A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee

This complex exquisitely written novel concerns both cultural/racial exile and universal experiences of emotional exile. It raises numerous human and moral issues: how the need for acceptance generates a pressure to conform that may ultimately be dehumanizing; how the brutality of war creates enormous moral dilemmas, where the horrors experienced and the decisions that are made may destroy the capacity to make emotional attachments; how parent-child relationships are inevitably affected by past trauma. The relationship of father and daughter is beautifully drawn and depicts powerfully how self-destructive and yet brave a troubled adolescent can be.

From its retrospective stance the novel can ask moral questions with the benefit of hindsight, yet it confronts us with the need to address those same questions in the here and now. Interestingly, the protagonist, Hata, is known locally as "Doc" and although he never tries to pass himself off as a physician, this pseudo-doctor designation is emblematic of the facade which is his life. It is metaphor also for the imperfect moral choices that Hata makes. In the end, Hata's willingness to let the past surface and disturb the present is what redeems him and allows him to re-establish emotional connection.

---

I will be teaching this novel in the Fall of 2008.

theteach

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

If you haven't read The Awakening by Kate Chopin you've missed a great read!

The Awakening is a short novel by Kate Chopin, published in 1899. It is widely considered to be a proto-feminist precursor to American modernism.

Plot summary

Edna Pontellier, the wife of a successful New Orleans business man and the mother of two, vacations with her family at a seaside resort in Grand Isle, Louisiana. She spends much of her time with Robert Lebrun, a romantic young man who has decided to attach himself to Edna for the summer. After many intimate conversations, boating excursions, and moonlit walks, they both realize that they are developing romantic feelings for each other. Edna then realizes that there is much within herself that has remained dormant throughout her adult life.

When vacation ends and the Pontelliers return to New Orleans, Edna frees herself from the trappings of her old life, including her social position, her role as a mother, and her role as a wife. A major part of this freeing in Edna's life is accomplished through her affair with Alcée Arobin. Moving out of her husband's house, she establishes herself in a cottage and hopes that Robert Lebrun will return soon from an extended business trip in Mexico.

Upon Robert's return, Edna discovers that he is unable to come to grips with her newfound freedom. Indeed, he seems hopelessly bound by the traditional values of the French Creole community.

WARNING READ NO FURTHER - SPOILERS!

Edna thereupon returns to the seaside resort in the off-season. She makes arrangements for her lunch before heading off to the beach, and carries along a towel for drying off. Unable to resist the lure of the water, she strips nude and swims out as far as she can and, having exhausted herself, drowns. Most readers interpret this final passage as a deliberate attempt at suicide.

theteach

PBS to show Austen films on Masterpiece Theatre

'Complete Jane Austen' features all her novels
By Steve Brennan

Nov 2, 2007
Jane Austen fans in the U.S. can be grateful for what appears to have been something of a local feud between the U.K.'s ITV and the BBC over filmed versions of the author's English classics. The rush to production over recent years has made it possible for PBS' "Masterpiece Theatre" to air adaptations of all six of her novels for the first time in what amounts to an Austen festival beginning in January.

Fans in the U.S. have been busily blogging for months with chatter about the upcoming series, "The Complete Jane Austen." But full details of the event are now being outlined by U.K. screenwriter Andrew Davies and "Masterpiece" executive producer Rebecca Eaton, who are on a multicity tour to promote the series and meet sponsors.

"Complete Jane Austen" offers new productions of "Northanger Abbey," "Persuasion," "Mansfield Park" and "Sense and Sensibility." The lineup also includes "Pride and Prejudice," starring Colin Firth, as well as the version of "Emma" that stars Kate Beckinsale.

drawing above: Austen at Bath, England

theteach

Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Oct. 11 (Bloomberg) -- British author Doris Lessing, whose latest novel The Cleft depicts a world without men, won the 2007 Nobel literature prize, the Swedish Academy said.

Lessing, 87, is an "epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny,'' the Stockholm-based academy said on its Web site today. The Golden Notebook, her breakthrough novel, ``belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th- century view of the male-female relationship,'' the academy said. (Bloomberg.com)

theteach

maryt

Ian McEwan's "Atonement" is now a film

Atonement tests Knightley's fame

By Razia Iqbal BBC Arts correspondent

Keira Knightley's performance in Atonement has been applauded

When a British film is called highly-anticipated and shown on an international stage, the clarion call of "the British are coming" is never far behind.

As the curtain-raiser to the Venice Film Festival, Atonement, only the second feature from 35-year-old director Joe Wright, is generating such interest.

Critics have reacted warmly to the film, based on Ian McEwan's novel, and some have even been bold enough to talk about Oscars, not least for the central performance from Keira Knightley.

The actress says she was very keen to work with Joe Wright again, who steered her to an Oscar nomination in her role as Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.

Knightley admits she read the script - about a couple who are divided by class but devastatingly intertwined by a false accusation - before she tackled the novel.

'Path to sanity'

"I eventually read it a week before we started filming. My character, Cecilia, is slightly different in the book. There is a maternal softness to her which I certainly didn't play," explains the 22-year-old actress.

Knightley, who has become a major film star, has mixed feelings about the culture of celebrity and being famous - which another high-profile role is likely to increase.

James McAvoy and Keira Knightley play lovers divided by class

"Once you become famous you get completely dehumanised. I think people forget there is a person in there trying to deal with it," she says.

"Partly the way you deal with it is by not reading, not looking and seeing any of it and burying your head in the sand. It is the only path to sanity," adds Knightley.

She hopes that cinema-goers will "bawl their eyes out" when they see Atonement, and dreams that the Venice Film Festival, where it will compete for the prestigious Golden Lion, will mirror the progress of The Queen last year - which culminated in Dame Helen Mirren winning an Oscar.

Knightley's co-star in the film, James McAvoy, has built an impressive film CV of his own, including a role in award-winning The Last King of Scotland.

But he is resigned to the fact that his glamorous female lead will steal all the headlines.

"I don't mind that Keira will get a lot of attention. She deserves it. She is incredible in the film.

Once you become famous you get completely dehumanised. I think people forget there is a person in there trying to deal with it Keira Knightley on the downside of fame

"I'm very, very lucky to be involved in this film and it was the finest professional experience in my life. I'm very fortunate," adds the actor.

Director Joe Wright, who is already working on his next feature, says he felt "fear" when he discovered Atonement would open the Venice Film Festival, but adds his career does not rest on the accolade, or box office takings.

But he admits to being prepared for the prestigious event's red carpet, having already purchased a new Prada shirt for the occasion.

Atonement premieres at the Venice Film Festival on 29 August. It opens at cinemas in the UK on 7 September.

Via BBC News

theteach

Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan

The following is the epigraph at the beginning of Amy Tan's marvelous new novel, Saving Fish From Drowning:

A pious man explained to his followers: "It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place the fishes on the bank, where they flop and twirl. 'Don't be scared,' I tell those fishes. 'I am saving you from drowning.' Soon enough, the fishes grow calm and lie still. Yet, sad to say, I am always too late. The fishes expire. And because it is evil to waste anything, I take those dead fishes to market and I sell them for a good price. With the money I receive, I buy more nets so I can save more fishes." - Anonymous

Half the fun of the novel is figuring out how this quote relates to the plot. Hint: Think Buddha.

The answer

theteach

Living on Charlotte Street...

In Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, the protagonist, Henry Perowne, who is driving on Charlotte St. in the middle of London, asks himself : Who was the American novelist who said a man could be happy living on Charlotte Street? [p.123 in paperback edition]

Well, do you know? leave me answers in comments, okay?

And if you know the answer, what novel is the phrase to be found in?

theteach

Guess the Novel 3

Can you guess this mystery novel published in 1860 from the first couple of paragraphs? The picture of the author is at the right.

THIS is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.

If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of the public attention in a Court of Justice.

But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse; and the story is left to be told, for the first time, in this place. As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence. When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded, he will be the narrator. When not, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he has left it off, by other persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively as he has spoken before them.

Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness -- with the same object in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word.

Let Walter Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight years, be heard first.

Guess the Novel 2

Can you guess the title of the novel from the beginning paragraph? The novel is contemporary, written in 2005, by a British author with the initials IM. His picture is at the right:

Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet. It's not clear to him when exactly he became conscious, nor does it seem relevant. He's never done such a thing before, but he isn't alarmed or even faintly surprised, for the movement is easy, and pleasurable in his limbs, and his back and legs feel unusually strong. He stands there, naked by the bed--he always sleeps naked--feeling his full height, aware of his wife's patient breathing and of the wintry bedroom air on his skin. That too is a pleasurable sensation. His bedside clock shows three forty.

This is only about half the paragraph. I got tired typing.

theteach

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini's new book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is coming out May 22. Mr. Hosseini became an international sensation with his first novel, "The Kite Runner."

Now, the Afghan-American novelist has a new book that promises to be as moving as his first. Another tale of Afghanistan in turmoil, "A Thousand Splendid Suns," covers three decades of civil war and Taliban tyranny from the perspective of two women, Mariam and Laila.

Read an excerpt.

theteach

Guess the Title of the Novel

For Leon (and anybody else who'd like to take a try)

Can you guess from the ending the title of the early American 20th century novel published in 1911:

She took off her spectacles again, leaned toward me across the bead-work table-cover, and went on with lowered voice: "There was one day, about a week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn't live. Well, I say it's a pity she did. I said it right out to our minister once, and he was shocked at me. Only he wasn't with me that morning when she first came to... And I say, if she'd ha' died, Ethan might ha' lived; and the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues."

No hints needed.

maryt

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Coming out Tuesday May 1, 2007:

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: April 29, 2007
New York Times

Sitka, Alaska

ASIDE from geography, Sitka, a boomerang-shaped island in the southeastern panhandle of Alaska, has very little in common with the imaginary city named Sitka conjured up by Michael Chabon in his latest book, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”

In this fourth novel, which comes out Tuesday, Mr. Chabon takes a historical footnote, a pie-in-the-sky proposal to open up the Alaska Territory in 1940 to European Jews marked for extermination, and asks: What if? What if this proposal, which in real life was supported by the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, but killed in Congress, had actually passed?

Here's a quote from an article by Tom Kissa in the Anchorage Daily News:

"Imagine, if you please, a city of 3.2 million people on the shores of Baranof Island around Sitka. The official language is Yiddish, the inhabitants are Jews, and their lights stretch across the in-filled sound from Mount Edgecumbe to some place called Shvartsn-Yam. They have been gathering in Southeast since World War II, when U.S. officials hatched a plan to transport refugees from Europe to the territory of Alaska."

See the article below from Alaska History and Cultural Studies for background:

The King-Havenner Bill of 1940

Dashed Hopes for a Jewish Immigration Haven in Alaska

By Hannah L. Mitson

01-01-1998

maryt

The Reluctant Fundalmentalist by Mohsin Hamid

From Amazon.com:
Mohsin Hamid's first novel, Moth Smoke, dealt with the confluence of personal and political themes, and his second, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, revisits that territory in the person of Changez, a young Pakistani.

Told in a single monologue, the narrative never flags. Changez is by turns naive, sinister, unctuous, mildly threatening, overbearing, insulting, angry, resentful, and sad. He tells his story to a nameless, mysterious American who sits across from him at a Lahore cafe.

Educated at Princeton, employed by a first-rate valuation firm, Changez was living the American dream, earning more money than he thought possible, caught up in the New York social scene and in love with a beautiful, wealthy, damaged girl. The romance is negligible; Erica is emotionally unavailable, endlessly grieving the death of her lifelong friend and boyfriend, Chris.

Changez is in Manila on 9/11 and sees the towers come down on TV. He tells the American, "...I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased... I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees..." When he returns to New York, there is a palpable change in attitudes toward him, starting right at immigration. His name and his face render him suspect.

You can read more of the review here , but there are some spoilers if you read the review further.

I am listening to the novel on CD and the reader (Satya Bhabha) gives the flavor of a young British-educated young Pakistani to his speech along with all his feelings: anger, mystery, overbearance, etc. His voice adds to the novel's elegance and terror.

I think I want to suggest that you listen to the CD instead of reading the novel. I've never made such a suggestion before.

theteach

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a rare feat for a short stories collection and even more notable for a debut work of fiction. This award affirmed the New Yorker Magazine’s summer fiction issue of 1999 that included Lahiri among the “20 best young fiction writers in America.” (Beachcomber)


Lahiri once again amazes readers with smooth and elegant prose in her novel, The Namesake. The Namesake is the story of the Ganguli family; Bengali immigrant parents and their American-born children. Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli, who were united through an arranged marriage, have difficulty assimilating to American customs and culture, while their children cannot entirely relate to their Indian heritage. The story is mainly about Gogol, one of the children, and how he reacts to his name in America and how he can live in America and yet respect his culture.

I'm going to see the film tomorrow with a couple of friends and I'm eagerly looking forward to it. See the trailer for the film below.

Readers' Guide

The Sea by John Banville

Here's the opening of a beautifully written novel:

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters of the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam. The looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no, not ever again.
Someone has just walked over my grave. Someone.

Banville's novel won the Booker in 2005. While critics do appreciate Banville's writing (although some make fun of his use of obscure words when simpler ones would suffice), they do always praise his work highly:

"Above all else, expect from The Sea a ceaseless tide of ravishing prose, the cadences of which are designed to slowly dissolve the shoreline separating the artificial exercise of recording felt experiences from the actual experiences themselves." [5 Nov 2005] (The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Charles Foran)

theteach

My Book Meme

Here are the rules:

1. Grab the book closest to you.
2. Open to page 123, look down to the 5th sentence.
3. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog.
4. Include the title and the author's name.
5. Tag 3 People.

The book I grabbed which was right at my elbow was The Plot Against America. Here are the next 3 sentences after the 5th sentence on page 123:

There were the bosses and there were the bossed, and the bosses usually were bosses for a reason -- and in business for themselves for a reason, whether the business was construction or produce or the rabbinate or the rackets. It was the best they could come up with to remain unobstructed --and, in their own eyes, unhumiliated -- not least by the discrimination of the Protestant hierarchy that kept ninety-nine percent of the Jews employed by the dominant corporations uncomplainingly in their place.
"If Jack was alive," Monty said, "the kid wouldn't have got out the front door." (The Plot Against America by Philip Roth)

Okay now I have to tag 3 people...

maryt :)

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

From JewishJournal.com:

The story isn’t too complicated and the author narrates. Philip is a precocious third-grader in 1940. He lives in a small apartment in Weequahic, N.J., with his father, mother, brother and 21-year-old cousin, Alvin, his parents’ ward. Everyone in his world is Jewish, and almost no one is religious. Everyone is patriotic: “Our homeland was America. Then the Republicans nominated Charles Lindbergh and everything changed.”

Lindbergh is elected on a platform to keep America out of the European War. The East Coast establishment of the Roosevelts mock Lindberg’s appeal to the people who don’t live in the big cities, and are surprised at the landslide. The red states win.

The book follows the expected structure of a speculative history, the entertainment is the flow of differences between what really happened and what the book describes, every change ringing congratulations for our recognizing it. That Walter Winchell is the book’s political hero, the voice of opposition, is delicious only to readers who remember the name...

"Life is normal, then it changes a little, and then everything changes."

Herman Roth loses his job to anti-Semitism, gets a night job through Jewish gangster connections and protects his family. The government establishes the Office of American Absorption, and Sandy is shipped to live for a few months with a family of tobacco farmers in Kentucky as part of the Just Folks program, spreading Jews harmlessly around the country. Cousin Alvin runs to Canada to join the army in its fight against the Germans and comes back with a missing leg. Some Jews emigrate.

So all of this would be unexceptional, amusing but remote, if Roth had not invented one of the greatest characters in literature, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, and it’s through him that Roth establishes the book as his response to the present disaster. Bengelsdorf, the town’s Conservative rabbi, is Lindbergh’s apologist. He speaks at the Republican convention to calm the fears of the Jews “koshering Lindbergh for the goyim,” cousin Alvin screams at the radio. “Don’t you see, Uncle Herman, what they got the great Bengelsdorf to do. He just guaranteed Roosevelt’s defeat!”

The Rabbi stands for all those who know that George W. Bush is surrounded by a crowd who know that scientific creationism is superstition, but support him anyway. After all, their children get a private education based on science, not the public schools’ program of de-enlightenment. But they have sold their piety and conscience because he cut their taxes, or because they think he’s good for Israel — as though lowered taxes or chimerical support for Israel are worth the catastrophe in Iraq, the catastrophe in our drinking water, the catastrophe in public education or the catastrophe in the national debt. For this last catastrophe, his supporters are happily sacrificing their children and grandchildren by giving them the bill, and leaving them a future for this country that could look like Argentina without much more effort.

The only satisfaction that any Jew who voted for Sen. John Kerry can feel about any Jew who voted for Bush is that you’ll wake up one day, like Bengelsdorf and the rebbetzin, and discover the truth, because the truth will come. Christian fascists are never friends of the Jews.

theteach

Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee (pronounced cut ze' a) is a South African author (now living in Australia) and academic. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. His 1999 novel Disgrace, for which he won the Booker Prize, was in my opinion, a magnificently told story of retribution for South African apartheid. What happens is horrifying and yet, understandable, if I can say so.

I am now about to read Slow Man, in which Coetzee ponders life, love and the mind/ body connection in his latest heavy-hitter; he also plays a little trick.

In brief, a summary from Amazon: When retired photographer Paul Rayment loses his leg in a bicycle accident, his lengthy, lonely recuperation forces him to reflect on a life he deems wasted.

You can read a review or two here.

I'll be back to let you know what I think of the novel.

theteach :)

The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer

The Castle in the Forest tells the story of Adolf Hitler's childhood through the words of a demon.

The opening lines recall Melville's Moby Dick, "You may call me D.T. That is short for Dieter, a German name, and D.T. will do, now that I am in America, this curious nation."

This is Norman Mailer's first novel in a decade.

You can hear NPR talk about the book here.

You can read a couple of reviews here: MSNBC.com, BAMM.com, Barnes & Noble

I don't think the New York Times has formally reviewed the novel yet. But from what I've read it will be a tough go, but worth the read.

theteach :)

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

Hurry up and read The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham because the film is coming out in New York and Los Angeles on December 20, 2006, December 29 elsewhere.

I encourage you because you, like me, may want to read the book before seeing the movie.

Here are some links to the classic novel by Maugham written in the 1920s and to the film(s) and trailer:

Rotten Tomatoes makes reference to the classic film (1934) starring Greta Garbo.

The British Library has a bio and links to the author Somerset Maugham.

Seriously sandeep has detailed info on the novel she re-read recently.

The Evening Class talks about the 2006 film and has lots of wonderful pictures from the current film.

You can buy the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells. Amazon has it the cheapest at around $11. or so.

You can buy the classic film (1934) at e-bay.

theteach =)