "Taare Zameen Par" (Stars on Earth) in 2007.

"We hope he creates a hattrick this year," said Amod Mehra, a Bollywood trade analyst.

Another leading critic, Taran Adarsh, gave the film 4.5 stars on his bollywoodhungama.com site and said it "easily ranks amongst Aamir, (director) Rajkumar Hirani and (producer) Vidhu Vinod Chopra's finest films".

Bollywood began 2009 after a muted end to 2008 due to the deadly terror attacks in Mumbai, which saw the cancellation of a number of films.

Audiences had already dwindled due to recession fears and disaffection at under-performing big budget films.

But the much-anticipated "Chandni Chowk To China", a co-production with US studio Warner Brothers and the first Bollywood film to be part-filmed in China, bombed at the box office.

Leading star Shahrukh Khan's own production "Billu" also disappointed, as world attention focused on the British film about a Mumbai teaboy, "Slumdog Millionaire", and its runaway success at the Oscars.

In April, Bollywood producers began a two-month boycott of multiplex cinemas, calling for a fairer share of box office receipts. The strike saw the postponement of scores of films and losses estimated at 63 million dollars.

Rising numbers of swine flu cases in Mumbai and the surrounding area added to Bollywood's woes, leading to the temporary closure of cinemas on public health grounds and the postponement of several films.

Despite a glut of new releases since then, only a handful of films have been considered hits, like "New York", about a group of friends in the city on September 11, 2001, and the thriller "Kaminey" (Scoundrel).

A new hero was found in Ranbir Kapoor after his hit "Wake Up Sid" and "Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani" (An Amazing Story Of Strange Love), while Salman Khan made a successful comeback in "Wanted".

But Adarsh told AFP: "It's not been a good year. In my opinion, it's been the worst year for the film industry.

"You can't blame anyone apart from the industry for churning out such bad movies. This results in perhaps 90 percent of films failing. It's not a good situation. We need to concentrate on quality."

Mayank Shekhar, national cultural editor at English-language newspaper The Hindustan Times, agreed and suggested that Hollywood -- which still has only a tiny market share but is trying to make inroads into India -- has benefited.

Roland Emmerich's "2012" crossed the 900 million rupees (19.2 million dollars) mark last weekend, making it the highest grossing Hollywood film in India, The Times of India newspaper said on Sunday.

Dubbed and original versions of James Cameron's "Avatar" and the hit comedy "The Hangover" have also done well.

Shekhar said "2012" would turn out to be the biggest hit in India this year, and had proved popular in both more expensive urban multiplex cinemas and traditional single screen cinemas in small towns and villages.

"This is the first time we've seen something like this. It may be an indicator of things to come, that people are now willing to choose," he told AFP.

"The Indian movie market has been the only one in the world where no one cares that (Hollywood director Steven) Spielberg is releasing a film. That might change."

Stories from North Augusta

2009-12-23T07:37:00.000-08:00

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Top five chosen for short story contest

BY STACEY EIDSON

OPINION With more than 45 writers submitting their work in the third annual Metro Spirit Short Story Contest, I’m pleased to announce that Jonathan Jaffe of North Augusta is this year’s grand prize winner.

Jaffe’s short story, “Child’s Game,” about a group of competitive college friends, stirred up the most conversation and received the majority of votes in our office.

As this year’s grand prize winner, Jaffe will receive $100 in cash and a free registration to Augusta State University’s Sandhills Writers Conference.

The conference will be held March 18-20 and it is a prize valued at $156, generously donated by ASU. For more information about the Sandhills Conference, please check outsandhills.aug.edu.

In second place was the story, “A Day in an Afterlife” by Joseph Miles, about a man’s strange encounter in a graveyard.

Coming in third was Lindsey Wise’s emotional story about the death of a woman’s first love and her fight to stay strong at his funeral.

After learning she came in third, Wise, of Aiken, could not have been more excited.

“It is a very personal story to me and I’m honored that you selected that one,” she said. “This was actually the first time I have ever submitted any of my writing to a publication, after much hounding from friends. So, it really is a treat for me to be selected as one of your favorites. It means a lot to me.”

These three stories can be found inside the print edition of this issue.

Due to space requirements, the Metro Spirit’s fourth and fifth place winners can be found on our online edition at metrospirit.com.

In fourth place, was Daniel Costello’s short story “The Rag,” which deals with the frustrations of the newspaper industry and the turmoil employees experience after being laid off.

Rounding out the top five stories was Tom Turner’s story “Two Together,” about a woman looking for a new home after the death of her husband.

We want to congratulate all the winners and participants in this year’s short story contest.

We thoroughly enjoyed reading each and every one of the submissions.

So, while you are enjoying your Christmas cookies and eggnog, put your feet up, relax and have a good read.

Of course, just one short week after Santa Claus pops down your chimney on Christmas Eve, it will be time to ring in 2010. One week doesn’t give you much time to plan, so the Metro Spirit has decided to help you out.

Between now and the publication of the New Year’s Eve issue, the Spirit writers will be hitting the streets talking to some of the town’s professional bartenders to find out their favorite drink to celebrate the traditional ball drop in Times Square.

We will feature those drinks and their recipes in our Dec. 30 issue. So, happy holidays everyone! Get ready for 2010.

How serious do you want to be?

2009-12-12T12:43:00.000-08:00

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A Serious Man: A Seriously Fine Film

Asher Goldstein

2 months ago
Comments (0)

Flag this This past weekend, I was one of the many audience members who flocked to see the Coen Brothers' newest outing A Serious Man. The film, in limited release, managed to pull in an impressive $41,918 per screen average. As this second weekend of release comes upon us, so does my chance to get myself out to the cinema and once again see this eye-thumbing look at what is nothing less than an existential American nightmare.

The film follows a middle class Jewish college professor who finds himself at odds with every element of his life: his kids are repulsively irreverent, his job is thankless, his neighbors pay him little respect or attention, and his over-bearing wife gives him gut-checking notice that she is leaving him for one of their family friends. He is the prototypical helpless American male--weighed down by the social constructs that supposedly give a sense of anchoring to our society.

The story is told deftly by the Brothers Coen with the masterful aid of ever impressing cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose concise camera work and lighting illuminate a carefully constructed world that brims with life thanks to the always fantastic work of costumer and production designer Mary Zophres and Jess Gonchor, respectively. So in short: this is a damn good movie, one whose story is told way more than adequately and with a highly attentive technique of craft, both from the below the line crew and the films performers alike. That said, what struck me most--and, as it seems, most people I've spoken to--are the ideas presented throughout.

Frankly speaking, to an extent this is a very Jewish, and more specifically American Jewish, film and at the same time, not one whatsoever.

I've read that the film is supposedly likened to being the "most personal" of the Coens' work as there are clear references to what need be nothing but their own autobiography speaking (if the filmmakers, who were raised in a Jewish household, grew up in one that were Catholic instead, their main character would surely find the testaments of his priest being as ridiculous and confusing as our hero’s Rabbi).

Of the folks I've spoken with, many have been frankly offended by what they've seen, generally for religious reasons. The film is set in the world of a tightly knit Jewish American community and observed with a sharply satirical eye--suggesting that the wholesome, wisdom-seeking tradition of Judaism can be just as faltering and plainly useless as many of the other traditions that are observed in this world of ours. At the film's heart, the writers are inherently suggesting that human beings are subjected to a world that is nothing but suffering-inducing, harrowing, and uncaring. Furthermore, any attempt to explain or fashion some sort of wisdom from the dire events that fill our lives will inevitably either cause one to fall to the chains of ignorant comforts (religion, and moreover, human constructions of family, home, love, occupation) or will send one off into a fit of panicked desperation until we find strength in the idea that it is all essentially meaningless. Religious, and cultural for that matter, traditions are ridiculed as useless distractions and the only "out" that said practices get occurs in one scene, in one movement, in one shot for that matter. Such an instance infers that while faith and other such constructs are generally time and soul wasting, they do provide for our meager-selves a way to experience catharsis and allow humanity to come together, giving us reason to seek the shelter of one another, even if shelter is rooted in nothing more than the stuff of make believe.

Cheery, no? The somber ideas presented are lightened by the darkened comedy that fits well into the canon of these fine auteurs, though because of its heavy, heavy references to American Judaism, it could be a bit difficult for wider audiences to find the same attraction as they did to the masterful No Country For Old Men. In short, if you are either a fan of the Coen Brothers or are simply one who enjoys thought-provoking cinema, this is certainly not one to pass up. In my eyes, this film belongs alongside the work of other existentialist authors and artists. It certainly firms up my belief that Camus or Hardy would be proud to see the Coens added to their ranks any day.

The Coens lended their filmmaking abilities to this commercial spot for the Al Gore's Reality Coalition, which seeks to spread the truth about so-called "clean coal" technologies and how this moniker is nothing more than an oxymoron. For more info on the truth behind "clean coal" visit the The Reality Coalition's website. Take Action Learn more about The Reality Coalition, an organization the Coen brothers support.

A Serious Man

2009-12-12T12:37:00.000-08:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Coen Brothers.........If you get the chance Goooooooooo!

Avatar The Movie

2009-12-12T12:32:00.000-08:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Is James Cameron's Avatar 'the future of movies'?

James Cameron's Titanic was the biggest hit in history - but Avatar and its 3-D technology could be 'the future of the movies'. No pressure, then, says William Langley.

By William Langley

Published: 6:33PM GMT 12 Dec 2009

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Link to this video For the past few years, Hollywood has conducted its business to the unsettling sound of hundreds of millions of hard-to-come-by dollars whooshing into the giant maw of James Cameron's new sci-fi epic, Avatar. As a director, the 55-year-old brings to the movies some incontestable advantages – and a couple of reasons why, if you were thinking of employing him, you might not want to rush the decision.

One is a fondness for monstrous budgets, which admittedly furnish his films with impressive casts and bleeding-edge special effects, but cause long-term sleeping difficulties for studio executives. The other is a troublesome mixture of insecurity and absence of tact.

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Avatar movie: history of 3D cinema"Let us join together in silence in memory of the 1,500 people who died when the ship went down," Cameron said upon collecting his Best Director Oscar for Titanic. "… and now, let's party until dawn!" Irritated that Arnold Schwarzenegger had gone sightseeing in Washington DC during the filming of True Lies, he thrust his face an inch from his leading man's and bellowed: "Do you want Paul Verhoeven to finish this mother------?"

For better or worse, Cameron has been quiet since the release of Titanic in 1997. Perhaps too quiet. Although the film went on to become the biggest box office hit in history – with a global take of $1.8 billion – it presented the director with the problem of surpassing it with something even bigger.

That something has now arrived. Avatar is a computer-effects-heavy 3-D space fantasy, set 125 years in the future, about a disabled US Marine, Jake Sully, who is sent to Pandora, a moon of the distant Centauri star system, to find supplies of "unobtainium", an energy-rich mineral. Upon arrival, Jake discovers a world of beauty and innocence, populated by 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned beings called the Na'vi, whose peaceful existence the humans proceed to rock.

Cameron first hatched the story 14 years ago, but found that the technology needed to realise it didn't exist. The new digital 3-D system solved the problem; indeed, powerful voices in Hollywood, including that of Steven Spielberg, have predicted that the results are so immersive that the film and technology represent "the future of the movies", while cinemas have been scrambling to convert to the new format.

The reviews have been generally favourable. "The most expensive and technically ambitious film ever made," reports the influential Hollywood trade magazine Variety, "James Cameron's long-gestating epic delivers unique spectacle, breathtaking sights and narrative excitement." The rival Hollywood Reporter cheers: "As commander-in-chief of an army of visual-effects technicians, creature designers, motion-capture mavens, stunt performers, dancers, actors and music and sound magicians, Cameron brings science-fiction movies into the 21st century with the jaw-dropping wonder that is Avatar."

Cameron pays unusually close attention to reviews. When Kenneth Turan, the highly regarded critic on the Los Angeles Times, exercised his right to dislike Titanic – a "hackneyed and completely derivative copy" of the classic Hollywood romance – Cameron went ballistic, penning a furious rebuttal in which he denounced the review as "the vitriolic ravings of a bitter man… the worst sort of ego-driven elitism".

Why such sensitivity? In a long, choleric interview in the current edition of The New Yorker, Cameron – clearly still seething over the affair – appears to suggest that the critics had it in for him, and were confounded when Titanic was a hit with audiences. "We were branded the biggest idiots in movie history," he fumes. "They were just sharpening up their knives so they could really take the film apart. Then they couldn't. So ---- them. ---- 'em all."

Those who seek to explain Cameron's irascibility and thin-skinnedness point – as he does himself – to his working-class background and ingrained suspicion of the way the movie industry operates. "I try to live with honour," he says, "even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time. It's very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy: a handshake means nothing to them. They feel they are required to keep an agreement with you only if you are successful."

He was born, one of five children, in Kapuskasing, a small, mostly French-speaking town in Ontario, Canada, where his father worked at the local paper mill. When he was 14, he went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece, and became fascinated by the kind of hyper-realistic visual effects the film pioneered.

A few years later, the Camerons moved to southern California, where James – with no educational qualifications – took a succession of lowly jobs, first as a factory machinist, then as a truck driver, and later as a model-maker at a film studio.

An incurable workaholic (he claims to have worked on Avatar for 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for two years), he rose rapidly as a designer of sets and special effects. Then, in 1984, he got his first directing break with The Terminator, a low-budget thriller starring the barely comprehensible Schwarzenegger as a rogue cyborg, which earned an extraordinary $78 million.

The film's unexpected success marked the end of Cameron's deference to studio bean-counters. His sequel, Terminator 2, was the first movie to cost $100 million; Titanic was the first to cost $200 million; and the budget for Avatar is believed to have exceeded $300 million.

Critics occasionally suggest that the green stuff covers up flaws which other filmmakers wouldn't get away with, but it's hard to deny that Cameron has delivered value for money. Then again, it isn't only critics who find him tough going. He has been accused by the Screen Actors Guild of mistreating casts with his punishing routines and combative approach, and Kate Winslet has declared that she'd need an unusually large fee before working with him again. Five wives – the current one being actress Suzy Amis – testify further to the challenging complexities of his personality.

When Titanic won 11 Oscars – the most since Ben Hur – Cameron declared himself, before a billion viewers, to be "King of the World". Those who winced at the display should have realised that he was only getting started. With Avatar, and the 3-D age it could usher in, he's aiming to be Master of the Universe.

Clint and rugby don't really mix.....

2009-12-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

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Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon in Invictus If Invictus (Warner Bros.), Clint Eastwood's inspirational sports biopic about the victory of the South African rugby team during Nelson Mandela's first year in office, had been made by any other director, it would be regarded as a tedious, unfocused, underplotted movie with a single strong selling point: The casting of Morgan Freeman as Mandela. Not the performance, the casting. No one else alive is as well suited to play the great South African leader. Freeman uncannily resembles Mandela, he imitates his accent convincingly, he radiates a benevolent aura of righteousness—but when does Morgan Freeman not radiate a benevolent aura of righteousness? What ought to have been the role of Freeman's career is instead less of an acting challenge than Driving Miss Daisy. Freeman-as-Mandela is an actor all dressed up with no place to go—at least, nowhere we didn't already know he was headed.

Yahoo! Buzz FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSETrue-life sports movies always work against the same disadvantage: Win or lose, the outcome of the game is known in advance. The only way to make the audience care is to somehow get us inside the heads of the people who were experiencing the triumph in real time. Eastwood goes to great lengths to explain why the 1995 World Cup championship was so important to South Africa: Only a few years out of the apartheid era, the nation needed a common cause for blacks and whites to rally around, and the national team, the Springboks, had historically meant nothing to black South Africans except being a symbol of segregation and oppression. Maddeningly, the movie never manages to make the championship matter to us.

Invictus, which takes its title from a Victorian poem that Mandela clung to as a source of hope during his 27 years in prison, takes one of the most genuinely inspiring moments in modern history and turns it into a high-minded plod. Every character is defined solely in terms of his (or her—but there aren't many significant hers on the premises) degree of racial nobility. Every line out of Mandela's mouth is a platitude: "Forgiveness is a powerful weapon" or "In order to build South Africa, we must all exceed our own expectations." As Mandela discusses leadership techniques over tea with the captain of the Springboks, François Pienaar (Matt Damon), both men agree on the importance of leading by example. But all either one does is lecture. "The rainbow nation starts here," Mandela scolds his bodyguards, who are prickly at first about integrating their ranks. Handing out beers to his dispirited team after a loss, Pienaar encourages them to drink up with these heartening words: "Taste it? That's the taste of defeat." Must the task of healing a divided nation fall exclusively into the hands of humorless goody-two-shoes?

It would seem hard to botch the inherently suspenseful events of the 1995 World Cup championship game, in which the underdog 'Boks fought their way back from a tie to win in an overtime squeaker. But though this film contains plenty of rugby—for viewers congenitally indifferent to sports, a lifetime's worth of rugby—Eastwood never gives his audience a basic grounding in how the sport works. For those not already in-the-know, the rules of the game remain as perplexing as those of Fantastic Mr. Fox's whack-bat. What exactly is accomplished in the scrum? What's a drop goal, and what does it mean to win a game on one? And what are the strengths and weaknesses of this particular team, other than the obvious fact that they go from playing badly to playing well after a training montage? A great sports movie—North Dallas Forty, Rocky, Breaking Away—gives its characters athletic personalities: Who's cool under pressure? Who's a choker? Who's phoning it in? Aside from Damon's Pienaar, who is himself little more than a resolute slab of muscle, the Springboks barely get personalities, period.

As a non-South African, I can't speak to the accuracy of the movie's racial politics, but they feel insultingly vague. A feel-good montage scored to a pop song that brags "I'm colorblind" smacks of self-congratulation, and the frequent paeans to equality and justice have an abstract, civics-class quality. The movie's only real suspense comes early on in a subplot about racial antagonism in the ranks of Mandela's security staff, but the Springboks' victory seems to wash all these tensions away in a rush of bonhomie. Invictus, based on a nonfiction account by John Carlin, posits Mandela's embrace of the national rugby team as a visionary moment of governance, but the movie never pauses to consider the question that must have dogged the president at the time: What if the 'Boks hadn't won the game?

Damon risked wrath of Eastwood for Invictus reshoot - Yahoo! News UK

2009-12-12T12:11:00.000-08:00

Damon risked wrath of Eastwood for Invictus reshoot - Yahoo! News UK

Scrooge, the banker!

2009-12-09T13:04:00.000-08:00

Yet in the era of global financial crisis and multi-billion-dollar fraud, Jim Carrey believes Dickens's tale about how the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge learns to change his ways remains as relevant today as ever.

"I think it's a very pressing story nowadays, too," said Carrey, the star of Disney's re-imagining of the classic, released in North America on November 6. "I think stories get told at times when they're supposed to be told."

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Financial crisis: We should turn to Charles Dickens in hard times, not just Little Dorrit"Scrooge is the first corporate scumbag. The unloved scumbag. So, in this time when all our constructs are breaking down because of greed, this story is so pressing," Carrey added.

"Everybody loves a good transformational story. You know, somebody who sees the light, who finally finds out what's important in life. And, this is one of the greatest ones ever written."

Just like the character of Scrooge, Carrey was confronted with a vision of his future during the making of the film.

But while Scrooge's insight came via the spooky Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Carrey's own premonition was entirely due to his appearance after the 3D movie's special effects wizards went to work.

Instead of the familiar 47-year-old face known to millions in hits such as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Bruce Almighty, Carrey said he was left staring at the spitting image of his father.

"When I saw the movie, one of the first things I said when I saw the first close up of Scrooge is, 'my family is going to have a heart attack, because that is my father,'" he said.

"It's unbelievable. It's really a look into the future for me. Not the long chin and the long nose, but the look is what I'm going to look like when I'm old," Carrey added.

Disney's new take on the classic is the latest in a long line of adaptations of the beloved 1843 novella, with the first screen version coming more than a century ago with in the 1901 British short Scrooge.

The new film sees Carrey play the bitter, money-grabbing Scrooge as well as the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.

The film, also featuring Robin Wright Penn and Gary Oldman, is directed by Oscar-winner Robert Zemeckis.

Zemeckis, writer and co-director of the phenomenally successful 1985 hit Back to the Future, said the story of Scrooge "might be the greatest time travel story written in the English language".

"It's fabulous... definitely this story influenced my own time travel stories," he said.

Like his groundbreaking 2004 hit Polar Express, Zemeckis uses performance capture technology to bring Scrooge and other characters to life, where each actor's movements are filmed and fused with animation.

For Carrey, the technique meant he and other performers were acting blind, with only a vague idea of what would actually end up on the screen.

"For an actor, there are certain aspects of the technology that are so exciting and amazing creatively that you can't wait to see what it turns into," he revealed. "For an actor, there are extra challenges. You have to create the ambiance and the belief in your surroundings in your head.

"I can't wait to do the process again. Watching it, you never know where it was going to go. You have to go through months of panic, not knowing and then slowly you start to fall in love with it. 'Oh, my God, look what they've done.' It's unbelievable."

2009-12-09T12:59:00.000-08:00

The new movie , A "Christmas Carol" with Scrooge is a terrific, film best watched in 3D for its incredible effects. When Dickens wrote the original his imagination knew no bounds - this film works on that principle involving the movie-goer in an adventure of sound & sight.

Worth a visit.....

2009-12-09T12:49:00.001-08:00

I found this fascinating quote today:

Things are “hotting up” in the Global warming arena. You’ll know that a bunch of so-called scientists have been cobbling together various facts and figures in a most unscrupulous concoction of half truths and lies.gorseinonboy.co.uk, Gorsein Boy, Dec 2009

You should read the whole article.

2009-12-06T03:15:00.000-08:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

What's your list for the best books currently?

Ah DOH......

2009-12-05T12:16:00.000-08:00

Image by nickstone333 via Flickr

Doh........

Kisses and catwalks

2009-12-05T12:13:00.000-08:00

Image by nicogenin via Flickr

2009-12-03T08:10:00.000-08:00

Image by Christophe Verdier via Flickr

Write text here...

2009-12-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

Image by ecstaticist via Flickr

I'm thinking about books for Xmas. Now what can I convince my wife I really need to have?

Heaney calls for Poets' Corner honour for Hughes - The Irish Times - Wed, Dec 02, 2009

2009-12-02T08:42:00.000-08:00

Heaney calls for Poets' Corner honour for Hughes - The Irish Times - Wed, Dec 02, 2009

Novels of the year - Telegraph

2009-12-02T08:40:00.000-08:00

Novels of the year - Telegraph

Gordon Brown’s son to blame for wife’s mysterious Tweet : Globally

2009-12-02T08:32:00.000-08:00

Gordon Brown’s son to blame for wife’s mysterious Tweet : Globally

Now Mrs Brown and littler Brown become Gaffers.....as in making a gaffe!

Well - I've heard it all now. When one makes a mistake blame it on the kid. Economy down the shoot, the littler gets to be blamed. Problems in Afghanistan. Ah, littler again.........

Son Objects to Moving Camus’s Remains - NYTimes.com

2009-12-02T08:00:00.000-08:00

Son Objects to Moving Camus’s Remains - NYTimes.com

If I were Camus' son I'd be annoyed. Bet Camus is churning in his grave.

I'm relaunching today.......

2009-12-02T07:33:00.000-08:00

Relaunch today for this site. No more St Yrieix Book club. Welcome to the Lincoln Reviews for films and books of all kinds.

Meet Mitch Albom.........

2009-04-11T08:21:00.000-07:00

Dear David Vernon Goddard,

I work with Mitch Albom on his new website, and noticed that you recently wrote about Mitch and his work on your blog. So I thought you might be interested to know that we just launched a new website at www.MitchAlbom.com.

There's a huge amount of content on the new site, including dozens of videos and articles related to Mitch's books; a link to live-stream his daily talk radio program; message boards where fans can share their thoughts and comments with Mitch and other readers; a special section devoted to Reading Groups; a community service section where organizations can post volunteer events and users can search by zip code to find opportunities in their local communities; an archive of every column Mitch has written for the Detroit Free Press (more than 4,000), including all his new columns as he writes them; his ESPN sports commentaries; clips from movies made from his books; a section devoted to theatre productions of plays; and a place for teachers to share stories about using Mitch's books in the classroom. And there's much more as well.
You'll need to register in order to access certain parts of site, and we encourage you to sign up for the Newsletter as well. In the next couple of weeks Mitch will be making an announcement about his new book, Have a Little Faith.
We hope you'll visit soon and return often.
Kind regards,
Brenda

www.MitchAlbom.com

Please note that your email address has not been added to any list and this is the only message you will receive from us. If you wish to receive information about Mitch and his work in the future please sign up for the Newsletter at www.MitchAlbom.com.

March Meeting of the Book Club.....

2009-03-10T07:13:00.000-07:00

Next Book will be "Snow Falling on Cedars"

Remember New venue to be confirmed by Pat and a different time.

20th March in the afternoon!!!!

The Five People you meet in Heaven.....A guide to reading

2009-02-23T07:45:00.000-08:00

From the author of the number one New York Times bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie comes this long-awaited follow-up, an enchanting, beautifully crafted novel that explores a mystery only heaven can unfold.Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. As the park has changed over the years -- from the Loop-the-Loop to the Pipeline Plunge -- so, too, has Eddie changed, from optimistic youth to embittered old age.

His days are a dull routine of work, loneliness, and regret.Then, on his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic accident, trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hands in his -- and then nothing.

He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it.

These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever.One by one, Eddie's five people illuminate the unseen connections of his earthly life. As the story builds to its stunning conclusion, Eddie desperately seeks redemption in the still-unknown last act of his life: Was it a heroic success or a devastating failure? The answer, which comes from the most unlikely of sources, is as inspirational as a glimpse of heaven itself.In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom gives us an astoundingly original story that will change everything you've ever thought about the afterlife -- and the meaning of our lives here on earth. With a timeless tale, appealing to all, this is a book that readers of fine fiction, and those who loved Tuesdays with Morrie, will treasure.

1. At the start of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Albom says that "all endings are also beginnings." In general, what does this mean? How does it relate to this story in particular? Share something in your life that has begun as another thing ended, and the events that followed.
2. What initially grabs your attention in The Five People You Meet in Heaven? What holds it?
3. How does counting down the final minutes of Eddie's life affect you as a reader? Why does Albom do this? Other storytelling devices Albom uses include moving from past to present by weaving Eddie's birthdays throughout the story. How do these techniques help inform the story? What information do you learn by moving around in time? How effective is Albom's style for this story in particular?
4. What does Eddie look like and what kind of guy is he? Look at and discuss some of the details and descriptions that paint a picture of Eddie and his place of business. What is it about an amusement park that makes it a good backdrop for this story?
5. Consider the idea that "no story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river." How does this statement relate to The Five People You Meet in Heaven?
6. How does Albom build tension around the amusement park ride accident? What is the significance of Eddie finding himself in the amusement park again after he dies? What is your reaction when Eddie realizes he's spent his entire life trying to get away from Ruby Pier and he is back there immediately after death? Do you think this is important? Why?
7. Describe what Albom's heaven is like. If it differs from what you imagined, share those differences. Who are the five people Eddie meets? Why them? What are their relationships to Eddie? What are the characteristics and qualities that make them the five people for Eddie?
8. Share your reactions and thoughts about the Blue Man's story, his relationship with his father, and his taking silver nitrate. What, if anything, does this have to do with Eddie? Why does he say to Eddie, "This is not your heaven, it's mine"?
9. How does the Blue Man die? What affect does it have on you when you look at the same story from two different points of view -– his and Eddie's? Can you share any events that you have been involved in that can be viewed entirely differently, from another's point of view? How aware are we of other's experiences of events that happen simultaneously to us and to them? Why?
10. Discuss what it means that "That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind." Even though Eddie hasn't been reincarnated, consider karma in Eddie's life (where Eddie's actions would affect his reincarnation). If it isn't karma, what is Albom telling us about life, and death?
11. Think about Eddie's war experiences and discuss your reactions to Albom's evocation of war. What did Eddie learn by being in war? How did he "come home a different man"? Why did the captain shoot Eddie? Explore what it means when the captain tells Eddie, "I took your leg to save your life." Why does the captain tell Eddie that sacrifice is not really a loss, but a gain? Examine whether or not Eddie understands this, and the significance of this lesson.
12. Discuss what you might say to Eddie when he asks "why would heaven make you relive your own decay?".
13. Examine whether or not you agree with the old woman when she tells Eddie, "You have peace when you make it with yourself," and why. Consider what she means when she says, "things that happen before you are born still affect you. And people who come before your time affect you as well." How does this relate to Eddie's life? Who are some who have come before you that have affected your own life?
14. What is Eddie's father's response each time Eddie decides to make an independent move, away from working at the pier? Examine how Eddie's father's choices and decisions actually shape Eddie's life. Why does Eddie cover for his father at the pier when his father becomes ill? What happens then? Share your own experience of a decision your own parents made that affected your life, for better or for worse.
15. Who tells Eddie that "we think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do we do to ourselves"? What is the significance of this particular person in Eddie's life? Why is this important for Eddie to understand? Is it important for all of us to understand? Why? Discuss whether or not you agree that, "all parents damage their children. It cannot be helped." How was Eddie damaged?
16. Why does Marguerite want to be in a place where there are only weddings? How does this relate to her own life, and to her relationship and life with Eddie?
17. Discuss why Eddie is angry at his wife for dying so young. Examine what Marguerite means when she says, "Lost love is still love. It takes a different form. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around on the dance floor. But when these senses waken, another heightens. . . . Life has an end. Love doesn't." Why does she say this to Eddie? Do you think he gets it? Discuss whether or not you agree with her, and why.
18. Why does Eddie come upon the children in the river? What does Tala mean when she says "you make good for me"? Discuss whether or not Eddie's life is a penance, and why. What is the significance of Tala pulling Eddie to safety after he dies? Why is it Tala that pulls him to heaven and not one of the other four?
19. What would you say to Eddie when he laments that he accomplished nothing with his life? Discuss what has he accomplished.
20. Briefly recall the five lessons Eddie learns. How might these be important for all of us? Share which five people might meet you in heaven, and what additional or different lessons might be important to your life. Discuss how Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven has provided you with a different perspective of your life.

"Sincere. . . . A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers."
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times"Simply told, sentimental, and profoundly true, this is an contemporary American fable that will be cherished by a vast readership."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Fans of Tuesdays with Morrie will be delighted with this novel."
—People magazine"Transcendent. . . . Albom has aimed high here, and there's a whiff of paradise as a result."
—Atlanta Journal Constitution"Albom has a gift for tapping into readers' sincerely sentimental spots, and he will undoubtedly connect again here."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer"Albom has the ability to make you cry in spite of yourself."
—The Boston Globe"Albom has done a masterful job."
—Oakland Press"There's much wisdom here . . . An earnest meditation on the intrinsic value of human life."
—Los Angeles Times"This is the fable you will devour when you fall in love. This is the tale you will keep by your side when you are lost. This is the story you will turn to again and again, because it possesses the rare magic to let you see yourself and the world anew. This book is a gift to the soul."
—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter's Daughter"Anyone who loved Tuesdays with Morrie should delight in reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Mitch Albom has populated his larger-than-life tale with memorable characters and filled it with the abundant warmth and wisdom that we've come to expect from this gifted storyteller."
—John Burnham Schwartz, author of Claire Marvel"This is a lovely book, sweet, entertaining and wise. What a gutsy, surprising follow-up to Morrie."
—Anne Lamott, author of Traveling Mercies and Blue Shoe"Deep, profound, superbly imaginative, written with the quiet eloquence of a storyteller who dares to leap into the most magical of places. This poetic book is full of lessons and hope."
—James McBride, author of The Color of Water and Miracle at St. Anna"A moving flight of fantasy come to teach us that Heaven is where we finally learn what our life was about."
—Harold S. Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People"In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom lifts us to a new level. You'll find here echoes of the classics -- The Odyssey, for one -- and that puts Albom's book in the best of company."
—Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes and 'Tis"One of the best books I've read. Very well written. Touching and very comforting. Makes you stop and think of how people affect each others lives under the simplest circumstances, and no matter who and what you are in life, you can always make a difference."
—Maria Linsangan, book buyer, The News Group, Sacramento"I was changed by this book. It has that wonderful ring of truth that stories have which affirm the value of the individual."
—Donna Cressman, Maxwell Books, DeSoto TX"A books that you find yourself thinking about days...even weeks later, reading favorite sections to others and thinking about how your own actions and choices ripple through life and affect those around you."
—Julie Smith, Auntie's Bookstore, Spokane WA

The Five People you meet in Heaven......

2009-02-23T07:42:00.000-08:00

THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN

Mitch Albom
Hyperion PressFictionISBN: 1401308589

• Read an Excerpt-->• Reading Group Guide

When I finished the last page of Mitch Albom's TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE, I knew I had to share the book with as many people as I could. I proceeded to buy 41 copies, inscribe them all to my friends and family members, hand them out, mail them --- whatever I had to do to spread the word. The book was that moving, in my opinion. So I was eagerly looking forward to THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN and I am happy to report that Albom did not disappoint me. He is a first-rate storyteller, and THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN is an imaginative, creative tale in the tradition of the best fairy tales or folklore.Eddie is a maintenance man who keeps the rides safe at the Ruby Pier amusement park. His 83rd birthday seems like any other day --- he inspects the rides, watches the people, makes pipe cleaner animals for the children. However on this day he dies unexpectedly, trying to rescue a young girl in harm's way.Eddie wakes up in heaven --- but not to the "paradise garden, a place where (we) can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains," not the idyllic place that heaven has been described as throughout time. Eddie awakens to a series of introductions --- or reintroductions --- to five people whom he had met during his life, either in passing or at length. They each carry answers to the whys and hows of Eddie's life. With each meeting he relives in part that time of his life, but now the gaps are filled in. For maybe the first time he sees what REALLY happened. "There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man, Eddie's first encounter, explains. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth."All five are of course deceased, and they all impart knowledge of Eddie's life and life in general. For instance, the Blue Man asks, "Why do people gather when others die," and his explanation is at the very core of the meaning of Albom's book: "It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed lives are changed." It is insights like these that leave the reader asking, "What does Mitch Albom know that we don't?"What he knows is that we all seek answers. We look for meaning behind the experiences in our lives. More often than not, we never get the answers but we continue --- we plod on, happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, pain-free or in pain. We live. Albom doesn't pretend to offer us the answers, but he does offer us an almost Taoist interpretation of life. It is. It just is. The answers may never be revealed. And do they need to be?THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN is a beautiful story. Eddie is human and likable for his foibles, fears and faults. The writing is often lyrical and fable-like. And though the book is fiction, behind it lies Albom's lifelong love of his uncle, which lends a tenderness and intimacy to the tale on par with TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE. You'll want to share this with your friends, family, acquaintances, and even those nameless people you pass on the street who may have played a larger role in your life than you ever could have imagined. --- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara

Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.Click here to get the audiobook from Audible.com.
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An Approach to...... Snow Falling on Cedars......

2009-02-23T07:21:00.000-08:00

Snow Falling On Cedars
by David Guterson
0-679-76402-X
480 pages
$12.00
About the Book

About this guide........
The discussion topics, author biography, historical material, and bibliography that follow are meant to enhance your group's reading of David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars.

We hope that they will provide you with new ways of looking at--and talking about--a novel that has been widely praised for its eloquent dramatization of themes of love, justice, racism, community, and conscience. These ideas arise organically from the book's suspenseful story of a murder trial, its evocation of a lost love, and its brooding, poetically nuanced portraits of character and place.

The place is the fictional island of San Piedro off the coast of Washington, a community of "five thousand damp souls" [p. 5] who support themselves through salmon fishing and berry farming. The time is 1954, eight years after the end of World War II, in which some of San Piedro's young men lost their lives and many others were irreparably injured, physically as well as emotionally.

Now one of those survivors--a gill-netter named Carl Heine--has drowned under mysterious circumstances and another fisherman is on trial for his murder. The fact that the accused, Kabuo Miyamoto, is a first-generation Japanese American is not mere coincidence. To the local coroner, Heine's injuries suggested that the sheriff look for "a Jap with a bloody gun butt" [p. 59]. And among San Piedro's Anglos, hostility against Japanese still runs high, even if, like Kabuo, those Japanese were born and raised on the island and fought for the United States during the war. Kabuo's trial, in a sense, is a continuation of the white community's quarrel with its Asian neighbors.

But the Japanese--and particularly Kabuo and his wife, Hatsue--have their own grounds for resentment, stemming from years of bigotry that culminated during World War II, when thousands of Japanese Americans were interned in government relocation camps and Kabuo was effectively robbed of land that his father had worked and paid for. Even as the state presents its case against Kabuo Miyamoto, the reader is compelled to recognize the Miyamotos' case against their white neighbors, the best of whom stood by as an entire community was driven into exile. Their case never receives a public hearing: it can only be prosecuted in the courtrooms of memory and conscience.

It is not only the Japanese who remember. Among the trial's observers is Ishmael Chambers, the embittered war veteran who runs the San Piedro Review. Ishmael is not an objective witness. He grew up with Carl and Kabuo. He lost an arm on Tarawa to Japanese machinegun fire. Most important, Hatsue was Ishmael's boyhood love and he has never come to terms with losing her. In the course of the trial he will find himself torn between rancor and conscience, loath to forgive Hatsue yet unable to condemn her husband. To a large extent, Snow Falling on Cedars is about the ways in which Ishmael, Kabuo, and Hatsue at last acknowledge their respective losses and recognize the sense of mutual indebtedness and need that may survive even the gravest injuries and betrayals--the way in which loss itself may become a kind of kinship. In a place as isolated as San Piedro, "identity was geography instead of blood" [p. 206] and people make enemies reluctantly, knowing that "an enemy on an island is an enemy forever" [p. 439]. The snow that falls on David Guterson's hauntingly imagined world falls on everyone who lives in it.

Historical Background...........

Between 1901 and 1907, almost 110,000 Japanese immigrated to the United States. They were drawn by promises of ready work--American railroads actually sent recruiters to Japanese port cities, offering laborers three to five times their customary wages--and by worsening economic conditions in their homeland, which was undergoing social upheaval in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration. Although many originally came as dekaseginin--temporary sojourners--work was plentiful, not only on the railroads, but in the lumber camps, salmon fisheries, and fruit orchards of Oregon and Washington. Increasingly, the newcomers stayed on. Many purchased their own farms. In time, these issei--first-generation Japanese--started families.

The Japanese government actively encouraged emigration, and although the Gentleman's Agreement of 1908 curbed the flow of Japanese men, it allowed unrestricted entry to their wives and children. Many women were "picture brides," who came to join husbands they knew only through photographs and letters and whom they had "married" by proxy in ceremonies in their native villages.

Very quickly the newcomers encountered antagonism. Although Japanese constituted less than two percent of all immigrants to the U.S., newspapers trumpeted an "invasion." The mayor of San Francisco proclaimed that "the Japanese are not the stuff of which American citizens can be made." The Sacramento Bee warned that "the Japs...will increase like rats" if allowed to settle down. The Asiatic Exclusion League agitated for legislation to halt all Japanese immigration. Politicians ran for office on anti-Japanese platforms. In 1923, the state of Oregon prohibited issei from legally buying land. A year later, Congress passed the National Origins Act, which banned all immigration from Japan.

In spite of this, the newcomers thrived. They found ways of getting around some laws (under Oregon's Alien Land Law, first-generation Japanese could legalize their land purchases by registering them in the names of their American-born-or nisei-children). They tolerated other laws. Meanwhile, the immigrants preserved the ceremonies and values of Japan even as they encouraged their children to acculturate and, particularly, to educate themselves. "You must outperform your detractors," one issei counseled his children. Typically, the nisei grew up thinking of themselves as Americans, yet were reminded of their difference every time they encountered the taunts and ostracism of their white neighbors.

Following the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, hostility turned into paranoia--and paranoia became law. Japanese who had lived in America for thirty years were accused of spying for their native land. The day after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Treasury Department ordered all Japanese-owned businesses closed and all issei bank accounts frozen. The U.S. government had already compiled lists of Japanese whose loyalties might be suspect, and more than 1,000 businessmen, community leaders, priests, and educators were arrested up and down the West Coast.

The restrictions escalated. Japanese homes were searched for contraband. Telephone service was cut off. One newspaper columnist wrote: "I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior....Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room in the badlands...let 'em be pinched, hurt, and hungry." In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which empowered the government to remove "any and all" persons of Japanese ancestry from sensitive military areas in four western states. Japanese residents had only days in which to evacuate. They were compelled to sell their land and businesses for a fraction of their value, or to lease them to neighbors who would later refuse to pay their rent. All told, some 110,000 Japanese Americans were deported from their homes to hastily built camps such as Tule Lake and Manzanar, where they lived behind barbed wire for the duration of the war.

Neither Germans nor Italians living in this country were subject to similar restrictions, and recently declassified documents reveal that the Japanese population was never considered a serious threat to American security. In all of World War II, no person of Japanese ancestry living in the United States, Alaska, or Hawaii was ever charged with any act of espionage or sabotage. As one nisei later wrote, the victims of Executive Order 9066 were people whose "only crime was their face."

In 1988, the U.S. government formally apologized to Japanese citizens who had been deprived of their civil liberties during World War II.

This information was gathered from Lauren Kessler, Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese-American Family. New York, Random House, 1993.

For discussion.........

Snow Falling on Cedars opens in the middle of Kabuo Miyamoto's trial. It will be pages before we learn the crime of which he has been accused or the nature of the evidence against him. What effect does the author create by withholding this information and introducing it in the form of flashbacks? Where else in the narrative are critical revelations postponed? How is this novel's past related to its fictional present?

The trial functions both as this novel's narrative frame and as its governing metaphor. As we follow it, we are compelled to ask larger questions about the nature of truth, guilt, and responsibility. How does the author interweave these two functions? Which characters are aware that what is at stake is more than one man's guilt?

When the trial begins, San Piedro is in the midst of a snowstorm, which continues throughout its course. What role does snow play--both literally and metaphorically--in the book? Pay particular attention to the way in which snow blurs, freezes, isolates, and immobilizes, even as it holds out the promise of an "impossible winter purity" [p. 8].

How does nature shape this novel?
Guterson divides his island setting into four zones: the town of Amity Harbor; the sea; the strawberry fields; and the cedar forest. What actions take place in these different zones? Which characters are associated with them? How does the author establish a different mood for each setting?

In his first description of Carl Heine [pp. 14-16], Guterson imparts a fair amount of what is seemingly background information: We learn about his mother's sale of the family strawberry farm; about Carl's naval service in World War II; and about his reticence. We learn that Carl is considered "a good man." How do these facts become crucial later on, as mechanisms of plot, as revelations of the dead man's character, and as clues to San Piedro's collective mores? Where else does the author impart critical information in a casual manner, often "camouflaging" it amid material that will turn out to have no further significance? What does this method suggest about the novel's sense of the meaningful--about the value it assigns to things that might be considered random or irrelevant?

When Carl's body is dredged from the water, the sheriff has to remind himself that what he is seeing is a human being. While performing the autopsy, however, Horace Whaley forces himself to think of Carl as "the deceased...a bag of guts, a sack of parts" [p. 54]. Where else in Snow Falling on Cedars are people depersonalized--detached from their identities--either deliberately or inadvertently? What role does depersonalization play within the novel's larger scheme?

What material evidence does the prosecution produce in arguing Kabuo's guilt? Did these bits of information immediately provoke the investigators' suspicions, or only reinforce their preexisting misgivings about Carl's death? Why might they have been so quick to attribute Carl's death to foul play? How does the entire notion of a murder trial--in which facts are interpreted differently by opposing attorneys--fit into this book's thematic structure?

Ishmael suffers from feelings of ambivalence about his home and a cold-blooded detachment from his neighbors. Are we meant to attribute these to the loss of his arm or to other events in his past? How is Ishmael's sense of estrangement mirrored in Hatsue, who as a teenager rebels against her mother's values and at one point declares, "I don't want to be Japanese" [p. 201]? To what extent do Kabuo and Carl suffer from similar feelings? How does this condition of transcendental homelessness serve both to unite and to isolate the novel's characters?
What significance do you ascribe to Ishmael's name? What does Guterson's protagonist have in common with the narrator of Moby-Dick, another story of the sea?

What role has the San Piedro Review played in the life and times of its community? How has Ishmael's stewardship of the paper differed from his father's? In what ways does he resemble his father--of whom his widow says, "He loved humankind dearly and with all his heart, but he disliked most human beings" [p. 36]? What actions of Ishmael's may be said to parallel the older man's?

Ishmael's experience in World War II has cost him an arm. In that same war Horace Whaley, the county coroner, lost his sense of effectiveness, when so many of the men he was supposed to care for died. How has the war affected other characters in this book, both those who served and those who stayed home?

Guterson tells us that "on San Piedro the silent-toiling, autonomous gill-netter became the collective image of the good man" [p. 38]. Thus, Carl's death comes to signify the death of the island's ideal citizen: he represents a delayed casualty of the war in which so many other fine young men were killed. Yet how productive does the ideal of silent individualism turn out to be? To what extent is Carl a casualty of his self-sufficiency? What other characters in this novel adhere to a code of solitude?

Kabuo and Hatsue also possess--and are at times driven by--certain values. As a young girl, Hatsue is taught the importance of cultivating stillness and composure in order "to seek union with the Greater Life" [p. 83]. Kabuo's father imparts to him the martial codes of his ancestors. How do these values determine their behavior, and particularly their responses to internment, war, and imprisonment? How do they clash with the values of the Anglo community, even as they sometimes resemble them?

Racism is a persistent theme in this novel. It is responsible for the internment of Kabuo, Hatsue, and their families, for Kabuo's loss of his land, and perhaps for his indictment for murder. In what ways do the book's Japanese characters respond to the hostility of their white neighbors? How does bigotry manifest itself in the thoughts and behavior of characters like Etta Heine--whose racism is keenly ironic in view of her German origins--Art Moran, and Ishmael himself? Are we meant to see these characters as typical of their place and time?

Although almost all the novel's white characters are guilty of racism, only one of them--Etta Heine--emerges unsympathetically. How do her values and motives differ from those of other San Piedrans? How is her hostility to the Japanese related to her distaste for farming? To what extent are Guterson's characters defined by their feelings for their natural environment?
Ishmael's adolescent romance with Hatsue has been the defining fact of his life, its loss even more wounding than the loss of his arm. Yet when Hatsue first remembers Ishmael, it is only as a "boy" [p. 86] and her recollection of their first kiss is immediately supplanted by the memory of her wedding night with Kabuo. How else does Guterson contrast Hatsue's feelings for these two men? (Note that Hatsue's feelings for both Ishmael and her husband become clear in the course of making love.) What does the disparity between Hatsue's memories and Ishmael's suggest about the nature of love? Where else in this novel do different characters perceive the same events in radically different ways--and with what consequences?

In choosing Kabuo, Hatsue acknowledges "the truth of her private nature" [p. 89]. That choice implies a paradox. For, if Kabuo is a fellow nisei, he is also rooted in the American earth of San Piedro's strawberry fields. How is this doubleness--between Japanese and American--expressed elsewhere in Snow Falling on Cedars?

Ishmael's attraction to Hatsue is closely connected to a yearning for transcendence, as indicated by their early conversation about the ocean. Ishmael says, "It goes forever," while Hatsue insists, "It ends somewhere" [p. 97]. Typically, it is Ishmael who wishes to dissolve boundaries, Hatsue who keeps reasserting them, as when she gently withholds the embrace that Ishmael so desperately wants. What limits might Ishmael wish to transcend, even as a boy? Does he ever manage to do so? Does Snow Falling on Cedars hold the promise of transcendence for its characters or at best offer them a reconciliation with their limits?

One way that Guterson interweaves his novel's multiple narrative strands is through the use of parallelism: Ishmael spies on Hatsue; so does Kabuo. The two men are similarly haunted by memories of the war. Both Kabuo and Carl Heine turn out to be dissatisfied fishermen who yearn to return to farming. Where else in this novel does the author employ this method, and to what effect?

What is the significance of the novel's last sentence: "Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart"?

Suggestions for further readingFiction: Walter Abish, How German Is It; Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939; Günter Grass, Dog Years; Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River; James Jones, From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line; Ivan Klíma, Judge on Trial; Joy Kogawa, Obasan; Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead; Shirley Nelson, The Last Year of the War; Howard Norman, The Bird Artist; E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News.
Nonfiction: John Armor and Peter Wright, Manzanar; Timothy Egan, The Good Rain; Hazel Heckman, Island in the Sound; Lauren Kessler, Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese-American Family; Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore; Studs Terkel, The Good War; Joe Upton, Alaska Blues.

Also by David Guterson, available from Vintage Contemporaries:
The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind

Different Approaches to & Reviews of CHESIL BEACH.......

2009-02-04T04:27:00.000-08:00

Review Consensus: Not quite a consensus, but the majority are impressed

From the Reviews:
"This is a small novel, 160 pages, but a very concentrated one; a miniature aware of the world beyond it. So when the powerful ending comes (and two years later we could have witnessed a completely different outcome), there's a lot behind it. Some might find the summing up a bit too neat; I didn't. It's the necessary step back, the distancing effect that puts one rotten hour into historical perspective." - Steven Carroll, The Age

"McEwan, a '60s child if ever there was one, comes to remind us that there were losers, all right, and that there still are. It would be less interesting to term this a generational achievement than a national one. Only Philip Larkin has ever decribed sex more bleakly than McEwan does here. No fumble, miscue, or calamity is omitted." - Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly

"Mr McEwan's prose is, as always, intense and visually descriptive, but in this elegantly crafted novel his skill lies in his illumination of an evening taut with emotional paralysis and in his portrayal of missed opportunity. As events move forward to the book's dénouement, On Chesil Beach becomes much more than a simple story of emotions held in check by convention. It is a memorable exposé of how terrible wounds can be inflicted and the entire course of a life changed -- by doing nothing." - The Economist

"To reveal what lies in store would lessen the pleasure of reading this small masterpiece, though it's hard to imagine that anything could spoil it." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
"Yet it would be wrong to see this novella as showing the liberated, therapeutically enabled present triumphing unambiguously over the past's stifling repressions and conventions. For, paradoxically, the fullness with which Edward and Florence's inner lives are explored depends wholly on their reticence and embarrassment, on their inability to talk to each other. Indeed, the power of the narrative as a whole derives from the painful seriousness with which they brood, from their antithetical perspectives, on the moment when, as Edward imagines it, "the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman". The book's poignant final pages evince an almost wistful nostalgia for the years before." - Mark Ford, Financial Times

"Kühl und mit einer Präzision, die ans Bösartige grenzt, verfolgt McEwan in dieser genialen Tragödie der Verkennungen, wie zwei Liebende einander immer wieder verfehlen, um Millimeter nur und am Ende endgültig." - Hubert Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"These currents of excitement and dread are following such different directions that it is hardly surprising that by the end of the novel, which comes quite quickly, just a few hours and about 150 pages later, the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach has become the backdrop to solitude rather than communion. This plot may sound inconsequential -- bad sex in English hotel shock! -- but McEwan manages to give it almost tragic impact. This is partly because we come to sympathise so intensely with Florence and Edward's idealistic expectations of intimacy (…..) No, what matters is whether the novel works as fiction. And it does. Some of the prose in the passages away from the bedroom is more workaday than we have come to expect from McEwan, and lacks the panache of his recent work. The exploration of Florence's love of music, particularly, never quite flares into life. Yet within the bedroom this couple's hesitant attempts at intimacy are nuanced and delicately realised." - Natasha Walter, The Guardian

"The unease in this book is mostly sexual. The young couple are hopelessly mismatched sexually (…..) (I)t is a fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret. In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowering to devastating effect." - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday

"On Chesil Beach, however, is full of odd echoes and has elements of folk tale, which make the pleasures of reading it rather greater than the joys of knowing what happened in the end. (…) The style of the book may seem plain: there is no recourse to the use of cadence for effect, and there are no elaborate sentences or pyrotechnics of any sort. We are, after all, in England, where words mean what they say. So numerous are the images of stability and continuity in these years of peace and prosperity, that the reader takes them for granted. The sheer skill in holding tone, and playing with it, is hidden much of the time. The novel is a pure comedy, but it is told from the point of view of the two protagonists who do not think it is funny at all, and this is managed without making either of them seem tedious." - Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books
"On Chesil Beach is a linguistic balancing act, each sentence delicately positioning itself both by historical co-ordinates -- an early-Sixties world of Austin 35s and wireless news bulletins -- and by more private reference points -- the separate anxieties and assumptions of the young bride and groom. McEwan, as Atonement demonstrated, is at his best with this finely tuned historical pastiche. The period detail allows him some virtuosic touches (…..) McEwan's forensic account of the warring couple's partialities (…) is perfectly constructed, but fails to throw off the feel of a private technical exercise. In a novel so reliant on bias and conviction, a little more authorly engagement would be welcome." - Rachel Aspden, New Statesman

"(A) small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses none of those earlier books’ emotional wisdom, narrative scope or lovely specificity of detail. (…) (H)e’s given us a smarmy portrait of two incomprehensible and unlikable people." - Michiko Kautani, The New York Times
"The situation is miniature and enormous, dire and pathetic, tender and irrevocable. McEwan treats it with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan’s written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls "the secret affair between disgust and joy. " (…) If On Chesil Beach is a horror novel, it is also as fundamentally a comedy, one with virtual Monty Python overtones" - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review

"There is a fairy-tale quality to the book, in that everything that follows seems inevitable. The minute currents of tension that change a conversation and a life are so crucial to McEwan's method that it would be unfair to give away every last turn in his narrative. Towards the end, when fates have been sealed, it seems to Edward 'that an explanation of his existence would take up a minute, less than half a page'. Such is the deft compression of McEwan's art here that, in his hands, such a formulation does not seem far from the truth." - Tim Adams, The Observer
"Communication failure is at the center of his tale, and he evokes it with heartbreaking eloquence." - Kyle Smith, People

"But after On Chesil Beach climaxes, the masterfully modulated denouement fast-forwards through the decades to come to our present day -- and prods us to consider what this book really is." - Ed Park, Salon

"Every detail in On Chesil Beach tells the reader that the new age has not yet dawned (…..) Some may call this book a novella, because it is a mere 30,000 words long, but it is in fact a fully realized novel, more than worthy of the grander appellation. Not only is it full of meaningful, organically significant details, but its narrative ebbs and flows in a way that demonstrates the most masterly narrative control. The story unfolds in a perfect manner, withholding now and then for effect, even omitting sometimes, with the result that On Chesil Beach is not only a wonderful read but also perhaps that rarest of things: a perfect novel." - Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle

"The finest passages in On Chesil Beach are the tremulous vacillations experienced by the couple, a sad mixture of stage-fright, clumsy slapstick and tender awkwardness. In the bleak aftermath, the emotional pendulum swings between pity and fury, embarrassment and apology, with each partner's self-doubts and aggrieved resentments interlocking and interchanging. It might, in a way, have been a rather good short story. On Chesil Beach, however, manages to feel too thin and too long simultaneously. (...) The concentration on the consequences of their unfortunate first night seems bizarrely disproportionate, a feeling exacerbated by McEwan's sometimes slapdash plotting elsewhere. (...)On Chesil Beach leaves the reader, like its two confused, disgusted and recriminating characters, utterly unfulfilled." - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

"As it turns out, McEwan’s concern for his characters’ individual humanity and his interest in the larger historical movement end up being somewhat at odds; they refuse, in the end, to embody sociological analysis. Liberation, in this novel, happens somewhere else. But that can only be to the benefit of the humanity of this small but interesting novel. I like it much more than McEwan’s last six novels, at least. (…) The novel is saved by an honest familiarity with individual psychology, and by the fact that it is, really, all about sex, which McEwan certainly does understand. The larger movements of history, however, enter into these lives in ways which are all too much like the novel that Professor Peter Hennessy might write about the period." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator

"Clean of sprawl and clutter -- not a word, incident or image seems slackly placed -- the book never hardens into the schematic. Where McEwan’s earliest handlings of one of his dominant themes -- attempts to attain and sustain loving partnerships -- often seemed diagrams of male and female stereotypes, everything here is alive with human complexity. (…) Subtle, witty, rueful and sometimes heartrending, On Chesil Beach coalesces these perceptions into a novel that is a master feat of concentration in both senses of the word." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
"McEwan exposes the rationalisations and self-deceptions we all succumb to in situations of great emotional uncertainty, the shifts in perception that show what changeable and unpredictable beings we can be to ourselves, let alone one another. In doing so, the book takes us deeper into two people's lives, counter-pointing the tensions of the present with the great backwash of their past and the surging of a future neither can fully see." - Mark Mordue, Sydney Morning Herald

"Writing in the third person, McEwan gives the reader access to both characters' thoughts with his usual skill, and the comedy of embarrassment, or of the kind of erotic misunderstanding that Milan Kundera used to specialise in, quickly disappears as the marital bed begins to seem more and more ominous. (…) It's a pleasure to watch McEwan fleshing out his characters, expertly shifting chronology and point of view around as he prepares for the coming bedroom scene and its aftermath. (…) Part of the problem might be that McEwan's use of suspense makes you forget that startling revelations aren't the point, that his writing is strongest in its texture and detail and masterly narrative set-pieces." - Christopher Tayler, The Telegraph

"Because this is a slight book, it would be unfair to detail the unfolding of this evening any further. Suffice it to say that the tiny tragedy of one wedding night -- which has large-scale implications -- is heartbreaking, understandable from both parties' perspectives, and sickeningly unnecessary." - Lionel Shriver, The Telegraph

"For the reader, the ending of On Chesil Beach comes too soon. Its devastating concluding passage, in which we glimpse the future that flows from the events of the honeymoon night, feels almost like the sketch of a larger novel of which this is merely the first section. Still, the experience of finishing a novel with regret is not so frequent that one should complain of it. Better to say with gratitude that McEwan’s latest fiction is full of richness: of serious thought about the nature of love and human relationships, informed by a poetic sensibility and expressed in prose whose lyricism never errs on the side of self-indulgence." - Jane Shilling, The Times
"A new book by him has long been an event. This new book, though, On Chesil Beach, is more than an event. It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly. (…) The novel has felicities which ensure, rather than embellish, the humanity of its treatment of the lovers' predicament. (…) Ian McEwan is serious, but not solemn, in his unfolding of this predicament, and of surrounding disorders." - Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement

"This slim novel -- a novella, really -- works as a parable of failed empathy. (…) This backward-looking stance, this assumption that the couple may have prospered had they been born a few years later, risks a charge of smugness. It carries more than a whiff of author knows best. The chapters detailing their respective childhoods and schooling sometimes have the same tone, a too-assured intimation that their pasts neatly account for their present difficulties. But such criticisms fall away when McEwan returns to the wedding night itself, scrupulously describing the mordant, melancholy comedy of it, the tragedy it gives rise to." - Alexis Soloski, The Village Voice

"(B)reathtaking (…..) (I)t is in no important sense a miniature. Instead, it takes on subjects of universal interest -- innocence and naiveté, self-delusion, desire and repression, opportunity lost or rejected -- and creates a small but complete universe around them. McEwan's prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

"So reich der schmale Roman an Beobachtungen, an Geschichten, an Beschreibungen gerade der immer wieder abstoppenden sexuellen Begegnungen der beiden ist (selten wurde ein Zungenkuss derart zum Abgewöhnen ausgenüchtert geschildert), so eng sind sie geführt. Wenn man diesem Schachtelalbtraum von einer Geschichte etwas vorwerfen kann, dann ist es -- neben der Kleinigkeit, dass McEwan sich im Epilog auf den psychologisch uninteressanteren Edward konzentriert -- ausgerechnet seine Meisterschaft: dass bis ins letzte Bild alles stimmt, dass noch die kleinste Subgeschichte ein Ziel hat, dass kaum Dunkelheiten bleiben. Wie ein wiedergefundenes Meisterwerk des Fin de siècle liest sich Am Strand" - Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt

"In seinem neuen Roman Am Strand nun überkreuzen sich diese sonst so genau kalkulierten Pläne, es geraten Literatur und Zeitdiagnose ordentlich durcheinander -- was vielleicht der Grund ist für das seltsam leblose und, schlimmer noch bei dem Thema, lustlose Scheitern dieses Sexromans vor dem Zeitalter des Sex." - Georg Dietz, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:
On Chesil Beach centres around the wedding night of Edward and Florence, and McEwan gets right to the point in his opening line:
They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. McEwan describes that wedding night in painful, exacting detail, from the meal they have in their room all the way through to the bitter end on the beach. He pulls back to fill in background -- their families and upbringing, their circumstances, their relationship -- but then always zooms back in to the wedding night. And you just know it's not going to go well. The time is 1962, and Edward and Florence are perhaps even worse equipped than most to deal with sexual difficulty than most of their contemporaries. They're deeply in love, but the physical has proved problematic during their courtship. Over the months Edward made some headway, but it never came easy, and Florence doesn't really take to much physical intimacy -- his tongue in her mouth when they, kiss for example. She has vague ideas of what to expect now, and she's dreading it:
Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust; her whole being was in revolt against a prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated.

Indeed:
being touched "down there" by someone else, even someone she loved, was as repulsive as, say, a surgical procedure on the eye. Yes, Florence's attitude is pathological; worse yet, she hasn't made it entirely clear to Edward how she feels about this act they're supposed to engage in. Edward has some sense of Florence's qualms, but he's so over-excited about finally getting this far that he doesn't pay enough attention. The exquisitely awkward dance they do as Florence tries to maneuver herself around the inevitable is wonderfully captured by McEwan, from both their vantage points. Marvellously, it comes even worse than expected, as Edward contributes to the mess with his own sexual difficulties (let's just say that his decision to lay off gratifying himself in the days before the wedding looks like it left him more precariously bottled-up than is healthy). Instead of awkward consummation what we get is sexual disaster.

McEwan doesn't let it end there; indeed, what's decisive is how they handle this mess they've gotten themselves into. That's what what interests McEwan, and that's where their real failure lies. They finally get some of the words out into the open, as they finally try discuss sex, but they're not very good at that either -- hardly surprising, given that they've never had a go at talking about it to anyone, on top of the terrible pas-de-deux they were just part of. Both partners' pasts contribute to the situation. Edward is used to living if not a lie then at least a very warped truth, having been brought up to treat his mother as if everything she did was normal when, in fact, little is, as she's been unhinged since an accident that left her in a coma for a week when he was a young boy. His father finally tells him about the accident that left her brain-damaged when he is fourteen, news that's not really news but still changes everything. "What I've said changes absolutely nothing", his father insists -- but then that's part of the problem. As before: "the fantasy could be sustained only if it was not discussed", and that's pretty much how they go on.

As for Florence, being a late bloomer is hardly explanation enough for her pathological feelings about sex. McEwan doesn't come right out and say it, but there are strong hints that a childhood trauma involving her father is at the root of it. Certainly, there's something off about that father-daughter relationship; even dense Edward notices that. (It's almost a shame that McEwan had to go that far; surely the unsettling weirdness of sex to a sheltered child of the times might have been enough to get him nearly as far.)

On Chesil Beach is a period-piece, McEwan focussing very hard on that time before the so-called sexual-revolution. It's not nostalgic, but he is trying to capture an era and he's very explicit about it, constantly reminding the reader of this different time (down to noting that: "This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine" when discussing their meal). It's not just the sexual mores and understanding that he wants to highlight, either: it's also very much a novel about family circumstances, opportunities, and, ultimately, class. Edward is the exception among his classmates in going on to university -- choosing London over Oxford, too, in a minor rebellion. Florence's parents are an academic (her mother) and a successful businessman; complicating the picture is the fact that Edward is hired by her father, his first real job.

Florence is a gifted and ambitious violinist, torn between the different opportunities she has; Edward has little understanding (or true appreciation) of what she does, her classical music remaining all Greek to him. They're very different people, yet McEwan convincingly presents them as in love -- the one constant, that, however, becomes yet another complicating factor.

After the wedding night McEwan also offers an extended coda, of afterwards. He focusses almost entirely on Edward here, describing the changes he undergoes and what becomes of him. It allows McEwan to make his final points -- of realising that a bit of patience, a bit of dialogue, and the power of their love would have been enough, that awkward moments can be handled if they're tackled head-on -- but leaves too much open about Florence (including the question of whether she ever got over her sex-problems).

There's been some discussion of whether On Chesil Beach is a novel or a novella. The small American edition stretches the book out to just over 200 pages -- and has A Novel printed on the cover -- but it's less a matter of length than scope, and On Chesil Beach's failing is that it remains a mere novella even while McEwan suggests (but doesn't follow through on) much larger ambitions. McEwan packs events and character-description into it, but he doesn't dare really move beyond the small story of the wedding night. It's like the notes are here for a larger novel, but everything is like the coda, background to the essential tale, but so much of it that it constantly suggests there should be more.

Successful in large part, the book nevertheless falls short of its larger ambitions, as McEwan chose a middle-ground that isn't entirely satisfying. Neither a compact novella nor a full-blown novel

On Chesil Beach is a very good book, but not entirely satisfying. Still, well worth reading.
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John Updike has died this week.....

2009-02-01T07:30:00.000-08:00

John Updike: The sultan of suburbia

By Joel Yanofsky, The GazetteJanuary 30, 2009
Things just got worse for the middle class. For the moment, never mind plummeting house prices and rising unemployment. Last Tuesday, the middle class lost its most eloquent champion. John Updike died.
Updike’s accomplishments were myriad and, for once, the word fits. He wrote some 60 books – 24 novels – and received just about every literary prize and honour around, except for the one he deserved: the Nobel.
His most acclaimed work – like his exquisite short stories and his quartet of irrepressible Rabbit novels – never strayed very far from his own experience. But he also enjoyed veering off in unlikely directions. Just to show he could.
And it turned out there wasn’t anything he didn’t or, for that matter, couldn’t write about – from an African dictator in The Coup to a blocked Jewish writer in the Henry Bech stories. Updike, Jewish? Blocked?
His essays and reviews – most of them appearing first in The New Yorker and then collected every decade or so in door-stopping volumes – showed off the range of his intelligence and the depth of his curiosity. Whether he was writing about modern art or religion, golf or infidelity, there was a greediness, an insatiability, in his prose. He took in everything and made the most of it.
Who else would think to turn his clumsiness on the dance floor into a meditation on marriage and mortality? Just Updike: “What do women want? They want, evidently, to dance…. (M)y dancing days are stumbling down to a precious few. This is a sadness to my wife, who took ballet as a tiny girl and loved her Connecticut cotillions. Well, I tell her, life is more than a two-step. But in my heart I fear it is not; we are born (step one) and then we die (step two), and between-times the drumbeat of the pulse demands that we act out its rhythm.”
Updike’s genius, a friend said after his death, was that he thought faster and noticed more than other people. This sounds about right. Other tributes and appreciations, however, seem to have missed the point.
Yes, as the obituaries say, he made his mark chronicling middle-class peccadilloes. Only not in the way you’d think, not subversively, as I heard another eulogizer suggest, and never cynically. His love for his characters may have been ambivalent but that’s because ambivalent love, as he said, was the only kind worth writing about.
In fact, Updike was ahead of his time in being behind it. While his contemporaries – from Jack Kerouac to Norman Mailer – did their best to disparage ordinary life, Updike celebrated it.
Even now, it’s instructive to watch TV series like Mad Men, with its mocking take on 1960s suburbia, or the new movie Revolutionary Road – based on a 1962 novel by Richard Yates, another Updike contemporary – to see what Updike was up against.
Just observe poor, pretty Kate Winslet and even prettier Leonardo DiCaprio moping about the soul-killing conformity of their mundane lives in suburbia and you get an idea of how mischievous and brave Updike was in choosing to go against the grain. How he knew, from the start, that someone had “to give the mundane its beautiful due” and that someone might as well be him.
This took some doing at times. But Updike, born in 1932, a child of the depression and the Protestant work ethic, was no slacker.
* * *
With Updike gone, the United States has also lost an ardent champion. He loved his country; so much so it seemed to embarrass him.
When I interviewed him in 1989, he confessed, somewhat sheepishly, that he was the most fortunate of fortunate creatures: a white American male living in the second half of the 20th century. (What a shame that there will be no Updike essay on Obama.)
In 1990, when Updike’s fourth, final, and best Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, appeared, his fictional alter ego, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, expressed a similarly ambiguous patriotism. Describing America, Harry says: “God’s country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.”
The Rabbit series began in 1960 with Updike’s breakthrough book Rabbit Run. As Updike said later, his second novel would announce him as more than “a New Yorker bunny,” but someone with “some teeth and fire.” The series continued in 10-year intervals until 2000, concluding with a novella, Rabbit Remembered, about Harry’s kids.
These books, taken as a whole, are an encyclopedia of the unfamous U.S.A: the extraordinarily ordinary life – or vice versa – of one man, one family, one nation. Everything’s in them: race and class, sex and love, divorce and decline, and, finally, death.
* * *
I still have a sense memory of what meeting Updike was like. I mean I still shudder at the thought. Updike was polite and easygoing; I was a wreck.
Why? Probably because when I first started daydreaming about becoming a writer it was Updike’s stories about a suburb much like my own that had me thinking two contradictory thoughts. You could, indeed, write impressively about this seemingly unimpressive world. And there was no point. You’d never do it as well as Updike.
Interviewing him reinforced the second notion. It was like teeing up next to Tiger Woods.
I was not alone in feeling this way. The novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a wacky, wonderful memoir, U & I, all about his obsession with Updike’s prose style. The British critic Wilfrid Sheed once compared Updike’s classy career to Fred Astaire’s. “It’s just nice,” Sheed said, “to know somebody lives like that.”
After Updike’s death, a kind of impromptu tribute began to gather momentum on the New Yorker’s website.
Famous writers, in particular, felt compelled to blog. E.L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Julian Barnes and many others shared their memories and praise.
“When a writer dies, a vote comes in,” novelist Jeffrey Eugenides says in his message. “It usually takes a while, but not in this case. Updike’s death has revealed how many people, how many different kinds of people, felt a strong connection to his work. He was our great American writer. There won’t be another like him.”
But there will be more books. Diagnosed with lung cancer, Updike was still doing publicity for his new novel, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, last December. His final New Yorker review appeared in November. (He slammed Toni Morrison.) A new collection of short stories is due out in the spring; a book of poems in the fall.
Early in his career, Updike said: “To be in print is to be saved.” It was an explanation, maybe an apology, for being so ridiculously prolific.
Still, at the time, it must have sounded, even to him, like wishful thinking. It doesn’t any more.

David Mitchell

2009-01-27T08:03:00.000-08:00

David |Mitchell ~ His next novel....

2009-01-27T08:00:00.005-08:00

Quite a few people at the Book club have asked me if I knew what David Mitchell was writing currently............

I picked this up from Wiki..........

Mitchell's next book, currently known as "NAGASAKI" [3], will be an historical novel about Dejima, the man-made island in the middle of Nagasaki Harbour that was built to house Dutch traders in the 17th century. Having just finished five months of research in the Netherlands, Mitchell says that the biggest challenge will be what to omit from this complex story. "For over two centuries", he said, "the Dutch were the only white people allowed to see inside Japan". No one was allowed on or off the island except for tradesmen, translators and prostitutes. "Except", he said, "every four years when the head of the trading post made the trek to Edo (modern-day Tokyo) to pay his respects to the Shogun." Mitchell plans to contrast Shogunate Japan with the Napoleonic era in Europe, he said. Of particular interest is the fact that while the Netherlands ceased to exist for a while after Napoleon annexed it, the Dutch flag still flew in Dejima.

[edit] Novels
Ghostwritten, 1999
number9dream, 2001
Cloud Atlas, 2004
Black Swan Green, 2006
Untitled De-jima Novel, 2009

[edit] Further reading
Mitchell, D. (2003). "January Man", Best of Young British Novelists 2003, Granta. Retrieved on 24 September 2007.
Linklater, A. (2007-09-22). "The author who was forced to learn wordplay", Life & Style, The Guardian. Retrieved on 23 September 2007.

[edit] References
^ Bold Type: Essay by David Mitchell
^ David Mitchell - The TIME 100 - TIME
^ http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20070624a1.html

Change of Books for 2009

2009-01-27T07:52:00.000-08:00

I have now amended the list of books and meeting times for 2009..........

Message from Pat.......

2009-01-27T07:40:00.000-08:00

There is a slight change in the order of books for reading because of people being away when their book was going to be discussed.

So now we shall be discussing:

On Chesil Beech by Ian McEwan at our 20th February meeting.........

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Gutterson at the 20th March meeting............

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Alborn will be discussed on the 17th April ...........

Mutant Messages Down Under by Marlo Morgan to be discussed on 15th May.

Best wishes, Pat

Some critical Reviews of "On Chesil Beach"....

2009-01-16T11:44:00.000-08:00

A Talented Wordcrafter Describes an Improbable Honeymoon, July 6, 2007
By
Donald Mitchell "a Practical Optimist" (Boston) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) If you are easily seduced by beautiful sentences, you'll feel On Chesil Beach is a five-star book. If you love exploring inner dialogue, you'll be even more pleased with this book. If, however, you like your stories to be compelling because of their relevance and interest to your own life, you'll wonder why in the world Mr. McEwan chose to write about this particular problem of poor communications in the context of 1962. As you delve deeper into the book, you'll be even more puzzled by the book's pivotal event and the characters' reactions to it. The short book (neither novella nor full novel) is organized in five parts that seem much like the acts in a Greek tragedy. The opening scene shows a couple dining in their room at an inn. "They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible." The second act describes how they met. The third act takes place in their bedroom in the inn. The fourth act describes their courtship. The fifth act takes place on the beach and in their lives afterward as they attempt and fail to communicate. Mr. McEwan does a good job of capturing your attention through exploring the couple's growing tension as they move toward the consummation of their marriage. But past that point, the story seemed like a punctured balloon to me: My interest was gone. I suspect that reaction is because I didn't feel close to either character; they are more there to entertain me than to lead me into experiencing the story like the characters do. Clearly, the story would have worked much better for me if focused around a more universal trial in marriage, such as handling both sets of parents during the birth of a first child. I also thought that Mr. McEwen played the role of the Greek chorus too often . . . telling us what was going on rather than letting us see and hear the action. The fourth part seems clearly out of place; it should have preceded the third part. Unless you are drawn to beautiful sentences and images, I suggest you skip this book . . . it's a misdirected storytelling foray by a talented writer that is eminently avoidable.
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What might have been, July 4, 2007
By
Ann Nigel James (Menemsha, Martha's Vineyard, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) As an Ian McEwan virgin, I was eagerly anticipating my tryst with this book--but it turned out to be as disappointing and unsatisfying as Edward's and Florence's wedding night (well, maybe not quite). McEwan does not merely ignore, but actually reverses, the wise "show, don't tell" advice about fiction writing. In his expository chapters about Edward's and Florence's backgrounds and courtship, he doesn't let us see much of them interacting and conversing with each other and their families; instead of fleshing them out in these sections, he gives us their inner thoughts, a panoply of geographical place names that won't mean much to readers outside the U.K. and a list of gourmet vegetables that Edward tastes for the first time at his future in-laws' dinner table: courgettes, aubergines and mangetouts. Conversely, in the play-by-play account of the wedding-night bedroom activities, McEwan "shows" each frame of the encounter with exhaustive, sometimes clinical detail. In this area, less is often more, and although it requires greater effort to write about physical intimacy with subtlety and allusion, it can still evoke the same intense reaction in the reader--without getting the sheets so messy. Do we really need words like "perineum" and the focus on the lone pubic hair that has escaped from Florence's knickers? Since I've already given away my copy of "On Chesil Beach," I can't use exact quotes here, but suffice it to say that the description of Edward's sticky, gummy ejaculate adhering to Florence's knees and chin is over the top--almost as if the author is trying to turn off the reader as well as Florence. The story could have ended effectively and poignantly after the couple's hopeless, near-tragic postcoital verbal battle on the beach, perhaps with a few closing thoughts from the author on the sadness and might-have-been-ness of it all. But instead, there is an anticlimactic final chapter consisting of what sound like afterthoughts, hurriedly recounting Edward's meanderings over the next 40 years. Somewhat mystifyingly, McEwan does not mention Florence's personal life after the traumatic wedding night, although he has paid equal attention to both characters until this last chapter. He does, however, offer an oblique but important clue. In a recent review of "On Chesil Beach," Christopher Hitchens concludes dismissively--and erroneously--that "Florence, a classically trained violinist, devotes the remainder of her life to a rather spinsterish role in a string quartet." Not at all. In an admiring newspaper review of a triumphant performance by that string quartet at Wigmore Hall in Oxford, the fictional reviewer singles out the exceptional playing of the first violinist, who is Florence. "She is obviously in love," writes this critic (to the best of my recollection), "not only with the music and with Mozart, but with life itself." Surely McEwan is implying that Florence, unlike Edward, has ultimately found fulfillment and happiness.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Could something please happen..., July 27, 2007
By
J. Mills "adventure seeker" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) Although I felt that this book was well-written, my attention span was challenged. The book was long on detail and short on action. Simply, it was antclimactic...
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Not My Cuppa, July 13, 2007
By
David Schweizer "Almawood" (Kansas, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) The author is dead on in his description of sexual frustration, I'll hand him that. One does indeed feel as though one knew these people, because what he is describing in the end is the fear of sexual contact. These days such experiences are rare, because by the time they are married, most people have been around the block. But fifty years ago in the world McEwan describes, sex came for the first time on honeymoon night. If the couple can be described as naive, it is only in this one area; otherwise they are sophisticated, if not jaded. The bride is having a hard time accepting French kissing, and fears she may vomit if he probes too deeply. He is afraid he may experience ecstasy before she's ready. This is described in excruciating detail. In fact, the details pile up until one is taking the bride's side: This sex business is an ordeal. The couple is a nervous wreck. The reader finds oneself wondering how the modern age ever was born with this sort of Victorian repression pressing so heavily. This all sounds very 19th century but the author is right to locate this so very late in the 20th century. We may never be free of it. These deeply disturbed individuals need help - not just sexual counseling but probing psychoanalysis and possibly shock treatment. In this sense the book is a revelation - what in God's name was done to these decent people in their childhood to make them so sick? We believe them to be permanently scarred. McEwan no doubt accomplishes what he set out to achieve, but I wonder if it was worth the trouble.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

Love means never having to say..., August 9, 2007
By
JoAnne Goldberg (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) I'm sorry, but what else can you say about a 22-year-old wife who ran away? And who took almost 200 pages to do so, leaving her drooling groom and an untold number of readers on a beach filled with literary quicksand, struggling to find a likeable character or a redeeming bit of plot? As I finished this book, I found myself humming "Where do I begin?" (the theme song from the movie version of Love Story). The similarities between that book and Chesil include length (both books barely squeak past 200 pages) and an ill-fated romance marked by different socioeconomic backgrounds and music. But Edward and Florence are no Oliver and Jenny, and anyone who sheds tears at the end of Chesil is probably mourning the loss of $22 (even the $13.20 amazon price seems steep.) I admire spare, chiseled prose, but McEwan's stiff, unyielding dialog feels wooden rather than trenchant. The book reads like a period piece, a stylized sitting room drama from the turn of the last century. Was Florence molested by her repulsive father? Possibly. But McEwan does his best to depict Edward as a pretty unappetizing boyfriend/husband. Was Edward's inability to sense his bride's emotional state a result of his growing up with a brain-damaged mother in a pigsty of a house? Does it matter? (I have to admit that the description of the mess was probably my favorite part of this otherwise unappealing book.) Though the story describes their courtship, the relationship has so little sizzle that it's hard to understand how the two of them managed to work up the energy to go through with a wedding. After dragging us through the beach spat (their first and only fight? and even that lacked spirit), McEwan decides to take the easy way out. So much for enduring love. While I can accept the premise for most of the book--the stilted, boring couple, the unpleasant parents, the wedding night jitters--a lifelong estrangement defies all experience and common sense. My impression was that McEwan was as tired of these colorless whiners as I was. Finally, the big question: how did this book ever get published? That's a rhetorical question, of course. If anyone else had written this book and managed to get it into the hands of a publisher, he would have been told "nice treatment--shows a lot of promise--bring it back when you're finished." But when you're Ian "Booker Prize" McEwan, editors may be a little too kind. As Ian himself might say, the result can be downright nauseous.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

The ickiness of intimacy, July 27, 2007
By
Julee Rudolf "book snob" (Oak Harbor, WA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) As the novella (miniscule font in a small dimensioned book) begins, Florence and Edward are "young [22 years old], educated, and both virgins," newlyweds on their wedding night contemplating the evening's objective: consummation. But considering his prenuptial preparation and nature--prone to making spontaneous relationship decisions in the throes of passion, hers--uptight in the ways of intimacy, what transpires is no surprise. The couple's progress is interrupted at opportune moments for flashbacks into their pasts: a bit on their upbringings, family members, meeting, and courtship. Alternate chapters cover the wedding night. Its final dozen pages fast-forward four decades beyond the honeymoon. On the night in question, she naively suffers from a failure to understand; he just plain misunderstands. Readers, sexually squeamish or not, may also suffer when reading the minutiae of their intimacy, which is, at times, just plain too much information. Better: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

Clearly in the minority, June 18, 2007
By
Alexander G. Hoffman (Toronto) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) I fully realize that as I am writing this, I am outnumbered 18-1 in the reviews of this book. Frankly, I absolutly loathed it. Florence and Edward don't, for a second, feel like actual human beings. I never saw any indication of why these two were "in love" or why they would ever have gotten to the point of being married. Edward is married to a woman who pretty much recoils at intimacy and who has made it clear she doesn't want his tongue in her mouth and yet while kissing her, seems to believe she is going to...well...take him in her mouth? Florence suggests, on her wedding night, that she and Edward would be fine as long as he goes out and makes love to other women? Any of this is realistic? The ending just caps it off. It sounds like a guy with a failed life, "talking an ex pretty" believing that it would have worked only "if". I never got the characters, never cared about them, certainly didn't see any reason they were together and just didn't enjoy it.
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Not to be compared to Atonement, March 31, 2008
By
anonymous "mrw" (CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach: A Novel (Hardcover) This is a very short, very pointless novella in my opinion. It is in no way comparable to Atonement. The prose is in McEwan's usual excellent style, but I was left with the feeling, "Is that all?"
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Bittersweet tale, ultimately trite, December 18, 2008
By
Cecil Bothwell "Author of Pure Bunkum" (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach (Paperback) Ian McEwan set himself the writerly task of composing a novel whose entire action takes place in just a few hours and succeeded. However, along the way he failed to help the reader much care about the young couple whose lives turn on a dime on their honeymoon night. The characters are so two-dimensional that their cataclysm fails the believability test. No one THAT much in love could behave THAT stupidly. McEwan is handy with a phrase, however vacuous the result. If you are fond of TV drama, this may just be your ticket, but life is short and there are more good books to read than you will ever have time to open.
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Not as good as his previous works, July 14, 2008
By
Barbara Johnson "Avid Reader" (Baker City, OR USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Chesil Beach (Paperback) I have enjoyed this author for years, but Chesil Beach didn't live up to his previous works.

Cloud Atlas

2009-01-01T05:53:00.000-08:00

Just started reading "Cloud Atlas" again and find it a fascinating read. Just the thing for a sunny 1st January 2009 in the Limousin.

Start the year as I mean to go on!

Helps with th fuzzzzzzy head from last night. Too much champagne and excellent food.

An interesting read.......

2008-12-31T03:08:00.000-08:00

Foundations of Crisis
By Doug Casey, Chairman, Casey Research, LLC.

Everybody wants predictions.

The following article does a little better than that, in that I wrote it back in November of 1997, outlining several theories of history, and pointing to a logical way of anticipating what will likely happen to the world at large over the next generation.

As you will read, the methodology I relied upon for anticipating the events that are now unfolding -- 11 years later -- were actually quite accurate, confirming, in my mind at least, that now is a time to be very cautious in your personal and financial affairs.
The article is unaltered in its text from the original, though I have added some current commentary in bold italics
Doug Casey
December 16, 2008

"Don't know much about the Middle Ages, look at the pictures an' I turn the pages. Don' know much about no rise and fall, don' know much 'bout nothin' at all" "Wonderful World," Sam Cooke.
The lyrics quoted above probably describe the average American's knowledge of history about as well as any academic study. Not only don't they know anything about it, and think it's irrelevant, but what they do know is inaccurate and slanted. And they must not think very much about the future either if the amount of consumer debt out there, mostly accumulating at 18% interest, is any indication.
One point of studying history is that it gives you an indication of what's likely to happen now, if you can find an appropriate analog in the past. This is a tricky business because as you look at factors contributing to a trend, it's not easy to determine which ones are really important. Making that determination is a judgment call, and everyone's judgment is colored by his worldview, or Weltanschauung as the Germans would have it.

Let me briefly spell out my Weltanschauung so you can more accurately determine how it compares with your own, and how it may be influencing my interpretation of the future.
I'm intensely optimistic about the long-term future. It seems to me a lock cinch that the advance of technology alone -- and nanotechnology in particular -- will result in a future of incredible abundance and prosperity, and that alone will solve most of the problems that plague us. Space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension will be commonplace realities. These things, plus the growth of both knowledge and its accessibility and the concomitant rise of the individual from the group, will constantly diminish politics as an element of life. The future will be much better than anything visualized on Star Trek, and will arrive much sooner. That's the good news.
The bad news is that within the longest trend in history, the ascent of man, there is plenty of room for setbacks, and much of history is a case of two steps forward and one back. My gloomy short-term outlook, and my reasons for maintaining it, is recounted here monthly. Whether it's right or wrong, from an investor's point of view, the short term is more relevant than the long term. Notwithstanding Warren Buffett's great success in going for the long term, Keynes was right when he said that in the long run we're all dead. History shows that goes for civilizations as well as people. The problem is that our civilization is probably just now on the cusp of the long term.

Hari Seldon: Where Are You When We Need You?

Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation trilogy centers around a scientist, Hari Seldon, who invents a science called psychohistory, which allows the fairly accurate prediction of broad trends in society going for centuries into the future. Seldon lives on Trantor, the planetary capital of a galactic empire; the entire planet is covered with a high-tech version of Washington, D.C., devoted to nothing but taxing and regulating the rest of the galaxy. Seldon forecasts that the empire will collapse and Trantor turn into a gigantic ghost town. And of course that's what happens, because it's a novel, and that makes for a good story. It's a good story because it's credible, and it's credible because people know nothing lasts forever, and there is a cyclicality to everything; birth, youth, maturity, senescence, and death. These stages are shared by everything in the material world, whether it's a person, a city, a civilization, or a galaxy. It's just a question of time and scale.

From that point of view everyone knows the future, i.e., we all know that everything eventually dies. But we'd like a bit more precision on the timing of their lifecycles. Some gurus believe, or appear to believe, they can actually predict the details of the future; I consider them knaves. People who actually do believe them should be considered fools. That said -- Nostradamus, astrology, channeling, tea leaf reading, and the like aside -- I do think the best indicator of what will likely happen in the future is what has happened in the past. That may seem like an obvious statement, but it's not. There have traditionally been three ways of looking at the problem; call them theories of history.

Oldest is what might be termed a chaotic view, which presumes mankind doesn't have any ultimate destination but is wafted on the wings of Fortune or hangs by the thread of Fate. Subject to the arbitrary will of the gods, whether it's the Old Testament's Yahweh, or Homer's Zeus, the future is unpredictable, and prophecy or an oracle gives you as good a read as anything else. I discount this theory heavily.

A second ancient view is that everything is cyclical, and therefore somewhat predictable. History may be viewed like a giant sine wave that's possibly headed somewhere, but the direction is unknown. Or history is really a circle, constantly repeating itself, much like the four seasons of the year. There's a lot of wisdom to the cyclical view.

The third view sees history as a linear sequence, one that's actually headed somewhere. That view holds a special appeal for followers of evangelically oriented religions, particularly Christians (many of whose beliefs have an apocalyptic tinge) and Marxists (who were, until lately, given heart by the "scientific" inevitability their views would prevail). The linear view ties in with the idea of Progress, that (more or less) every day and in every way, things are getting better and better -- although there's also a subculture populated mostly by deep ecology, animal rights, and anti-technology types who believe things are headed to hell in a hand-basket. But they all believe we're headed somewhere in a more-or-less straight line. There can be a lot of truth to the linear view, certainly if you look at the technological progress of mankind over the past 10,000 years, and this view prevails today.

My own view is a synthesis of the cyclical and linear theories. I see history evolving towards an incredibly bright future, but cyclically suffering setbacks, cyclically repeating the same patterns along the way. To me history looks like a spiral, heading off in a specific direction, but always covering the same ground in a different way with each revolution.

That's one reason The Fourth Turning, (Broadway Books, NY, 1997) by William Strauss and Neil Howe got my attention; we're all drawn to those who see at least part of reality the way we do. The book is an extrapolation of their last work, Generations, and notwithstanding its literary faults, is simply brilliant.

I've never met Howe, but did have lunch with Strauss once about five years ago. The way I see it, although they're both conservatives, neither of them has any particular economic, political, or social philosophy, and they're not trying to grind an ax. Their books are a value-free look at U.S. history, and their conclusions are more credible as a result.
Their basic hypothesis is one I suspect Hari Seldon would recognize, and my thoughts are built on the research Strauss and Howe have done over the years. I suggest you get a copy of The Fourth Turning while it's still in the stores. That's also true for my own Crisis Investing for the Rest of the '90s, which has several chapters on related subject matter, and Arthur Herman's just-released The Idea of Decline in the West, which also bears on the subject. With 50,000 new books published every year, very few stay available for more than a few months. If something has appeal, you should buy it now, because it may be hard to come by when you have the chance to get into it. (Of course, I was wrong on that point -- websites such as Amazon and Alibris.com now make it easy to pick up many older books.)

Generations

Generational conflict has been recognized since ancient times. The twist here is the discovery of several things that have previously eluded observers. One is that the well- known conflict between fathers and sons is only half the story; there aren't just two generational types that alternate (e.g., liberal and conservative), but four. The reason for looking at it this way is that a human life can be conveniently divided into four stages: Childhood, Young Adulthood, Midlife, and Elderhood. Throughout all of history, a long life might be considered to be 80 to 100 years, with each of the four stages equaling a quarter of it.

Just as each person's life holds four stages of about 20 years each, each generation comprehends a group of people born over about 20 years. Members of a particular generation tend to share values and ways of looking at the world not only because their parents also shared a set of views (which the kids are reacting to), but because every new generation experiences a new set of events in a way unique to them. They hear the same music, see the same events, are exposed to the same books. Members of a generation share a collective persona. There appear to be four distinct archetypal personae that recur throughout American history. And throughout world history as well, although that's a bit beyond what I hope to explore here.

It also seems, throughout history, that there are periodic crises. About once every century, or about when each of the four generational types has run its course, a cataclysmic event occurs. It generally takes the form of a major war, and it generally catalyzes a whole new epoch for society.
The four mature generations alive today each represent an archetype. Let's review them from the oldest now living, to the youngest.

Hero Archetype

The "GI" generation, born between 1901 and 1924, includes basically all living people in their mid-70s and older. They grew up and came of age in the midst of the most traumatic years in human history: the 1930s and '40s. This was a time of catastrophic financial and economic collapse, world war, political dictatorship, genocide, and virulent ideology, among other unpleasant things; a period of intense turmoil. The times required them to be civic minded, optimistic, regular guys who could be counted on to do the right thing, fit in, and see that everybody got a square deal. As a consequence of what they've been through, they tend to be indulgent parents. As kids they're "good"; as adults they're selfless, constructive, and communitarian. Hero archetypes encounter a Crisis environment in Young Adulthood; assuming they survive it, the odds are the rest of their lives will be lived in growing economic prosperity, leading to a leisurely retirement.

Artist Archetype

Meanwhile, another generation was being born at the height of the Crisis -- something that seems to occur roughly every 80-100 years -- from 1925-42. This generation, the "Silent," watched these titanic events happen but were too young to take part in them. They were relegated to being protected, while trying to be helpful in the limited ways available to them. They're overprotected as children, when they might be characterized as "placid"; they tend to underprotect their own children as a reaction. As adults they're sensitive, well-liked, sentimental, and caring.

Prophet Archetype

Next came the group we call the "Boomers," born from 1943 to 1960. This was the first generation born after the Crisis was over, and they grew up in an environment where their parents (mostly GIs and early cohort Silents) felt obligated to protect them from all the trauma of the preceding years and were desirous of giving them all the things they never had. As kids they're seen as "spirited." Later in life, they tend to be narcissistic, presumptuous, self-righteous, and ruthless. Born after a Crisis, their Childhood years coincide with a rebirth of society, and their Elderhood coincides with another Crisis. More on them below.
Nomad ArchetypeThe fourth generational type is represented by today's "Generation X," born 1961-81, during what might be called an Awakening period when the Boomers were in the limelight. As a consequence, they were overlooked and a bit abandoned. Their reputation as kids can be summed up as "bad." They're oriented toward survival, which is partially a result of their being underprotected as children. When they become parents, they react and become overprotective. They tend to be savvy, practical, tough, and amoral.

The kids born between 1982 and perhaps 2002 should be another Hero archetype. My own experience with them is that they're shaping up that way. Represented by clean-cut, straight-arrow Power Rangers. Quite a reaction to the sewer-dwelling Mutant Ninja Turtles that were analogs for the previous generation. They're "'can do" kids, programmed to do the right thing in a smoke-free, drug-free, eco-sensitive, politically correct world. Like all Hero types, they respect their elders, do what they're told without much questioning authority. That's just the type of person you want to have fighting a war for you, and that's probably just what they'll wind up doing. Just like the last Hero types, the GIs. (Iraq was first. Iran next? Or will it be Saudi Arabia?)

It's risky to characterize everyone born in a certain time frame as sharing a persona; after all, people are individuals, not ants or atoms, each like the other. But it's really no different than characterizing people by the country they're from. There's no question in my mind that people share characteristics by virtue of the milieu in which they live, and that's true of time as well as geography. Take a look at the people you know by age groups, and see if they don't roughly fit the brief descriptions.

The interesting thing is that through about 400 years of American history, it's possible to see these generational types repeating themselves. It's not an accident. The characteristics of each type shape the next generation, as well as current events. And events leave a further imprint on all of them.

Making an Example of the Boomers

Just as every generation has its own persona, the character of each generation evolves as it moves through life. The Boomers are perhaps the most relevant example of this. First they were Mouseketeers and Beaver Cleaver clones. Who could have guessed they would mutate into Hippies and even Yippies as they reached Young Adulthood, reacting against everything they'd grown up with, everything their parents worked so hard to give them.

They came of age during a period that might be called an Awakening, and it's recurred on schedule five times so far in American history. Awakenings are times of religious and moral ferment, when the youth tend to challenge prevailing cultural values pretty much across the board. Young adults were into New Age things this time around, in the 1960s and '70s. At the time it seemed utterly shocking and completely new, but that was only because nobody then alive had seen the previous Utopian Awakening in the 1830s and '40s, the Pietist Awakening of the 1740s and '50s, the Puritan Awakening of the 1630s and '40s, or the Protestant Reformation of the 1530s and '40s.

Like all the generations before them that grew up in similar times, they eventually put away the things of their youth. But who guessed that their next mutation would be into Yuppies, whose motto was not "Peace and Love" or "Revolution for the Hell of It," but "Shop Till You Drop" and "He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins" as they moved into midlife.

But even now the acquisitive mania that characterized the '80s is ebbing, now that the first cohorts of Boomers are crossing over 50. You can already see the signs of their next stage of evolution, in the judgmental behavior of people like William Bennett (George Bush) and Dan Quayle (Ann Coulter) on the "right," and Al Gore and Hillary Clinton on the "left." They did sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll in the '60s. They believe they've fought the war of good against evil in both Vietnam and the segregated lunch counters of the South. They know they were the first generation to have traveled widely thanks to the jet, to have been brought up by television, and had the telephone as a given. They've been there, done that, and now that they're getting older, they're going to make sure that everyone else benefits from their wisdom -- like it or not.
The Boomers are an archetypal Prophet generation, a type born after a secular crisis, just in time to create another one. Get the image of a grim elder, with a well-defined vision of what's right and wrong, calling down wrath, and laying down the law for a troubled nation in chaotic times. That's the type of person who tends to lead countries into wars, as well as through them. Interestingly, the Boomers in America have their counterparts abroad today, especially in China, where they grew up during the Cultural Revolution. Two ideologically driven, righteous groups running two such powerful and alien cultures is almost a guaranteed formula for a millennial-sized crisis. Which should appear, coincidentally, sometime shortly after the millennium. (We're right on schedule.)

So What's Next?

The real watersheds in history, crises that make or break a civilization, occur roughly every 100 years. The most recent ones in American history that will resonate without looking up the facts in a reference book are the Revolution, circa 1782; the Civil War, circa 1863; and WW II, circa 1943. We've had other wars, and they were traumatic enough; that's the nature of war. But the War of 1812, Mexican, Spanish, World War I, Korean, and Vietnam wars had nothing to do with the country's survival as an entity, as a civilization. They were optional wars, sport fighting, if you will, by comparison. Wars that occur at a secular Crisis, a "Fourth Turning" to Strauss and Howe, when a Prophet generation is acting as elder statesmen, with Nomads as operational commanders, and Heroes as front line soldiers tend to be total wars that have an ideological underpinning. They're life-and-death struggles not just for the individual participants, but for the civilization as a whole.

That major wars occur at such long remove from each other probably isn't an accident. Really catastrophic wars, from at least the days of Troy on down, have usually been the Great Events that resound through living memory. The Great Event of a century forms the thought and character of everyone alive when it happens, influencing them relative to the stage of life they're in at the time. Perhaps that's why a people will collectively do its best to avoid a repeat, at least while there's anyone still alive who saw the last crisis.
(It's been said that war is a force that gives life meaning. And I think that's true, although it's perverse that the most destructive and idiotic activity that it's possible to engage in would just have to be the most important. Maybe, after the orgy of self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption that has characterized the past couple decades, Americans collectively feel they need to prove something. There has to be some rationale for the current war hysteria other than pure stupidity...)
In any event, the way the current generations line up relative to historical analogs, an excellent case can be made the U.S. is approaching another time of secular crisis, a Fourth Turning, with an expected due date of 2005 -- seven years from now -- plus or minus a few years in either direction. The Stamp Acts catalyzed the American Revolution, the election of Lincoln catalyzed the Civil War, the Crash of '29 catalyzed the Depression/WW II era. What might precipitate the elements now floating in solution? The answer is, practically any random event that's sufficiently traumatic. Any of the theses of current disaster/action novels and movies will do nicely. Perhaps the accidental or intentional release of a super plague vector. The crashing of an airliner into the Capitol during a joint session. (Close, but not quite.) An all-out assault on the IRS computers by an armed group -- or perhaps the computers just melting down due to the Year 2000 Problem. Perhaps a financial disaster that cascades into the Greater Depression. In any of these, or a hundred other scenarios, the federal government would almost certainly act precipitously and with a heavy hand, which would bring on a whole other set of consequences.
(In the historical context, 9/11 will be viewed as the opening kick-off for the coming Crisis... and the messianic overreaction of Bush and his cronies as the catalyst for turning things from bad to worse. It may be that Hurricane Katrina, for instance, a completely accidental event, may be blamed for providing a pin to burst the financial bubble -- which would be a pity, since the neocons could then blame it, not themselves.)

There's no way of telling where the Crisis will lead, or how it will end. That's going to depend not only on exactly who's in control, but what they do, whom they're up against, and a hundred other variables we can't even anticipate. One thing that seems certain is that real crisis brings out strong (although not necessarily wise) leadership. Because of its age and size, it will come from the Boomer generation, and it will be in the mold of Roosevelt or Lincoln -- both very dangerous precedents. The Boomers in Elderhood will be dogmatic, harsh, puritanical, and quite willing to burn down the barn in order to destroy whatever rats they see. Admix that attitude to a time resembling the Revolution, the Civil War, or WW II, overlain with today's ethnic strife, urbanization, financial overextension, and powerful, compact new weaponry in the hands of foreign fanatics out to teach the Great Satan a lesson, and it's a real witch's brew.
If things evolve over the next decade as they did in past analogs, it will be a very un-mellow time indeed. That's assuming things end well, and there's no guarantee they will, as many foreign countries have discovered throughout history. We've been uniquely blessed.
What to Do Strauss and Howe aren't financial types, and their advice is nebulous along those lines. To sum it up, their suggestion is to learn to swim with the tide by not hoping the current good times last forever; the chances of the good times are coming to an end now. They'd also advise not sticking your head up above the crowd, something that is always very risky when times are in turmoil; remember what happened to Japanese-Americans during the last crisis. They suggest that there will likely be a resurgence of nationalism, much as was the case during past crises. It won't be a good time to be a maverick in the U.S., a thought that makes places like Argentina and New Zealand look even more appealing.

(I bought property in both places shortly after this was written, and have been rewarded with a quadruple in both instances -- considerably better than would have been the case in the U.S.).
Strauss and Howe suggest you look to diversify in all things, so everything won't go bad at once. Brace for the collapse of public support mechanisms. Set your roots with your family, because people you can rely on will be at a premium. Heed emerging community norms, bond with like-minded people, and return to basic, classic virtues. This is sound advice any time, but critical if you're rigging for heavy weather.

Assuming you wanted to stay in the U.S., you'd rather be on some land near a small town, and far away from a major city. You'd want to be self-sufficient in as many ways as possible -- freeze-dried food. etc. Perhaps Howard Ruff will make a comeback with advice like that, which seems quaint today. But then I'm nothing if not a contrarian.

(In hindsight, the original article could have been a bit more specific -- other than the suggestions about Argentina and New Zealand. Personally, I believe that unassailable wealth is the best protection against global crisis. For it to be unassailable, your wealth must be at once substantial, free from threat of confiscation, divorced from the whims of the masses, and located in a country or currency that has a good risk/reward profile. Unfortunately, the U.S. doesn't make the cut.
In the first instance, the single best way to build wealth now, while there is still time to do so, is in carefully selected gold and other resource stocks. In order for it to be free from the threat of confiscation, at least some part of your wealth needs to reside in a country where you don't. To state the obvious, I would be very cautious about traditional stocks and bonds until we see how things shake out. Rather, get positioned in gold and silver stocks now, ahead of the curve, then sell out for a big profit to the panicking masses and move an increasing percentage of your wealth into tangibles such as gold, silver, and maybe, as part of a diversified portfolio, real estate in especially attractive areas -- but only after the bubble has decisively burst.)

A Parting Parable

In case you have any doubts, I buy the theory outlined above and its many ramifications that there isn't room to explore here. It really is scary to think that we could again experience a real Crisis with a capital C; I'm not talking about just a bear market in stocks. If it happens, I promise you stocks and mutual funds will be about the farthest things from most people's minds.
At the same time, there's no point in feeling terrorized. This stuff has been going on since the dawn of history. So let me leave you with a parable. I could appropriately quote Ecclesiastes (To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted, etc., etc.). But everyone knows that reference. Let me rather give you John O'Hara. At the beginning of O'Hara's novel Appointment in Samara, he tells a brief parable, which I'll summarize:
There was a merchant in Baghdad who went to the market with his servant. There they saw Death, who stared at the servant in what seemed a threatening way. Later the servant said "Master, lend me a horse. I shall ride to Samara, and there Death will not find me." The merchant did so, then returned to the market, where he again saw Death, whom he approached and asked why he had stared at his servant in such a threatening way. Death responded, "I wasn't threatening him. I was just very surprised to see him here in Baghdad, since I have an appointment with him in Samara later this afternoon."
(Strange, the location for the proverb, in that this was well before the current war).

By John Mauldin
John Mauldin, Best-Selling author and recognized financial expert, is also editor of the free Thoughts From the Frontline that goes to over 1 million readers each week. For more information on John or his FREE weekly economic letter go to: http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/learnmore

Cloud Atlas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2008-12-21T09:14:00.000-08:00

Cloud Atlas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

2008-12-21T09:12:00.000-08:00

More reveiws here:

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

Book Reviews - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

2008-12-21T09:09:00.000-08:00

There are several reviews worth reading by clicking on the following contact:

Book Reviews - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

2008-12-21T08:59:00.000-08:00

Book Review - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Time Pieces
Cloud AtlasbyDavid Mitchell
Published by Random House
Review by W. R. Greer

Cloud Atlas is a brilliant novel. It is put together with almost clockwork precision in its exploration of several themes, many of which boil down to the duality of good and evil that exists within man and mankind. You will not read another book like it, and you will be absorbed by its genius that suddenly makes an idea leap off the page with a clarity of purpose that catches you by surprise. Yet, I had a hard time finishing this book.
Cloud Atlas consists of six different stories that march forward, and then backward, through time. Each of the stories is recorded in some form. It begins in 1850 in the South Pacific with an American notary named Adam Ewing traveling by ship from Chatham Isle back to San Francisco. He's been to Australia to find the beneficiary of a will, and his return trip is on a ship called the Prophetess. It's not a ship that inspires nostalgia for a return to sea, but is captained and crewed by harsh and cruel men who barely tolerate his presence. His only friend and companion is Dr. Goose, an English gentleman who shares his profound faith and compassionate approach to all life. Dr. Goose is also treating Ewing for a tropical brain parasite, a progressively worsening condition which makes the sea passage even more miserable. Ewing is recording all of this in his journal and it abruptly ends in mid-sentence.
The second story concerns a young bisexual English man, Robert Frobisher, on the run from gambling debts in 1931 after he's been disinherited by his father. He comes to Belgium with a plan to worm his way into a famous composer's household, offering his musical skills as a way to put a roof over his head and some money in his pocket. Vyvyan Ayrs is a syphilitic and arrogant old man struggling to still write music, and he hires Frobisher as an amanuensis. Frobisher details his experiences in letters to his best friend back in England, Rufus Sixsmith. Everything goes even better than expected for Frobisher. He becomes an indispensable asset for Ayrs' musical composition, he beds the old man's wife, and pilfers different documents from the estate that he can sell for needed cash. One of the items he finds is a copy of Adam Ewing's journal. It's also a time that Frobisher's own musical genius begins to emerge and he begins writing his own composition, the Cloud Atlas Sextet.
The novel then jumps forward to 1970s California where journalist Luisa Rey is investigating potential dangerous implications of the new nuclear plant being built. She meets Rufus Sixsmith, now an elderly physicist, whose report would uncover the truth behind the conspiracy to hide the failings of the plant and its real purpose. Those who want the report to disappear will stop at nothing, including murder, to destroy every copy of it. Luisa is determined to bring the truth to light and to stop the plan to have similar plants built all across the United States. Corporate greed appears to have the upper hand as the third section of Cloud Atlas ends with Luisa's life in imminent peril.
Then we meet Timothy Cavendish in present-day England. He has a small publishing business which suddenly achieves huge success when one of the novels he publishes becomes a bestseller. As his success grows, the more Cavendish's life unravels. His frustration grows as he encounters a society that no longer functions as it should, hampered by bureaucracy and incompetence. In a combination of wrong assumptions and miscommunications, he finds himself held prisoner against his will, and goes about trying to plot an escape. He does have with him, though, one of the last manuscripts he received. It's titled Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery.
Cloud Atlas then jumps forward to the 22nd century where a corpocracy rules Korea. Much of the earth has been poisoned and the remaining citizens are crammed into large cities run by corporations. The populace is supposed to do their civic duty and spend the appropriate amount of money in their businesses every year. Bioengineering has created fabricants, human creatures bred as workers, controlled by drugs, and enslaved to a business for a singular purpose. One of these fabricants is Somni, who works in a fast food restaurant. Somehow, Somni has achieved consciousness, and she can have thoughts and ideas that surpass what's necessary to do her job. As she ascends to this higher consciousness, she is helped by rebels who want to free her and educate her so she can achieve full human potential. She develops a liking for old picaresques from the 20th century. Her favorite is The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.
The final story is set in a distant future iron-age Hawaii. "The fall" has occurred and most of the remainder of mankind has reverted to a primitive state, trying to eke out what existence they can from the earth. Zachry is a goatherd in one of these settlements where they worship the goddess Somni. His clan lives among a peaceful group, but they live in fear of others on their island who bring violence as they rape, pillage, and enslave other communities. There are a few advanced human groups left from before the fall, and they travel in ships trying to find a way to understand their plight and rebuild civilizations if they can. A woman from one of these ship comes to stay with Zachry and his family. Zachry discovers amongst her possessions an orison of Somni, a video interview with her after she was captured by the corpocracy. Even this technologically advanced visitor may not be enough to help Zachry and his village when the warrior tribe finally attacks.
Zachry's story, an oral history passed to his children, is told in one section. When it completes, the second half of each of the earlier stories is then told, moving backwards in time until it reaches Adam Ewing on the ship in the South Pacific. By the time the novel ends, the threads that tie all these stories are understood - mostly.
The six stories in Cloud Atlas all explore similar themes, but each is presented in a different way through vastly different perspectives. Each of the six protagonists lives in a dystopian world where brutality, enslavement, and violence threaten their well-being. If survival or redemption is to be found, it can only be achieved by reaching out to someone else. By telling each of their stories in some sort of recorded format, David Mitchell explores the idea that the written or recorded word is an essential part of human survival. It is this sharing of stories and personal experiences that bind mankind together across generations and time that provides hope that similar challenges against the evils of the world can be overcome.
Part of the brilliance of Cloud Atlas is how each story, each period in time, has its own language and rhythm. David Mitchell aptly creates the atmosphere and sense of each era and its associated peril with the language he uses to tell each story. This helps keep each one unique from the others, so that the novel doesn't read like a set of repeated stories. The reader is easily immersed in the squalor of the Prophetess, understands the musical genius of Robert Frobisher without understanding the details of how he writes music, can sense the evil behind the corporate greed that seeks to destroy Luisa Rey, instantly identifies with Timothy Cavendish's frustration with a nonfunctioning modern society, and can empathize with Somni and Zachry as they try to find their place in future dehumanized worlds.
Nothing is wasted in this novel. It explores so many themes and ideas that several readings may be necessary to ferret them all out and understand them all. This is literary novel with literary in capital letters. So why did I have such a hard time finishing such a brilliant novel with well-formed characters and deep thematic structure? I think it comes down to the basic structure of the novel. Telling six different stories with six different protagonists means that instead of investing my time, compassion, and worry in one character, it had to be spread out across all six of them. It's not that the individual stories lacked suspense or that I didn't care about the characters' eventual survival. Instead, it just wasn't that important to me to find out.
Should you read Cloud Atlas? If you appreciate literary fiction, then this is a novel you should read at least once. Maybe more. It will challenge you, intimidate you, frustrate you, and dare you to think about the important questions it raises. It may not, however, grab you and pull you along with its storylines. That doesn't necessarily detract from its importance or its brilliance. David Mitchell may be more intelligent than the rest of us, and he has some interesting and important ideas he wants to explore with his readers. Read Cloud Atlas.
Copyright © 2005 reviewsofbooks.com

Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell

Paperback
Used copies of Cloud Atlas at amazon.com

Message from Pat to all members....

2008-12-14T04:20:00.000-08:00

Hello Everyone,

Here is your usual reminder about our next Book Club meeting which will be on Friday 19th December 10.30 a.m. at Le Cheval Blanc when we shall be discussing the book Great Apes by Wil Self.

It has been suggested that as it is near Christmas perhaps we should splash out and have our lunch in the main restaurant, this will also give the chance for those who are not keen on having a set menu to have a choice of food.

So you could please let me know if this is OK for you.

There is always the possibility, of course, of some of you having the set Plat de Jour, but you may need to be in the front part of the hotel for that.Can you, therefore, let me know how many of you will be there for just coffee (chocolate etc.) and/or lunch in the main restaurant by Tuesday evening 16th December.

There are a couple of things which I would like to discuss, they are - as we have so many members now do we have two groups or just have a waiting list?

Also regarding the lunches, in order to please as many of you as possible, do some of you want to have lunch in the restaurant one month and then the plat de jour another, or any other ideas?

As I mentioned last time, I would dearly like to have someone who can take over from me from time to time as, at the moment, it looks as though I may be away for both the April and June meetings.

So, please, please, would someone like to volunteer.See you all on Friday.Pat

Buying Books for the 2009 Season

2008-11-23T05:29:00.000-08:00

I think all of us have used different ways of acquiring books for the Book club. Some buy in the UK whilst on holiday picking up bargains in Second-hand and Charity shops. For anyone who may wish to use the internet the following are good, reliable and cheap sites:

There’s a global network of second hand booksellers which supplies secondhand books. The UK website is:
http://www.abebooks.co.uk/

For new or second hand books and all sorts of other goodies contact:
http://www.play.com/Books/Books/6-/ComingSoon.html

Hope this hlps. I've ordered my books this weekend and expect delivery over the course of the next few days. The books cost me £35 including delivery to France. Most of the books were second hand.

Book List for 2009.......

2008-11-21T07:10:00.000-08:00

At this morning's Book Club meeting we discussed books for the 2009 Season. After placing all offers in the plastic bag the following were chosen at random.

Each person nominating a book will introduce it at the monthly meeting.

January
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and introduced by Patsy Odams

February
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson and introduced by Rosalinde Betts

March
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and introduced by Annie Grainger

April
Mutant Messages Down Under by Maria Morgan and introduced by Pat Dixon

May
The Five People You meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom and introduced by Vernon Goddard

June
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and introduced by Kerstin

July
Tanamera by Noel Barber and introduced by Lucy

August
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse and introduced by Mary Rogers

September
The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West and introduced by Angie Brewer

October
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale and introduced by Mike Brewer

November
East of the Mountain by David Gutersen and introduced by John Binks

December
The Girls by Lori Lansens and introduced by Diane Foster

Great Apes in December

2008-11-15T05:43:00.000-08:00

Coming Soon!!!!

Message from Pat for Book Club Members......

2008-11-15T03:08:00.000-08:00

Here is your usual reminder that the Book Club will be meeting again on Friday 21st November at the usual time of 10.30a.m. at Le Cheval Blanc to discuss the book Piano in the Pyrenees by David Hawks. Please let me know if you wish to have coffee etc. and/or how many are staying for lunch by TUESDAY EVENING 18TH NOVEMBER. Thanks.

Also at this meeting we shall be deciding which books we would like to read for next year, so please bring along the titles and authors (if possible). If by any chance you cannot make this meeting then perhaps you could let someone else have the details with a short synopsis of what the book is about, alternately e-mail me the details.

Something else that has been noticed, some people have not been able to get the book in time for our meetings, would it be possible for someone that has read a particular book 2 months ahead to bring it to the meeting for another person to borrow - or perhaps to bring it to a Connect meeting? This is just an idea - any others would be gratefully received.

Another point, as there is a possibility of Vernon being in England during this next year, I would like someone else to be available to take over from me when I am not able to be here, then, hopefully, they would then take on the job permanently in 2010 (or before if they so wish!!!!).

Look forward to seeing you all again and having another lively discussion.

A Bientot

Pat

Book List for 2009......

2008-10-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

Don't forget everyone ~ in the November Meeting, we are setting aside some time for each of us to suggest and promote a book of our choice for inclusion in the list for 2009.

PLEASE come prepared!

Another review of Great Apes.......

2008-10-27T06:51:00.000-07:00

Review by Charles Wyrick

Years ago a friend of mine described a peculiar sensation he had while reading a book that he didn't like. He felt that he was being watched, that the author was continually peeking around a corner in order to make himself known. This image he created of the overbearing writer stuck. It resurfaced in my mind after reading Will Self's new novel "Great Apes." Self's presence is insurmountable. He gnaws at the pages and cuts peepholes through the spine. Yet unlike my friend I relish this authorial presence. I enjoy being watched.

Ironically enough "Great Apes" revolves around different types of voyeurism. It begins with Simon Dykes staring out a window watching a rowing team. Dykes is a semi-controversial painter just weeks away from exhibiting his newest work. At a midpoint in both his career and his life Simon is beginning to feel restless. Bored with the now predictable nights on the town with his young girlfriend and her friends, Dykes does not know that soon he will be the subject of another's scrutiny. Soon Dykes will be under psychiatric observation. Just as we as readers meet him, Dykes undergoes a dramatic change. After a night of heavy drinking and drug use Simon wakes up as a chimpanzee.

Using Dykes as his Gulliver, Self takes a hilarious romp through modern society. In "Great Apes" the worlds of contemporary art, academics and psychiatry fall quickly as easy prey to Self's mock sociology of chimpanzee culture. Just imagine a popular art opening crowded with chimpanzees dressed in chic chimp evening wear and you can get a peek at the novel's vision. "Great Apes" is literature's Planet of the Apes as author Self plays the role of a funhouse anthropologist, a voyeur into a world of his own warping. On waking to a world modified to satisfy chimpanzee issues, the protagonist Simon Dykes is hysterical. As readers we can only be amused. When Simon Dykes first screeches at the sight of his girlfriend's hairy chest and arms, we know we are witnessing the birth of a strange world.

What I have liked in the past in Will Self's writing is that he is blunt. In this book there is nothing easy about his characters' transformations from humanity to chimpanity. The chimpanzee world thrives on a brutal code of male supremacy. Dykes is astonished by the physicality of this society. Chimps express irritation through violent physical attacks on one another and tenderness through prolonged grooming sessions. Dykes is completely horrified by these practices. With a shrewd wit Self draws a wonderful and acerbic satire out of his character's absurd dilemma. We see chimpanzee society through the eyes of its weakest member, the spiritually weakened Dykes whose case hinges on what his psychologist sees as the completely unnatural delusion that the world should be run by humans.

There is an overreaching sense of Self's presence in these pages. He forces on us his love of the banal and the absurd. His humor is as bawdy as it is bizarre. But these profanities are not without their compliment. Self litters his work with his sublimities -- his playful yet masterful language and his gorgeous literary control. In "Great Apes" he writes with both the assertiveness of a great satirist and the dexterity of a practiced, well-tuned prose strategist. When reading "Great Apes" do not be afraid to look over your shoulder if you feel you are being watched. Try to take comfort in the intrusion because your voyeur wants to see you laugh.

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Charles Wyrick lives in Nashville and plays in the band Stella.

"Great Apes" A review by M.Kakutani

2008-10-27T06:39:00.000-07:00

'Great Apes:' Life Among Randy Apes Can Be Tough on a Guy
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Books of the Times

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GREAT APES
By Will Self
404 pages. Grove Press. $24.

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Will Self is the Dennis Rodman of contemporary fiction.

Like Rodman, he has made a name for himself by specializing in willfully self-conscious outrage and by flirting with sexual transgression. And like Rodman, he possesses a genuine talent -- for writing in his case, not rebounding -- that is often overshadowed by his adolescent high jinks.

As his 1994 novel, "My Idea of Fun," demonstrated, Self is capable of creating genuinely engaging, innovative fiction, of turning his myriad influences -- Kafka, Burroughs and Lewis Carroll -- into something interesting and new. All too often, though, he has squandered his gifts for language and satire on silly, sophomoric stories: tales in which a man grows a vagina, a woman sprouts a penis or the phlegm of sick people coats the streets and contaminates the air. An obsession with bodily functions and the grosser aspects of sex infects all his work, as does a fascination with altered, often drug-induced states of mind.

Self's latest novel, "Great Apes," unfortunately, embodies most of his weaknesses as a writer, and few of his strengths. It is a slender idea for a satire, inflated into a fat, puffy novel, a "Twilight-Zone" episode blown into a full-length feature.

The novel's premise is borrowed, as was the first part of his novellas "Cock & Bull," from Kafka's "Metamorphosis." This time, an eminent artist named Simon Dykes wakes up to find himself turned into a chimpanzee and the world around him transformed into a planet of the apes. Simon is committed to the mental ward of a London hospital and diagnosed as suffering from a terrible delusion: he believes he is a human being.

As delineated by Self, the world Simon awakens to is very much like the human world he remembers: yuppies addicted to computers, would-be artists addicted to cocaine and careerists addicted to competition. The one difference: everyone -- from historical greats like Socrates, Plato and Freud through contemporary not-so-greats -- has become a chimpanzee. As for humans, they are regarded as a pathetic, inferior species; dying out in the wild, they can now be seen in zoos and experimental labs.

"Infants often had stuffed humans as toys," Self writes. "Birthday cards with humans dressed up as chimps on them were available in almost every news agent. There were also the notorious commercials for P.G. Tips tea, with their absurd use of humans mimicking chimp behavior; special effects used to convey the impression that they were signing intelligently and enjoying the beverage."

Although there are occasional moments of wacky comedy in "Great Apes," Self's usually inventive imagination is notably absent in this novel. His chimps tend to be lewd, pretentious sycophants: they are constantly saying things like "I admire your beautifully effulgent ischial scrag, your rump is like the morning star, and your maverick philosophy is a beacon of intrigue in a dull world." In fact, his planet of the apes turns out to be an even less surprising place than the one in the Charlton Heston-Roddy McDowall movie, a highly predictable place, mechanically constructed to allow the author to indulge in his sophomoric fascination (and disgust) with sex.

Self's chimps differ from humans in several respects: they greet one another with elaborate grooming rituals (involving fondling, petting and nit-picking); they do not wear clothes on the lower parts of their bodies (the better to display their genitals to others), and they routinely take part in public, and often incestuous, sex. This leads Self to go on, and on and on, at wearying length about an individual chimp's sexual endowments and about chimpanzee sex in all its varieties: sex between fathers and daughters, sex between doctors and patients, sex between dozens of strangers linked in a copulatory conga line in a public park.

All this chimp sex, of course, is supposed to make a satiric point: that humans, too, can be promiscuous and unfaithful to their spouses; they're just more hypocritical in pretending to be monogamous. This is a pretty banal point for a 400-plus page satire to make, and the book's other points are equally familiar: that human beings can act like beasts when competing for prestige, fame and money; that they can grovel and betray one another like chimps; that humans and animals actually have quite a lot in common.

The lumbering plot of "Great Apes" hardly makes up for the novel's flimsy satire: a long, meandering story line about Simon's efforts to come to terms with his "chimpunity," the efforts of a doctor to help him, and the suggestion that Simon's delusion may stem from his participation in an experimental trial of a drug called Inclusion (first mentioned in an earlier Self story, "Gray Area").

"Great Apes" may push Self's favorite theme of alienation (from family, friends, self) to a new extreme, but in doing so, it sorely tries the reader's patience. Like Rodman's recent antics, "Great Apes" is all juvenile calculation: meant to be provocative, it ends up being merely boring.

Great Apes by Will Self.....A Review......

2008-10-27T05:55:00.000-07:00

The Ape Who Mistook Himself for a Man
By GARY KRIST
Read the First Chapter | Read Michiko Kakutani's review of "Great Apes" (September 12, 1997)

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More on Will Self from The New York Times Archives
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GREAT APES
By Will Self.
404 pp. New York:
Grove Press. $24.

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r. Zack Busner -- distinguished clinical psychologist, maverick neuropharmacologist, noted television commentator and tooth-clacking, lice-picking chimpanzee -- is a figure of commanding presence. In the world of Will Self's latest novel, ''Great Apes,'' a world in which chimps rather than humans are the species cursed by the gift of advanced civilization, Busner is one of the greatest apes of all. An ''elder stateschimp of the psychiatric fraternity,'' he has achieved an Oliver Sacks-ish eminence in his field, writing about his encounters with various neurological misfits in popular books like ''The Chimp Who Mated an Armchair'' and ''Nestings.'' As a result, he is met wherever he knuckle-walks with a flurry of obsequious groveling from subordinates, reinforcing his position as an alpha male at the very top of the professional hierarchy.

But now Busner is confronted with his most puzzling case: that of Simon Dykes, a celebrated artist suffering from the bizarre delusion that he is human. Indeed, Dykes's psychosis is so comprehensive that he even regards the true reality as one in which -- get this -- humans are the evolutionarily successful primates. Evidently thinking ahead to his next book (''The Ape Who Mistook His Fur for an Overcoat,'' perhaps?), Busner takes on the unfortunate Dykes as a patient. And that's where the trouble begins, for there are subordinate males afoot who, while paying homage to Busner in public, are secretly working to undermine him, and see his handling of the deluded artist's case as just the opportunity they seek.

Such, believe it or not, is the story line of ''Great Apes,'' and if it doesn't sound like your idea of literature, you're probably not alone. In earlier books, like ''My Idea of Fun'' and the story collection ''Grey Area'' (in which both Zack Busner and Simon Dykes previously appeared, though in human form), Self made a name for himself as a defiant satirist with a peculiar mastery of the vocabulary of modern neurosis. Cultivating controversy in his life as well as in his work (during his stint as a reporter in the recent British election campaign, he was thrown off John Major's plane, accused of shooting heroin in the bathroom), he has polarized the reading public both here and in England, earning the usual iconoclast's reward of rabid denunciations and hyperbolic praise.

In ''Great Apes,'' his seventh book, Self carries this outrageousness into new realms. Taking a device that most comic writers would have dared to employ only over the space of a four-page satirical piece, he instead develops it into a 400-page novel. And although that may sound like a recipe for disaster -- like deciding to make an animated all-Simpsons version of ''Long Day's Journey Into Night'' -- the real surprise here is not only that the device works but that it works so brilliantly. What should have been the literary equivalent of a parlor trick turns out to be an utterly absorbing and affecting work of fiction.

The success of Self's feat is due in large part to the completeness with which he has imagined his alternate universe of ascendant ''chimpunity.'' Though much of the civilization depicted in ''Great Apes'' will be recognizable to human readers (there are chimp versions of Freud, O. J. Simpson and even Jane Goodall -- who, of course, has spent her career studying the wild humans of Gombe), it is the differences that are most telling. For instance, since chimps lack the vocal range necessary for complex spoken language, Self's primates have instead developed an eloquent vocabulary of hand signs punctuated by generic vocalizations. Thus the cry ''HoooGraaa!'' is the all-purpose attention getter, while ''H'huuu?'' is the question signifier and ''chup-chupp'' the inevitable accompaniment to all palliative gestures. Similarly, the human idea of the family has been replaced here by the hierarchical grouping of chimpanzees, where promiscuous copulation (even among blood relatives) is warmly encouraged and the major antisocial act is to upset the group structure by failing to groom with sufficient deference or mate with appropriate frequency and abandon. Self's grip on his extended trope is so tight, in fact, that I found only a few transmogrification errors in the entire book -- instances, for example, in which a ''bed'' is referred to instead of the more proper ''nest.'' (But then, as Alexander Pope once wrote, ''To err is chimp,'' and so on.)

What's more, all of this literary skylarking is grounded in a lush, scrupulously exact prose that can vault from the poignant to the grotesque to the ridiculous with vertiginous ease. Here, in a typical passage, Self riffs on the emotional consequences of Simon's recently failed marriage and his relationship with his children:

''No matter how much he saw them now, how many times he picked them up from school, how many times he made them oven chips and fish fingers, how many times he petted them, kissed them, told them he loved them, nothing could assuage this sense of wrenching separation, their disjunction from his life. He may not have snacked on the placenta, but somehow the umbilici still trailed from his mouth, ectoplasmic cords, strung across summertime London, snagging on rooftops, car aerials, advertising hoardings, and tied him to their little bellies.''

A few pages later, Self reprises the snacking imagery in an entirely different tone, when Simon idly imagines the crowds in Oxford Circus being ravaged by a ''post-imperial Kong'': ''These people were finger food to the god, sushi for the divinity. He disentangled them from his fur, eyed their knotted faces, and then popped them between his teeth, each of which was the size of a dentist. Mmmm . . . ! Crunchy . . . and yet chewy.''

With such reckless bravado, Self manages to turn his novel into a high-powered satirical weapon capable of blasting a wide range of targets. The circus of celebrity psychiatry, the jungle of hospital politics, the Vanity Fair of the London art scene -- all are brutally sent up in their apish reincarnations. But Self is also after bigger game. In scope, his book's obvious predecessor is ''Gulliver's Travels,'' which made similar use of anthropomorphized beasts to point up the general corruption and foolhardiness of Homo sapiens. And like Swift's book, ''Great Apes'' can be unexpectedly moving in its more ambitious moments, as in this passage, where Simon's human mind/chimp body problem takes the form of a drug-induced fever dream:

''He identified the lost infant as himself -- or to be more precise his lost body. He saw his infant's body, standing, shivering, naked of its protective coat. Little Simon, as gracile as a young bonobo; head fur blond and cropped at the back, features refined and serious. . . . Simon turned towards the lost infant, wafted across the grassy floor to get him. But as he drew nearer the infant's blue eyes widened, and his red red lips parted, and the sapling body bent in an afflatus of anguish. Then Simon heard the awful, meaningful vocalizations; so guttural -- but so just. 'Get away! Get away, Beelzebub! Foul beast! Ape man!' ''

It's in moments like this that Simon's situation -- the radical alienation he feels from his environment, his family, his own nature -- becomes more than just a clever comic device. Simon, the human-minded ape, could at times be speaking for all divided souls of the modern urban savanna, where the demands of everyday life in society often seem at odds with the inclinations of our animal selves.

Obviously, ''Great Apes'' is not a book that will delight everyone. In places, its humor caroms toward the sophomoric (not to mention the scatological), and there are times when Self's readers may feel as if they're trapped in a windowless room with a monstrously intelligent, diabolically articulate adolescent. Moreover, like some of Self's earlier work, this book ends lamely, with a reductive conclusion that seems almost intentionally to trivialize what has come before. But the value of the novel shouldn't be obscured by the inevitable skirmishes it will inspire on the battlefield of taste. With ''Great Apes,'' his most satisfying book so far, Will Self establishes himself as an alpha male in the British literary hierarchy. He deserves every thunderous ''HoooGraaa!'' we can offer him.

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Gary Krist is the author of two story collections, ''The Garden State'' and ''Bone by Bone.'' His first novel, ''Bad Chemistry,'' will be published this winter.

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More on Will Self
From the Archives of The New York Times
REVIEWS:

Cock & Bull (1993)
"[Will Self] possesses all those gifts a satiric writer might want....Unfortunately, in this volume, these copious gifts are all too frequently put in the service of a misogynistic and ridiculously sophomoric vision."
My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale (1994)
"Although he is British and this novel is set in England, it has family resemblances to the work not only of Nabokov, but also of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo....Will Self belongs in their company."
The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1995)
"Mr. Self was fired as a cartoonist for The New Statesman because he was "too depressing." And he does seem very fond of that word."

Here's a review I saw on the internet of Great Apes

2008-10-27T05:48:00.002-07:00

Will Self has always had an ambivalent relationship with the novel. He doesn't write about character and admits that he finds plot 'boring', as a result his novels usually work off a single comic device or absurd concept, stretched to the limit through a vast vocabularly, endless metaphors and a scatological humour. Self's is a style that can be very visceral, funny and incisive, however, over the course of an entire novel it can become nauseous, tedious and dull. Self is better suited to short stories and journalism, forums where his flamboyant, potent prose and wild premises still have the ability to be shocking rather than tired and worn.
'Great Apes', Self's 1997 work released shortly after the scandal over the author taking heroin on John Major's private jet, combines both these aspects of his work into a great, fierce piece of satire.
Taking the Kafkaesque premise of a London artist, Simon Dykes waking from a night of bad coke and worse sex to find himself in a world where chimps have reversed roles with humans, the novel works best when describing the social hierachy of the chimps and their bizarre behaviour, using it as a device to show how similar the two species are.
Dykes finds himself in a secure unit under the supervision of emenient primate psychiatrist Zack Busner, the titular 'great ape'. Self goes to great lengths to describe Dykes' anguish and how insane he seems in contrast to the rest of the world. As the book progresses Dykes' belief in his own humanity is shown to be nothing more than the workings of delusional mind- chimps do indeed have global supremacy.
Mental illness and the problems of medicine are common Self themes and the book does raise interesting questions about the nature of madness and drug abuse, but here they feel thinly developed, as if Self is writing for his own amusement. For every funny line or comic invention there are vast amounts of unecessary and flabby writing, either concerning psychiatry, sex or divorce, that just come across as dull. Self has an incredible mind, at his best recalling, all at once, Martin Amis, Celine, Kafka and Carroll, but here he comes across more as a man writing really just to waste time, as if the novel was a bit of filler between magazine assignments and taking drugs. The satirical comment Self hoped to make, on modern art, on coke, on humanity, on whatever, never fully translates or is fully concluded. Self started writing, kept going and then finished, whether what he wrote was of real substance wasn't obviously of much concern to him.

Here's a review I saw on the internet of Great Apes

2008-10-27T05:48:00.000-07:00

Review of Piano in the .........

2008-10-27T05:37:00.000-07:00

Sean McManus's Blog
Book review: A piano in the Pyrenees by Tony Hawks
21 June 2006

After lugging a fridge around Ireland, chasing Moldovan footballers to challenge them to play tennis, and increasingly desperate attempts to have a hit single, life's slowed down a bit for Tony Hawks. His latest book 'A Piano in the Pyrenees' tells the story of how he bought a nice holiday home in France, moved a piano over there and chilled out with his friends.

He still has a flair for character sketches and for humorous writing. It's just that the material's a bit weak. There is a 15 page section about a village event where everyone follows the cows up into the mountains. It's a gruelling journey and a long day, but it all falls a bit flat when Hawks ducks out early and ends up committing a minor faux pas in front of the mayor: not really the kind of punchline you'd expect after such a big build-up.

Most of the book's pretty hum-drum: Buying houses abroad, wrangling with foreign bureaucracy, moving house, and building a swimming pool are common enough experiences that you'd never get an autobiography commissioned on the back of them. Reading the book is a gentle and pleasant enough journey - it just doesn't feel structured or particularly special at the end. Put it this way: you or I could never get this book commissioned on its outline, and probably not on the strength of any of these chapters either.

If you've lived in the region he writes about, it might be a lot funnier for you. If you enjoyed his other books, you'll probably like reading his style again. For me, it was an enjoyable but lazy read. After all his previous madcap stunts, I was pleased to read a book in which he seems to be content, rather than just jolly. But I'd be surprised if the market will be as tolerant and it seems unlikely this book will recapture the commercial success of his debut.

Grasshopper......

2008-10-27T05:36:00.000-07:00

HATED IT!

Will Self

2008-10-26T10:19:00.000-07:00

For anyone wanting to discover more about Will Self [Author of Great Apes] please click on the following link:

http://www.will-self.com/

A few comments on Grasshopper........

2008-10-01T01:39:00.000-07:00

Sunday, 11 March 2007
Review: Grasshopper, by Barbara Vine

Personal Rating: 4/5

Having said I'm going away (which I have done) unfotunately I haven't managed to stay away from the internet altogether, so here I am (but maybe for the last time this week - honest!
Anyway, I seem to have gone from one Barbara to another with my reading. This novel is the story of Clodagh Brown, who has a great love of heights and an equally great fear of underground and enclosed spaces. Her love of heights has resulted in two major events in her life, both of which end with tragic consequences, and this story primarily focusses on the second one.
Much of this story takes place skipping across the rooves of terraced houses in Maida Vale, an area of London, although this light airy spirit is not carried through into the writing. The plot cleverly reveals little bits at a time, and although this can be intriguing, it does also drag along in places.
What saves the day are the main characters, Clodagh and Silver, and their young simple naive spirits as they try to help underdogs. The characters and the intriguing plot kept me reading through to its fairly inevitable tragic end, and the way the story flipped between the present day, and earlier events, kept giving little clues about the outcome.
Although this book was hard work at times, I would still say it was worth it, and I'm glad I persevered. I read one of her other books, The Dark Adapted Eye, a few years ago, which I remember thinking was an amazing psychological novel and, although this wasn't on a par with that, it was still a thrilling read which I would highly recommend.
Posted by heidijane at 19:36
Labels: Barbara Vine, holiday, Recommended, reviews
4 comments:
jenclair said...
I haven't read this one, but have enjoyed all of the novels I've read by Barbara Vine (and all of those she writes under her own name, Ruth Rendell).

13 March 2007 12:24
nessie said...
I remember when I worked in a bookstore that she had a small but devoted following.

13 March 2007 21:48
Lesley said...
Hmm, this sounds interesting. I just finished a Barbara Vine book that I did not really like all that much (The Minotaur), and that was my first experience with her writing (either as BV or Ruth Rendell). Not sure whether I want to give her another try or not ...

14 March 2007 18:09
Anonymous said...
Yeah I read this one as well and I admit that it dragged along at times for me.

I must say though that I love all Barbara Vine and Ruth Rendell novels. I love the settings and the deep and sometimes very dark psychological intrigue.

http://twitter.com/RedPenAnni

Something on the author...

2008-10-01T01:36:00.000-07:00

Author Information: Barbara Vine

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Rating: Weighted - 7.36 / Average - 6.3 of 10 (3 votes)
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Biography's Source:
Biography:

From the publisher
Barbara Vine is a pseudonym for Ruth Rendell. Barbara Vine's first novel, A Dark-Adapted Eye, won an Edgar Award, the highest honor of the Mystery Writers of America. A Fatal Inversion won the English equivalent, the Crime Writers' Gold Dagger Award. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature who holds honorary doctorates from the University of Essex and the University of Bowling, Green, Ohio, she has one grown son and lives with her husband and two cats in a sixteenth-century farmhouse in Suffolk, England.

Novels:

Dark-Adapted Eye, a (1986)
House Of Stairs, the (1988)
King Solomon's Carpet (1991)
Anna's Book (1993)
No Night Is Too Long (1994)
Brimstone Wedding, the (1995)
Grasshopper (2000)
Blood Doctor, the (2002)
Pseudonyms:
Ruth Rendell

"Grasshopper" hops from one reader to another

2008-10-01T01:33:00.000-07:00

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This book is currently in the wild!

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Journal entry 1 by boucli from Toulouse, Midi-Pyrénées France on Wednesday, May 14, 2003

Synopsis
Blamed by her parents for the tragic death of a friend, Clodagh has been banished from their home in the countryside to a dingy basement flat in the city. Her life is transformed when she meets the inhabitants on the top floor of 15 Russia Road. An exotic range of young people who explore a London of roofs, eaves and ledges, thrilling in the freedom and danger. Clodagh, haunted still by the accident, finds that running the roofs brings her back to life, but it seems that tragedy and misfortune may not be done with her yet. Barbara Vine's 10th novel, Grasshopper is an enthralling, chilling novel that mirrors Vine's acclaimed London Underground novel King Solomon's Carpet.

Offered in the "one word only" bookrelay, and accepted by MissBagpuss

sent june 22nd

book rating:

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Journal entry 2 by MissBagpuss from Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire United Kingdom on Saturday, July 10, 2004

a very enjoyable read. although the events portrayed were a little far fetched, they were written in a strangely believable way. i liked both of the main characters. i also thought the character of wim was well thought out and oddly convincing.

book rating:

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Journal entry 3 by MissBagpuss from Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire United Kingdom on Monday, September 19, 2005

Released about 3 yrs ago (9/19/2005 5:00:00 PM BX time) at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in San Francisco, California USA
RELEASE NOTES:

left next to the payphones near the bathrooms in the departure check-in area

Thank you for picking up this book. Please make a journal entry to let me know that this book has found a good home with you. You may choose to remain anonymous or to join (its free). If you join, please consider indicating that you were referred by MissBagpuss. I hope you enjoy the book. You can make another journal entry with your comments when you’ve finished reading. Whenever you’re ready to send it on its way, make a journal entry if you are giving or sending this book to a known person, or release notes if you are leaving it “in the wild” again for anyone to catch. Then watch its journey. You’ll be alerted by e-mail each time someone makes another journal entry. It’s all confidential (you’re known only by your screen name and no one is ever given your e-mail address), free, and spam-free.

Review of Grasshopper by K. Kimbrough

2008-10-01T01:29:00.000-07:00

by Kay Kimbrough

GRASSHOPPER
Barbara Vine
Harmony Books, New York, 2000, $25.00.

Clodagh Brown is nineteen when she goes to London to attend a technical college and recover from a depression caused by a tragic accident for which she feels responsible. She lives in a basement flat provided by her mother's cousin and his wife. Unable to ride the London subway because of claustrophobia, she takes the bus to school on the days she does not skip classes altogether to investigate the architecture of London, which fascinates her. On one occasion she is directed to an underpass because of a blocked-off crime scene, and she collapses in terror while trying to reach the end of the tunnel.

Rescued by a young eccentric, Michael Silverman, known as Silver because of his almost white hair, Clodagh begins her adventure that leads to the complications of the plot. Silver is living an experiment in goodness, consciously accepting anyone into his life and into his flat on the top floor of his parents' house in spite of criminal records or character defects. With the confidence of youth, he expects to do good to anyone who needs him, although he does prevent evil when it is happening in his presence. Clodagh recognizes that she has been longing for "goodness" for a long time, so she is attracted to Silver immediately.

She does have some doubts about Silver's generosity at times, for he seems to have no regard for his money, inherited from his grandmother, that is enough to live on, but not a grand fortune. Unable to suppress her strong pragmatic bent, she quarrels with him about this carelessness.

While carrying out his experiment in goodness, Silver has learned to enjoy climbing on the roofs of London with his friend Wim for pleasure, excitement, challenge and escape from life on the ground level. Clodagh is already in love with climbing, a practice which had led to her friend's death and her exile to London. These young people are like children climbing trees, towers, mountains or castle walls. They are still immature, enjoying spying through windows, getting away with something they shouldn't do.

Although there are several mysteries presented to throw the reader off the tract, the central plot stems from this practice of going on the roofs. An adopted mixed-race child has been abducted by his parents because the social service has decided the adoption is bad for him. He should go to a mixed-race couple, no matter how happy he is. Spotting the family, who have frequently appeared in newspapers and are in hiding in a neighboring flat, Silver and Clodagh determine to help them. Their efforts lead to the conclusion, highly improbable but no stranger than real life, solving one of the novel's mysteries.

Along the way, the two young people fall in love and discover that their powers of doing good are limited by the very people they try to help, leading Clodagh to wonder about whether one should consider the kind of people in need of help before getting involved with them. They encounter true evil, dishonesty, greed and indifference in one character after another. They are innocent, inexperienced and trusting, learning about the disguises people create and the lies they tell themselves to get their way in painful steps toward wisdom.

Writing the Wexford mysteries as Ruth Rendell or psychological thrillers as Barbara Vine, the author always has a sermon to deliver without preaching or being obvious. The treatment of children by parents is one of her typical subjects; evil people have had some form of abuse as children in her books. Sometimes the abuse is neglect, sometimes physical battering and sometimes extreme indulgence, but there is always an explanation for human behavior.

A botched illegal abortion and a child who should have been taken from sick parents cause the tragedy in this novel. Other issues surface, such as the unfairness of the class system and the increasing materialism of culture. There is one bright spot: the cleaning woman Clodagh befriends lives a contented and meaningful life. On the other hand, the successful actress who loses her husband to another woman is miserable, regretting the amount of money she spent to provide her husband with a lovely home more than she regrets the loss of him.

GRASSHOPPER opens slowly; nothing much happens for the first one hundred pages. It takes patience to get into the story. Unlike some of Vine's other books, it ends almost too quickly, leaving one story, that of Liv, unfinished. It is well worth reading, however, for its understanding of the growing-up process, its array of characters and the varieties of human dramas they perform. The character of Clodagh is created with restraint. She grows up in the book, becoming good herself without leaving behind her practical self and her refreshing honesty.

Robert Crone on Grasshopper.........

2008-10-01T01:24:00.000-07:00

'Grasshopper' by Barbara Vine

Open-and-shut cases of masterful mystery writing: ‘Grasshopper’

Sunday, December 17, 2000

By Robert Croan, Post-Gazette Senior

Grasshopper

By Barbara Vine

Harmony Books
$25.00

British mystery writer Ruth Rendell uses the pseudonym Barbara Vine when writing novels in which mystery is not the primary element. Her latest effort in this genre has several mysteries woven into the plot, but the new book is essentially a coming-of-age story about a young woman afflicted with severe claustrophobia.

Clodaugh Brown, or Clo, is so claustrophobic that she cannot go through any of England’s short underground passageways to cross a street. And she will never take the tube, or what we call a “subway.”

She will walk miles out of her way or take buses and trams that might add hours to a normally brief journey. Worst of all, her claustrophobia is offset by a love of heights. As a teen-ager, Clo and her first boyfriend, Daniel, would scale the pylons -- dangerous electrical towers -- but one day Daniel was zapped by the electrical current. Clo was helpless to save him.

Her parents, the whole town, in fact, blamed Clo for Daniel’s death. As an adult, Clo blames herself as well and writes her thoughts in a diary, which -- now, more than a decade later, she is updating for a particular reader. We know that Clo has survived it all, though not without mental and physical scars. She is married and has become a successful electrician, living in a luxury apartment.

The part of her life that she (and we) are most concerned with, however, is the time -- at the age of 18 -- that she went to London to take a business course at Grand Union Polytechnic. Soon Clo finds a lover, a neighbor called Silver because he’s an albino. He makes his apartment available to a variety of occupants, including a mysterious Dutchman named Wim who has discovered the secret of traveling through the neighborhood on rooftops.

Other residents include a Swedish girl named Liv who has a phobia just the opposite of Clo’s: She cannot bear to go outdoors. Liv takes up with Jonny, a very bad egg who uses the roofs in his trade as a burglar.

Things get even more tangled when Liv becomes infatuated with Wim and Jonny takes violent steps to keep Liv for himself.

Furthermore, Clo and Silver -- in a naive attempt at altruism -- help a childless couple trying to abduct a mixed-race child who has been refused for adoption.

All this comes together in a tale that shows Vine’s mastery of plot and character. We hardly know what the mystery is until it is solved, although Clo gives us hints that one thing will work out and another will end badly. Characters develop in ways that are unpredictable but ultimately believable. Vine’s prose is quite beautiful, not only in her furthering of the plot but also the atmosphere she creates of two Londons: one class-bound and wealthy, the other Bohemian and poor.

By the end, the reader can’t help wishing it were possible to join in just once for one of those wild romps on the roofs.

October Book Choice ~ Grasshopper by Barbara Vine

2008-10-01T01:15:00.000-07:00

This month we're discussing Grasshopper.

We'll be meeting on Friday 17th October ~ usual time and place.

I've read about 100 pages so far and find the style ponderous, the characterisation unbelieveable and the storyline uninspiring.

Perhaps things can only get better!!!!!!

Never Let me Go Reviews

2008-08-31T05:45:00.000-07:00

Book Summary and Media Reviews
Never Let Me Go: Summary and book reviews of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, plus an excerpt from Never Let Me Go and a biography of Kazuo Ishiguro.

Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Hardcover: Apr 2005
Paperback: Mar 2006
Publication information Book Jacket & Reviews
Excerpt
Reader Reviews
Author Biography
Author Interview
Reading Guide

Read-Alikes
This Book's Themes
BookBrowse Says....

Critics' Opinion: Very Good
Readers' Rating:
(7 reader reviews)
Add to my Reading List Buy this book:

From the Jacket

A BookBrowse Favorite Book

From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly re-imagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.

As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.

And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now.

A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work.

Media Reviews

Booklist - Allison Block
In this luminous offering, he nimbly navigates the landscape of emotion--the inevitable link between present and past and the fine line between compassion and cruelty, pleasure and pain.

Library Journal - Henry L. Carrigan (starred review)
Ishiguro's elegant prose and masterly ways with characterization make for a lovely tale of memory, self-understanding, and love.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives-without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have "tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn't matter." ... A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
So exquisitely observed that even the most workaday objects and interactions are infused with a luminous, humming otherworldliness. The dystopian story it tells, meanwhile, gives it a different kind of electric charge. . . . An epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature. . . . Ishiguro spins a stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics.

The Guardian (UK) - M John Harrison
This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.

The Independent (UK) - Geoff Dyer
The problem for the reviewer, appropriately enough, is that by revealing more of what the book is about he risks going too far and unravelling its meticulously woven fabric of hints and guesses. So I'll leave it there. Suffice it to say that this very weird book is as intricate, subtly unsettling and moving as any Ishiguro has written.

The Sunday Times (UK) - Peter Kemp
Not since The Remains of the Day has Ishiguro written about wasted lives with such finely gauged forlornness. That he contrives to do so in a narrative crawling with creepy frissons is remarkable. Not the least out-of-the-ordinary feature of this novel, with its piercing questions about humanity and humaneness, is the way it affectingly moves past gothic shudders to a wrenchingly desolate ending.

The Telegraph (UK) - Caroline Moore
Never Let Me Go will probably disappoint readers for whom the solution of a mystery is all-in-all, or those who want the gratification of full-on horror. But in its evocation of a pervasive menace and despair almost but not quite lost in translation - made up of the shadows of things not said, glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye - the novel is masterly.

August, September, October & November Meetings

2008-08-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone in the Book Club & potential new members

The Book club will meet at the usual venue at the hotel.

Under discussion for the next few months will be:

August
Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden

September
Never Let Me go
Kazuo Ishiguro

October
Grasshopper
Barbara Vine

November
A Piano in the Pyrenees
Tony Hawkes

Reviews of the Book and information about the author are available on the St Yrieix Book club Blog. http://vernonboy.blogspot.com

Please let Pat Dixon know of your coffee/lunch requirements a few days before the meeting.

Pat Dixon ~ 0553552185
Vernon Goddard ~ 0555099490

All welcome ~ but if you are a new member, please contact us to let us know you’re joining. _________________

Gorseinonboy................

Books on the Olympics

2008-08-07T05:34:00.000-07:00

What books are there around about the Olympics?

Which are the best?

2008-08-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

Solzhenitsyn the great survivor will live on as truly great writer

The man who exposed Stalin's horrors outlived his time, turning from a prophet into a zealot, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY

HAD HE died about 30 years ago, instead of living on until Sunday to die of heart failure at 89, the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have been remembered as a hero, a prophet and, above all, a great writer in a country of great writers.
But he made one mistake - he survived.

Not only did he survive the second World War, Stalin's death camps and stomach cancer, Solzhenitsyn, the author of more than 20 books, who went into exile, initially to Switzerland, and then on to the US where he remained for 17 years, survived communism.
His was not an exile of glamour. By the time Solzhenitsyn had settled in Vermont where his household lived in a high security compound of sorts, surrounded by a high wooden fence, the West had already discovered a far more attractive Russian dissident, Joseph Brodsky, who was possessed of a swagger, an anger he could use to theatrical effect and a willingness to play to the gallery. Aside from all of that Brodsky was only 55, he favoured highly Americanised English, whereas Solzhenitsyn's was formal. Above all, he repeatedly attacked liberalism. His years in the West saw the one-time prophet become a zealot.
Yes, Solzhenitsyn was very different from Brodsky; he was reclusive, taciturn, an ex-soldier and detached since childhood, his father having died before he was born. It was his fate. His soldier father, having survived the Great War, then died in a hunting accident - some suggested it was suicide.
Whatever the truth, the future writer was born in the shadow of a family tragedy and was left with relatives while his mother went to work in a nearby town. He was also born into revolution; his birth in Rostov on Don in 1918 coincided with a time of global upheaval. For Russia it was cataclysmic. Tsarist Russia died in a bloodbath and Communist Russia was born into another.
The young Sanya was clever and secured a first-class degree in maths and physics while also pursuing his interest in the arts, particularly literature, and he completed a correspondence course. Then he was called up. Already something of an intellectual, he proved an arrogant soldier, serving as a gunner and later an artillery officer. He was twice decorated and was the commander of his battalion. He was soon a captain. But he made a mistake; when writing a letter to a friend, he made "derogatory" comments about Stalin. The irony was cruel. Having served his country well, he was then arrested as an enemy of the people in early 1945. His sentence seemed mild enough - only eight years - but those eight years were spent in the hell of the labour camps, initially in general camps in the Arctic Circle where the political prisoners lived alongside criminals, and later in the harsher conditions of Beria's "special" camps for long-term prisoners.
His experiences in the camps inspired his masterful first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , first published in Novy Mir, a literary journal, in 1962. It was the book that would make his name, and for many, it remains his finest artistic achievement. It is written with a bleak lyricism that is both heartrending and also, at times, deeply witty. It is his most human book. For those who doubt him as an artist they need only read this book and experience life in the camp through the thoughts of Shukhov, who survives the biting cold and the hunger.
He had been released from the camp in 1951 but then had another battle to face, cancer. This experience would later inspire Cancer Ward (1967). With The First Circle , published in 1968, Solzhenitsyn proved that he was privy to the literary power that had dominated the 19th-century Russian novel.
Yet all the while Solzhenitsyn the artist was being pushed aside by Solzhenitsyn the campaigner. He set out to expose the horrors of the Soviet system. He began his monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago , a history of the political oppression and personal suffering that destroyed millions. It is a three-volume labour of courage. In 1967 he revised and retyped the entire text which runs to more than 1,500 pages. At that time he did have some support within Russia, also he could draw on the influence of Pasternak's legacy. The international success of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had made him famous. It was a useful shield - he did not disappear, he was merely quietly deported.
There is no disputing his contribution towards the collapse of communism - he exposed the system. He had also demolished the myth of Lenin with his boldly ironic Lenin in Zurich , which was first published in Paris in 1975. By then he had already been honoured with the Nobel Prize, although he had not been able to accept it in person in 1970. His books were being read all over the world and he was grimly devoting himself to the story of Russia. The witness, the writer, had become an historian. The Gulag Archipelago is the defining study of the horrors communism inflicted on Russia. Unfortunately, unfairly for Solzhenitsyn, a shift occurred. He outlived his usefulness. No longer a prophet, he would be dismissed as a polemicist and a crank.
In addition to survival, his love of Russia proved another mistake. After the fall of communism, he decided to return home. By then his country had changed beyond recognition. Most Russians when asked to name great Russian writers rarely included him in the roll of honour. His homecoming in 1994 had none of the expected triumph. Indifference, not affection, met him. His books were dismissed as boring and his Russian was considered ugly and graceless.
The British writer Michael Scammell wrote a detailed and near definitive biography in 1985. It is a good book, even including material on the writer's second marriage during which he first became a father at the late age of 52. Solzhenitsyn, who had never wanted children and effectively broke his first wife's heart because of this edict, eventually had three sons.
If his country lost interest in him as both a writer and a polemicist, the West has continued to take him seriously, although US opinion of him was damaged by his reclusiveness. In 1998, the maverick British writer DM Thomas, who has long held an interest in Russian history and literature and who has also translated many of the Russian poets, attempted an eccentric biography of Solzhenitsyn, focusing on his personal life, his ego and his vanity.
As a schoolgirl I remember reading the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago back to back and wondered at the cruelty of humankind and also the endurance. In an interview with me in 2006, the British novelist Martin Amis attributed Solzhenitsyn with opening his eyes and inspiring his novel, House of Meetings .
Yes, the strange, remote, determined Alexander Solzhenitsyn did outlive his time; the country he tried to save turned its back on him with all the indifference of an ungrateful child. Yet his achievement remains and, for all the truths contained in his non-fiction and autobiographical writing, his fiction, Cancer Ward and The First Circle are compelling, important novels, while One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich remains a masterpiece. The prophet may have been forgotten but the novelist will be remembered.
© 2008 The Irish Times

Review of the film "The Last king of Scotland"

2008-07-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) wasn’t looking to change the world.

He just wanted an excuse to keep him from spending the rest of his life in Scotland, in medical practice with his father. So a spin of the globe leads the young doctor to service in a small village in Uganda.

Garrigan arrives in Uganda as the people are celebrating the coup that brought Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) to power. When the new president visits the village where Garrigan works, Amin’s vibrant personality instantly wins the young doctor—and the rest of the village—over. After Amin’s speech, the president is injured in an accident, and Garrigan is called upon to treat his hand—and the encounter leads him to amazing new opportunities. First, he’s offered a position as the president’s personal physician—and before long, he’s one of Amin’s most trusted advisors, often attending meetings and making decisions in the president’s absence.

For a while, Garrigan enjoys his good fortune—rejecting requests from the British government officials in Uganda for details about Amin’s policies and plans for the country. But as the president becomes more paranoid and impulsive—and as members of Amin’s staff begin to mysteriously disappear—Garrigan begins to realize that the allegations against Amin could very well be true. He starts looking for a way to get out of Uganda alive—but Amin has no intention of letting him go.

Based on the novel by Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland offers an interesting (albeit fictional) look at Idi Amin’s regime. Whitaker is enchanting as the infamous leader—and he makes it easy to see why, initially, so many people saw his rise to power as a positive thing. He’s charismatic and fun-loving and personable—exactly the kind of guy whom everyone wants to be around. Keep in mind, though, that if you’re looking for a historically-accurate overview of Amin’s rule, you’ll be disappointed—because that’s not the point of the movie. It’s not a documentary. Instead, it’s a glimpse of history, as seen from the perspective of a fictional character.

Since the film’s focus is on Garrigan, the blissfully unaware young doctor (who was loosely based on Bob Astles, a British soldier who became one of Amin’s top advisors), you’ll see what Garrigan sees—that is, very little. You’ll discover the grim reality of the situation gradually—just as Garrigan does. Though it doesn’t give you the whole story, it gives you all of Garrigan’s story. And though its conclusion is somewhat abrupt, The Last King of Scotland tells a captivating story about a fascinating historical figure—and Whitaker’s show-stealing, Oscar-winning performance alone makes it worth seeing.

President for Life - New York Times

2008-07-18T12:06:00.000-07:00

For an excellent review of the book, "The last king of Scotland", please click on the link below:

President for Life - New York Times

2008-07-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

In August we will be discussing:

"The Last King of Scotland" by Giles Foden

August Meeting ~ Change of Day!!!!!!!

2008-07-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

Please note that in August we will be meeting on Thursday 14th August at the usual time & place.

Book Club Choices for the rest of the year ~ 2008

2008-07-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

July
Firelight and Woodsmoke
Claude Michelet

August
Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden

September
Never Let Me go
Kazuo Ishiguro

October
Grasshopper
Barbara Vine

November
A Piano in the Pyrenees
Tony Hawkes

July Book Club Choice..........

2008-07-07T09:47:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone in the Book Club & potential new members

The Book club will meet at the usual venue at the hotel.

Under discussion is: "Firelight & Woodsmoke" by Claude Michelet.

Reviews of the Book and information about the author are available on the St Yrieix Book club Blog. http://vernonboy.blogspot.com

Please let Pat Dixon know of your coffee/lunch requirements a few days before the meeting.

All welcome ~ but if you are a new member, please contact us to let us know you’re joining. _________________ Gorseinonboy................

Ian McEwan

2008-06-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

Ian McEwan: I despise militant Islam
By Nicole Martin, Digital and Media Correspondent
Last Updated: 1:16PM BST 22/06/2008

The award-winning novelist Ian McEwan has launched an outspoken attack on militant Islam, accusing it of "wanting to create a society that I detest".

Ian McEwan has been criticised by the Muslim Council of Britain
The author said he "despises Islamism" because of its views on women and homosexuality.
But predicting a backlash against his comments, which were made in an Italian newspaper, he insisted he was not a racist.
The writer of Atonement and Enduring Love condemned religious hardliners as he defended his friend, the writer Martin Amis, against charges of racism.
Article continues
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Amis was accused last year of being Islamaphobic after he said that "the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order".
In an essay written the day before the fifth anniversary of the bombing of New York's Twin Towers, the novelist suggested "strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan", preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation.
In The Age of Horrorism, Amis argued that fundamentalists had won the battle between Islam and Islamism.
McEwan, 60, said it was "logically absurd and morally unacceptable" that writers who speak out against militant Islam are immediately branded racist.
"As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist," he said in an interview in Corriere della Sera.
"This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on - we know it well."
McEwan recognised that similar views were held by some Christian hardliners in America.
"I find them equally absurd," he said. "I don't like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don't want to kill anyone in my city, that's the difference."
Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, criticised McEwan's defence of Amis.
"Mr McEwan is being rather disingenuous about his friend, Martin Amis's remarks. Of course you should be allowed to criticise the tenets of any religion. However, Amis went much further than that," he said.
"He was advocating that the Muslim community be made to suffer 'until it gets its own house in order'. And what sort of suffering did Amis have in mind? In his own words, 'Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.'"
He added: "Those were clearly very bigoted remarks and the fact that McEwan prefers to whitewash them tells us much about his own views too."

Claude Michelet

2008-06-22T04:54:00.001-07:00

Firelight and Woodsmoke, Applewood, Scent of Herbs by Claude Michelet

Written from personal experience by French writer Claude Michelet this is a wonderful epic of one family – the Vialhe Family – set in rural France from the turn of the twentieth century up to the 1980s. It follows the fortunes of the family as they live out their lives in the village of Saint Libéral in the southern Corrèze region, close to the Dordogne. As an example of a social history written in narrative style it is first class. The first book sees the family begin to fall apart as the younger generation rebel against the ‘old ways’ and the terror of WW1 takes its toll.
The second book continues from the 1930’s through to the early 70’s taking in the horrors and after-effects of WW2. The final book in the trilogy shows how the Vialhe family and the villagers have to move with the times if they are to survive in modern day France. This comes highly recommended.

The Lincoln Reviews

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