Book List for 2009.......

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" A review by M.Kakutani

'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.

Calling Ex-Pats..........

Are You A British Ex-Pat In France Considering A Move Back To The UK?

Are You In A Dilemma About Whether To Return?

If so ITV1 are making a documentary series about expats who are weighing up the merits of returning home. It is the great British dream to find a place in the sun which offers tranquility and a better quality of life. It is no surprise then that many people turn to France with its stunning weather, cultural heritage and fiscal benefits.

Yet despite this one in three people who leave Britain are returning home every year.In many cases this has nothing to do with their adopted country but more to do with personal circumstances.

Upon making the decision to return some find they fall back in love with the country and decide to stay for good but others are surprised about how much has changed since they left and end up ruing their decision to return.

So how can you be sure the Britain you left offers you the opportunities you crave? How can you reconcile so many factors such as career, property and schooling decisions whilst abroad?We are offering expats the opportunity to be flown back home to see what the UK has to offer them.

They will spend a week back in the UK with a relocation expert who will show them some of the things they have missed about Britain whilst also highlighting the reasons why they moved in the first place. We hope by the end of the week our contributors will have either developed a new appreciation for what their adopted country offers them, or been inspired to return home.

If you would like to find out more please contact us on

michael.hanney@fevermedia.co.uk

or call 0044 207 4285752.

Monday, October 03, 2005
We Need to Talk about Kevin

Have put up a post on The Middle Stage about Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. It's a book I can’t recommend strongly enough.

Update: have cross-posted the full review. Here it is:

Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the most provocative books I’ve read in a long, long time (and when you’re reading books and writing about them for a living, you learn to be chary about sweeping statements like that one; the reviewer’s jargon is already full of stock phrases. But then cliché is sometimes the only recourse). This is a story told in the form of long confessional letters written by a woman, Eva Khatchadourian, to her (presumably estranged) husband Franklin, about their son Kevin who murdered nine people in his school gym a few days before his 16th birthday. Over the course of her letters Eva looks back at her peculiar, strained relationship with her son; but she begins her story with the time when she and Franklin, both in their late 30s, decided to have a child.

In a perfect world, the most important reason – perhaps the only reason - for a couple deciding to have children would be: both of them badly want to, and feel they are ready for it. In the real world, far too often too many other factors play the decisive role. This is especially true in more conservative societies where pressure from family elders is a continuous, intrusive presence – but it holds good everywhere. The reasons can be many. Perpetuating the species – or, less nobly, having children as a means of ensuring immortality for oneself. The knowledge that they’ll talk about us when we’ve passed on (whether they say good or bad things is another matter), the same way we talk about our parents. Simple curiosity about what it might be like to hear someone calling “Momm-MEEE?” from around the corner. The dark thought that if something were to happen to your partner, you’d at least have a tangible memento. Eva’s decision ultimately rests on a combination of these.

The first 60-70 pages give us some of the starkest, most daring writing on the nature of our closest relationships, the ones we take for granted. In her letters, Eva painstakingly dissects her feelings about parenthood. She wasn’t ready, she repeatedly claims:

“At last I should come clean. It is not true that I was ‘ambivalent’ about motherhood. You wanted to have a child. On balance, I did not. Added together, that seemed like ambivalence, but though we were a superlative couple we were not the same person. I never did get you to like eggplant.”
Her descriptions of pregnancy, of the child-bearing and delivering processes, are shockingly subversive, and shockingly honest.

“Crossing the threshold of motherhood, suddenly you become social property, the animate equivalent of a public park. That coy expression ‘you’re eating for two now, dear’ is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no longer a private affair…”
And later, comparing pregnancy to infestation, to “colonisation by stealth”, as depicted in horror films like Alien and Rosemary’s Baby:

“…the host is consumed or rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive its shell…any woman whose teeth have rotted, whose bones have thinned, whose skin has stretched, knows the humbling price of a nine-month freeloader.”
If the gestation period was a nightmare, the actual labour is worse. Finally, however, Kevin deigns to come into the world, and Eva, having heard gush-stories from friends about how parents fall instantly, irrevocably, in love with their newborns, discovers that she feels nothing for him.

“I felt…absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion…but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn’t there. ‘He’s beautiful,’ I mumbled; I had reached for a line from TV.”
Here, Shriver’s book takes an interesting right turn. Kevin (at least in the account of him presented us by Eva) turns out to be the kind of child who would have both Damian (the kid in The Omen) and baby Hannibal Lecter bawling for their security blankets. Importantly, this is how he is right from the outset (which means it isn’t the result of his mother’s attitude towards him). He’s positively demoniac – frighteningly precocious and aware, yet uninterested in everything; completely bereft of attachments, yet with a fearsome propensity for malice. No babysitter can handle him for any length of time. Classmates and even teachers are frightened of him for reasons that can never be properly explained. He has the power of influencing people to do things that are bad for them. Eva can see this side of him; Franklin, who truly IS in love with his child, can not.

As the years pass, Eva repeatedly questions whether she’s been a good mother but wonders if she even had an option, given her son’s nature: “After having not a child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles and an upstairs neighbour who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.”

In a desperate attempt to “understand something about my soul”, Eva has another child, against Franklin’s wishes, and this one turns out to be an angelic girl who does indeed stir the mother inside her. Her soul is safe for the time being. But now Kevin has a potential victim right under his nose.

Here, portions of the book start to read like the scripts of those horror movies about malevolent children (albeit much better written). And yet, throughout the reading process, we must be aware that we can’t blindly trust Eva’s narrative. Though there’s nothing equivocal about Kevin’s final act of destruction, there is room for ambiguities in the details that accumulate over the years. Another option presents itself: could it be that Kevin, though undoubtedly a strange, emotionless child, was never as malicious in the early stages as his mother makes him out to be? Could the real evil have resulted from his upbringing, and is this what Eva is trying to conceal (even as she repeatedly apologises for the things she does feel responsible for)?

And by the time we reach the book’s end, there’s yet another option: could Kevin have become what he is because he carries his mother’s genes? Throughout the story we’ve been presented the picture of Kevin as his father’s son, while Eva clings to her darling daughter (when Franklin and Eva decide to separate, they joke darkly about there at least being no argument over custody). But is there a bond between Eva and her son that transcends these surface appearances? The final, chilling paragraphs certainly seem to suggest so.

We Need to Talk about Kevin raises so many issues – about the nature-nurture debate, about family units made up of very different individuals who have to find a way to coexist, about upper-class hypocrisies - that it’s impossible to mention all of them here. Ultimately I have to turn to another cliché, this time from the blurb-writer’s pantheon: consider yourselves grabbed by the shoulders and told “Read this!”

Interview with Niffenegger

MF: Was there a central theme that you wanted readers to grasp?

Audrey Niffenegger: I wanted people to think about the intimacy of time, how ineffable it is, how it shapes us. I wanted to write about waiting, but since waiting is essentially a negative (time spent in the absence of something) I wrote about all the things that happen around the waiting.

Audrey Niffenegger ~ Short Bio

Audrey Niffenegger
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Audrey Niffenegger

Born
June 13, 1963 (1963-06-13) (age 44)South Haven, Michigan, United States
Occupation
Novelist, Artist
Nationality
American
Writing period
2003-present
Genres
Fiction
Influences[show]
Louise Fitzhugh
Official website
Audrey Niffenegger (born June 13, 1963 in South Haven, Michigan) is a writer and artist. She is also a professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. She is the founding member of T3 or Text 3, an artist and writer's group that also performs and exhibits in Chicago.
Niffenegger's debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife (2003), was a national bestseller. The Time Traveler's Wife is an unconventional love story that centers on a man with a strange genetic disorder that causes him to unpredictably time-travel and his wife, an artist, who has to cope with his frequent and unpredictable absences. The film version, starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, is due for release in 2008.
She has also written a graphic novel, or "novel in pictures" as Niffenegger calls it, called The Three Incestuous Sisters. This book tells the story of three unusual sisters who live in a seaside house. Because of the artwork and mood, the book has been compared to the work of Edward Gorey.
Another graphic novel, The Adventuress, was released in September 1, 2006. She is currently working on another novel called Her Fearful Symmetry.
Niffenegger is also a Faculty member at the North Shore Art League where she teaches the Intermediate & Advanced Printmaking Seminar. [1]

And they did!!!!!! Beat France.......

Wales celebrate having beaten France taken the Championship, Triple Crown and Grand Slam.....Mmmmnnn Tasty!!!!!!!