I have to confess that I read this book a few years ago and didn't get a chance or time to re-read it - it was a library copy and I know it is still in the library here but I haven't had a minute to get back there- and I also was being distracted by reading the marvellous new book by Jonathan Franzen, Freedom. I adored that book, as I did his last book, The Corrections, and as I'd read The Reader before, I didn't feel too guilty. Thanks to Lorna for recommending it.
Also I saw the DVD of the film with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes a year or two ago. It was one of those rare films that was faithful to the book. It captured my impressions of the book's atmosphere - lyrical and very evocative of the era in which it is set, which is post-war 1950s Germany when Michael is a teenager and meets Hanna and their affair starts, right to the war trials of the 1960s which are underway when he's a law student.
I remember the book left an impression as a powerful read, which has stayed with me in its general context rather than the detail. Michael's whole life is changed and affected by his encounter with the older woman who is Hanna, whom he meets when he is sick near her apartment and who takes him in to care for him. The initial meeting leads to revisits and the start of a torrid affair. He knows little or nothing about her other than her work as a tram conductor, and her secret of illiteracy is only discovered by him much later on.
The title of the book comes from Michael's role in their relationship, that of her reader, when he reads aloud the German classics, in a post-coital haze, and this pattern shapes their encounters. It's an intense relationship, excluding all others, and its eroticism precludes too much information. When the denouement of her Nazi past is disclosed in such a shocking manner to Michael when he turns up at her war crimes trial it's a life-changer for him. He has to come to terms with the fact that his lover was an SS guard at a camp for women prisoners, 300 of whom died in a fire in a church on the death march from Auschwitz, and her illiteracy is such a secret shame she accepts responsibility for a report on the fire rather than admit illiteracy. She also admitted to selections at Auschwitz of women who ended up in the gas chambers.
As she had left him suddenly at the height of their affair years earlier, he never got over her and had no chance to expunge her from his impressionable youth, and this lasting damage led to his subsequent marriage breakdown, and his sad and lonely future is well portrayed out when he renews his relationship with Hanna - albeit on a platonic level - in prison. He sends her tapes of his readings, and she learns to read by following the recordings with the books in the prison library. He seems to treat her like a benevolent nephew but he never visits her in her 18 years in jail. On her release he agrees to find her a place to live, but she hangs herself prior to her release, and he discovers her conquest of illiteracy through his readings.
I liked Schlink's style of writing. It's a very spare and sparsely written book, and he chooses his words very thoughtfully. I found the eroticism almost contradictory to the spare style of the writing, yet paradoxically it fitted into the intensity of an affair predicated on lust, secrecy and isolation - they were locked away from the wider world in their own bubble, and it's full of conflicting emotion, and the old debate on German collective guilt is well illustrated. It's not a very long book, and I remember it as a gripping read at the time. I think I would re-read it again, if and when I have a minute. Would I recommend it to friends or our book club? I think it would be a great trigger for a good heated debate, and well worth the effort.
Don't forget to visit the other members of the Bloggers' Book Club - Lily is the terrific moderator who keeps us all coordinated, and as it's late and I'm wrecked after a day in Dublin at the Labour PartySpecial Delegate Conference deciding to go into Government with Fine Gael later this week, I won't list the other members here - rather you can find them over at Lily's blog. Read their reviews, always entertaining and informative and they're a great bunch of women(thus far, no men, but I'm sure that's always open to change!)
We had this Man-Booker shortlisted novel for our real-world book club here in Lismore last month so it was serendipitous that it was listed for the Bloggers' Book Club for November. There's been a few coincidences recently - Andrea Levy's Small Island was another one we did in both worlds and it went down a treat in each!
Room has just won the Irish Novel of the Year at the Irish Times Book Awards and it is a well deserved accolade for Emma Donoghue, whatever you may make of the novel's subject matter which has sat uncomfortably with many readers. It's a pretty ambiguous book and many of our book club members seemed ambivalent; torn between admiration and exasperation, the lack of the definite article was a particular gripe with one of our members who found it incongruous in a child with an otherwise extremely advanced vocabulary.
Many felt uncomfortable about the voyeuristic sense that it exploited for literary and commercial gain the misery of those who had experienced such incarceration, particularly the Fritzl case in Austria which was the inspiration for Donoghue.
Coincidentally, last Sunday morning Emma Donoghue and her father Denis Donoghue, a renowned literary critic were on RTÉ Radio One's Miriam Meets. It was a fascinating programme and it showed the relationship between father and daughter to be mutually loving and relaxed. She came across as a gentle articulate woman with a lovely accent - Hiberno-Canadian overtones probably - and he as a slightly self-deprecating academic and family man. I have to admit I'd never heard of him but had read her before - Stir-Fry was the first of her books I read back in the '70s and it left an impression.
But this is a review of Room. The subject was harrowing - based on the horrendous true story of abduction and imprisonment of young women by monsters - often their own fathers as in the Joseph Fritzl case - and in this book, a stranger who abducted Ma (I don't think she's named in the book - correct me if I'm wrong) as a young student and held her hostage in a soundproofed garden shed for 7 or 8 years. Long enough for her to be impregnated twice - first with a baby who dies, and is buried in the garden by the abductor/father (known only as Old Nick, a nicely Satanic reference), and then with Jack who survives and becomes the focus of Ma's life. The story opens when he's almost six and he is the narrator throughout. It quickly becomes evident that he is an extremely precocious child with a vocabulary way beyond his tender years, and an intelligence of acquired knowledge - like reading and big words - while having a very peculiar trait. He personalises objects in his environment and in doing so drops the indefinite article. The Wardrobe is simply Wardrobe, and every inanimate object in his frame of reference comes alive. It is a grating construct that grew on me - I quickly got over the initial irritation - and it made perfect sense to me when he had such a strange world view.
For Jack, his world was Room - he knew no other space - and Ma conspired in this by telling him the world they saw on TV was not real. So he grows up with the norms of childhood in the early 21st Century - TV. Dora the Explorer is his favourite children's programme, slightly unusual as it is generally favoured by girls, but Jack has no gender stereotypes to conform with. Their lives in Room are so confined yet Jack has no sense of this, knowing nothing else. That he has got to five with such intelligent development is a testimony to Ma's care and the most disturbing images are of his hiding in Wardrobe during the visits of their abductor and Ma's passivity in succumbing to his advances, all the while humouring him to protect Jack. She still breastfeeds Jack which makes sense - they need to be close to each other and it provides him with nutrients he might not get from his diet given that he never saw daylight except through the skylight in Room.
I found myself trying to imagine how the world would be if all you knew was the one space and had no language to describe the rest of the world. It reminded me of writer/philosopher Alain de Botton's references to Xavier de Maistre's Voyage around my Room in his book The Art of Travel. de Maistre wrote about travelling around his bedroom, as if on a global expedition - but he knew what else was out there. Jack has no idea what he's missing, and only midway through the book when Ma plots the escape plan does she disclose the truth to him. He cannot comprehend that there is a world with more people out there, and while the actual escape stretches the imagination a bit I think Donoghue deserves a bit of artistic licence as there was no other way to do it.
The book is clearly divided into a before and after - life in Room and beyond. The world falling apart for Jack is at times harrowing and if not such a difficult scenario would be often hilarious. The poor boy has a hard time adjusting to relationships with the family of Ma who has a nervous breakdown soon after their rescue. There's little reference to the abductor afterwards, other than to confirm he'd be getting life. I found the after part of the book quite disjointed and it probably reflected their new life - she had to pick up the pieces after a long absence and her parents had split up, so she had a new Steppa to contend with while her natural father came from Australia to visit her and had a difficulty with Jack being the result of rape. It had an open ending - so one hopes there's a good future for both of them - if there's a sequel potential I'd be curious to know what went on before - maybe there'd be a prequel as well.
I'm going to add some videoclips I saw on other Blogger's Book Club member's reviews, as they give a good sense of the macabre world we move into with Room.
All in all, I loved the voice of Jack - his innocence and absolute acceptance of the world he knows is credible, and while the lack of the indefinite article is a bit irritating at first it blends in with the theme. I could visualise Room so well that I could imagine them exercising, feeding, watching TV and hiding in Wardrobe. The horrors of the incarceration are alluded to and the reader is drip-fed tidbits, like the injured wrist which Ma sustained from her abductor, her rotten tooth which Jack holds like a talisman, a soother. There are terrible things in this book that creep up on the reader they are told so matter-of-factly by Jack referring to incidents or relaying what Ma's told him happened.
There's a subtext on breastfeeding and societal attitudes to extended feeding which are nicely addressed here - Jack helps himself to "some" as he calls the milk whenever he wants it - a situation prevailing in many parts of the world today - but it freaks out people on the outside when they hear of it, as if it's one of the bigger deals. The topic is opened up without being laboured pedantically but it shows the prejudice that society can have towards something so innocent, as if it's something bad she's doing, instead of a way to keep sane as well as keep Jack healthy in his incarceration.
While it is a disturbing difficult book to read, that's probably the genius of the writer. As a mother of a young boy like Jack, she listened and listed his speech patterns to get the gist of a child's voice. The reader is drawn into their world that it becomes plausible and real. I would say this book will be read by book clubs globally and there will be a universality in the response to it, a difficult subject, controversial regarding allegations of exploitation by the writer of such situations - some of our members and indeed some journalists felt it exploited the awful abductions like that of Jaycee Dugard that came to light in 2009, the Fritzlone in 2008 and the Kampusch one in 2006, both in Austria. I'm sure Austrian society has done a lot of soul-searching lately but I don't think any country can take the moral high ground. We're not too hot ourselves in our treatment of the innocent, with all the clerical sex abuse of children, the dreadful incest cases exposed in the media - some high-profile like the McColgan and Kilkenny and Roscommon cases, others less so where there's a litany of misery in the cold detached language of a newspaper court report.
The subject matter might be bleak, and any review will reflect that, but I think Donoghue offers insight into what it might be like to be a victim of such a terrible crime and we'll all hug our children a little bit tighter after reading a book like Room - and be thankful for our ordinary mundane lives.
The members of the Bloggers' Book Club (moderated by Lily, bless her!) include:
Drop by and leave a comment if you feel inclined. And if you'd like to join, just send Lily a message. New members are welcome so link in if you're a book-lover!
This book has a sense of dejá vu for me as I read it a few years ago, then our real-world book club chose it for September, and now it's rolled around again for the virtual Bloggers' Book Club - Lily's brainchild.
I re-read it, and it weathered the re-read pretty well, as I had forgotten a lot of the detail.
The story tells of the lives of four main characters - a young Jamaican woman, Hortense, who comes to live in England, following her husband Gilbert Joseph who has already come over in the first wave of Caribbean immigration on the Windrush; Queenie Bligh, their landlady and friend; and her husband Bernard who signs up for service in India during WWII.
Hortense has great hopes for their future, but these are dashed when she sees the squalor in which he lives, in a room in a boarding house. The landlady, Queenie,is a truly anachronistic character in that she is kind-hearted and very open to immigrants in the face of the overt racism of Britain at the time - the days of the "No Blacks, Irish or Dogs" signs in the windows. In her tolerance, she seems to be colour blind and this brings the wrath of her neighbours and family on many occasions. Her husband Bernard has vanished during the war, and his story emerges when he returns unexpectedly from abroad, a changed man whose wartime experiences in India are horrendous and show the brutality of war on ordinary men.
The writer highlights the attitudes of the colonial Caribbean "small island" people to England - the Motherland. They speak of it as Home, redolent of the Raj, and imbue it with a sentimental nostalgia. The disillusionment they must have felt on experiencing the reality must have been a huge let-down and thrown them completely.
Gilbert is a lovable rogue and quite innocent, while Hortense was ambitious and quite the snob - she had aspirations to a grand life in England and won't let anything stand in her way. To this end she does an appalling thing by telling her best friend's boyfriend about her mad mother - and ends up marrying the boyfriend - Gilbert. This shows a mean streak in her character which is mirrored throughout the book in her treatment of Gilbert and yet she is a paradox as she shows at the end with an uncharacteristically magnanimous gesture.
Hortense was well-educated in Jamaica as a schoolteacher and it is heartbreaking to see the dismissive attitude of the staff at the department when she tries to get her teaching certification recognised in England. She sees her dreams dashed but becomes a better and kinder person by the end of the novel, by realising that people are what matter.
There are many twists in this tale - Queenie's love affair with Michael, who has links to Jamaica and Hortense - and whose paths almost cross in England. The end of the tale is very poignant, and I found it very moving and yet somehow redemptive, and to tell more would prompt a spoiler alert.
Levy has a lovely style of writing - she uses the vernacular and the patois of Jamaica - and she paints a wonderfully evocative picture of an idyllic yet hard life on the island before the mass migration to the motherland. She is well placed to write on this theme of migration as her own parents were also migrants on the Windrush to England in the 1940s.
The sense of being from a small island becomes relative when they realise that England and the Motherland is another small island in the global context. It is a novel that encompasses race and identity in a cultural clash and brings the colonial past into sharp relief - the propaganda of colonialism is shown by the idealised image Gilbert and especially Hortense have of England and how disconnected that ideal is from the reality.
Serendipitously, I had BBC Radio Four/World Service on yesterday and thanks to a strike by newscasters and journalists, the Today Programme was replaced by the World Book Club programme with Andrea Levy talking about - yes, Small Island! It was great to hear her reading in the voice of Hortense and to hear her discuss the book and answer questions from the audience about the characters - check it out for yourself here. Just scroll down and find it under Andrea Levy. You can podcast it to iTunes and listen at your leisure as I have just done. There is also a BBC TV production of Small Island which I haven't seen, but I am very tempted to get the box set or even check if the local library has it.
The members of the Bloggers' Book Club are here - be sure to visit their posts and compare and contrast everyone's reviews!
In May we read Let the Great World Spin for our Bloggers' Book Club, a great idea inspired and established by Lily a few months ago. This is the much-acclaimed new book by Colum McCann, a writer I first heard of in our own book club in Lismore when we read one of his books - This Side of Brightness - some years ago. That book was beautifully written given the dark theme - literally and metaphorically - as it was set in the New York underground, the subculture life of those who live on and beyond the margins of society's norms. I have forgotten the finer details but I can still visualise the mind pictures the book conjured up in me.
This book was somehow redolent of that earlier book. I found it relentlessly bleak in the middle while the beginning and end were more hopeful and optimistic. The book's premise of linking seemingly random lives by a single factual event on August 7th 1974 was certainly an interesting one and he pulled it off in that there was a cohesive holding together each of the main characters. These connections were fairly nebulous and random at first glance, and you had to pay close attention or you might find yourself re-reading to clarify any confusion. I found it a bit hard to keep the links in my head as I didn't get to read the book in a short time-frame, rather it was over a couple of weeks between everything else going on - life and work get in the way of reading at times!
The breadth of the story was vast, as was the geographical reach - from Dublin to New York. But this was a subtle twist on the Irish-American literary fiction genre as it centred around the tightrope walker Philippe Petit, a guerrilla highwire walker who defied security guards and the NYPD to walk across a wire that he slung between the iconic Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which assumed a mythological status post-9/11. This became a metaphor for the terrible events to follow nearly three decades later, where everything hung in the balance and the world spun a little off its axis, and nothing was the same afterwards. New Yorkers gazed skywards that day too, to see the man on the wire, and cheered when he made his way to safety, despite his immediate arrest. The Judge dealing with his charge took a lenient view of the "crime" - and he was peripheral to one of the central characters in the story, as it wove its web around the city.
Video of Petit's daring walk which inspired the recent film Man on Wire
Both the tightrope walk and the events of 9/11 were moments in history where everyone would remember what they were doing at the time, a bit like my generation remembers what they were doing when Kennedy was assassinated. (I was lying on the floor in front of the fire, drawing and colouring in, and it came on the old wireless. It was only months since his helicopter had flown over Lismore and our school, when he came to stay in the Castle where his sister Kathleen should have been the Duchess, had she not been tragically killed in a plane crash in 1948, four years after her husband the heir to the Duke of Devonshire title was killed in action in World War II.
Once again I digress; back to the book. Its opening, set in an affluent Dublin suburbia of the 50s, gave no indication of the direction it would take, Stateside to New York to follow a hermit-style priest whose life's work was looking out for the hookers in the Bronx, while naively or otherwise falling foul of their pimps. I know this is the real world for far too many women but it made for very brutal and bleak reading, especially the narrative by Tillie, one of the women whose daughter Jazzlyn was also on the streets and who saw no other future for her grandchildren after their mother's death and her jailing, until a twist of fate saw their lives turn around, although they could never forget their origins.
All the women in the story are all strong women who are influenced for good or bad by their circumstances in life and the external events like the Vietnam war has had an impact on two of the women who lost sons there. The description of the upper-crust Claire's brittle demeanour and her efforts at bringing a group of similarly bereaved mothers together was one of the strong parts of the book and it brought into stark relief the contrast with the lives of desperation of Jazzlyn and Tillie, the daughter-mother hookers. I found this intriguing, and I think he captured the mood very well, especially the dynamic between Claire and Gloria, one of the mothers, which gets off to a bad start and ends with their friendship - a mutual need fulfilled. There are some characters who seem to have minor roles, like the computer hackers, and the graffiti tagger in the subway tunnels - a nod to This Side of Brightness here - and drop-out artists in the woods, and I enjoyed the depiction of their life. McCann paints vivid imagery and like his forenamesake Colm Tóibín did in Brooklyn (last month's book club choice) can bring a place to life for someone like me who has never been to New York.
Corrigan, the priest who is known by his surname, is a maverick character who epitomises the Christ-like humble and serving priest, in stark contrast to the current image of the clergy who have got a hammering in recent years, much of it well deserved, however good individual priests may be. The church and the clergy cannot hide behind their collars and Canon Law as mitigation for the disgraceful handling of the sex-abuse scandals that have beset them since the disclosures, denials and cover-ups. These have been exposed thanks to brave survivors of abuse, and no thanks to the church leaders in Ireland and Rome who have been dragged kicking and screaming to a grudging acceptance of their role in the institutionally-sanctioned cover-ups. I wrote about that last year when the Ryan Report was published and I despair that anything has changed for the better in the interim.
That terrible date, 9/11, marked a shift in global attitudes both towards and by the US after which the world has never been the same again. Certainly international air travel has become more stressful and restrictive, and the halcyon days of yore when you could go as far as the steps of the plane or at least the boarding gate when seeing off a child who couldn't get or refused the ignominy of unaccompanied minor status are gone forever.
I remember doing precisely that in 1999 when middle son, aged about 13, went off to stay with his old school pal from Laos who'd moved home to Berlin. Dublin airport staff were totally unfazed with such an occurrence and it reminded me of all the long-haul flights we took over two decades between Ireland and Africa and Asia, where the boys had their Aer Lingus log books and got the Captain's signature with all the flight details completed, and were invariably invited up to the cockpit for a chat with the pilots. Those days will probably never return and I hope the boys will treasure those special memories along with the log books.
Did I like the book? I did - but a caveat - it is hard going at times and very harrowing - yet McCann's way with words and language is lyrical and gets you through the tougher parts, and there was a lot of empathy with the various characters, especially the women. I am glad I read it; McCann is a decade younger than Tóibín yet they have similarities in their fluent writing style and the ability to draw in the reader.
I will be fascinated to read all the other reviews as I am sure it will be a book that inspires a diversity of opinion, once again! The title is from Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" - a little bit of serendipity I hadn't been aware of till I read the end notes - I have a pocket collection of Tennyson from my mother who loved his poetry among others, and she gave me a love for it too. I think the title is fitting for a book with a theme of the Twin Towers, as the world has been in something of a spin since, with the conflicts it sparked in Iraq and Afghanistan -notwithstanding the fact that 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq but that's a whole other blog post.
I have gone all over the place with this review, as it inspired streams of thought I had no idea would emerge, but they just seemed to flow and I went with them. I hope you stuck with me to the end, through all these tedious ramblings, and got something from the post that will set you off to read this writer - he has quite a few books I have yet to read, but I think he has a lot to offer.
The other members of the Bloggers' Book Club are listed at Lily's blog which seems down at present so I don't have an updated list but those I have are:
When I do get the other links I will add them to this list. Drop by these blogs and see what they thought of the book, though it may be the weekend before they post their reviews.
(I'm posting this a bit early - the deadline is next Sunday but as I've been late the last two months with the reviews it can't do any harm to be early for once - bucking the trend for me! NB - It's Saturday 5th June - I am moving the post to today's date so other members will find it at the top of my blogpost roll!)
I am running late in posting this review which should have gone live about a day ago - so let me start by apologising to my fellow book club bloggers* (especially sorry Lily!)who've been checking in on Sunday May 2nd. My excuses might sound trite but they are merely that we have thirteen members of hubby's family visiting from Holland for the week as he reaches a significant birthday which we will celebrate on Thursday with a party in a local establishment of repute. There may even be a post about it if we come through it with our dignity intact!
I am enjoying being on holidays from work for the next week, and hosting our guests with all the hospitality we can muster. They are staying in a nearby town in holiday bungalows. We had a great barbecue yesterday with hubby cooking for 22 people and us all ducking and diving between the thundershowers. After the family arrived we had lunch on the patio where I had a chance to showcase my domestic goddess skills. We had freshly baked buttered scones with strawberry jam and whipped cream, which went down a treat, hot apple tart and cream, and a variety of fairy cakes, from coconut to hundreds and thousands on icing to cherry buns. Today when they called in we had simpler fare - plain madeira and cherry madeira cakes with lashings of tea (which the Dutch drink black) and real coffee (as opposed to instant). I hope I can sustain the variety for the week, in between baking the birthday cake and deciding on a decorative theme.
But I digress. First and foremost this post is supposed to be about Brooklyn - a wonderfully evocative yet bleak book that I read some months ago. I'd read the reviews back when the book came out and they were mixed - I remembered reading that it went down a treat in Ireland and America but it failed to make much impact in the UK. I think this is because the theme of emigration has a particularly Irish emotional resonance, and I think that this nuance is absent in the UK, where migration tended tobe either outward to the colonies, and inward migration was inherently self-serving. This is best portrayed with the West Indian immigrants of the Windrush who were brought in to serve the Empire in its dying days. I think Andrea Levy wrote brilliantly about that era in Small Island, and Colm Tóibín writes equally evocatively about the same era but in the Irish-American context.
Brooklyn is the story of Eilis Lacey, who somewhat reluctantly emigrates from Wexford for Brooklyn in the 1960s, leaving her older sister Rose and mother behind. She comes across as extremely passive and lets things happen to her, imposed by those stronger than herself, or so it seems on first glance. Her position as a shop assistant, and her boarding with the ghastly Mrs. Kehoe is secured through contact with a local priest home on holidays from New York, who promises to take care of Eilis. I remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable when I read that, as from today's perspective the prospect of being beholden or under a compliment to the priest could have undertones of the abuse of power. Thankfully my fears were unfounded but the relationship with the priest seemed almost unreal and you wondered why he would go to such ends to take care of her. Perhaps it's the times we are in that we can't attribute a good deed to a member of the clergy without suspecting an ulterior motive. Maybe he was just a decent man.
Eilis's departure from home was sad and the sea crossing to New York was graphically written and spared nothing for readers of a delicate disposition in its description of its awfulness for steerage class passengers. Rose dies unexpectedly and Eilis returns to Wexford for the funeral. A dilemma develops as her brothers go to England to look for work, and she has fallen in love in New York with Tony from an Italian family with ambitions to develop a building empire - echoes of Charming Billy by Alice McDermott here - does she abandon her widowed mother to return to her Tony - is she really in love or was it an illusion? It's almost because it seems like the right thing to do at the time, to escape from the loneliness she felt so far from home in a society where she wasn't fully accepted by her peers in the boarding house or at work. She seems to drift through life and comes across as a suppressed woman who daren't let emotions surface or they could become uncontrollable. All the women in the book were strong women who had to be in control and despite Eilis's apparent passivity it was an armour against revealing her true emotions and desires. I thought the book was written with sparse narrative but this fitted the theme of leaving a lot unsaid - as was fitting to the era when everything was concealed and true feelings were subsumed in convention dictated by church and state - two things that in Ireland were interchangeable. This was the era where the State bowed - literally - to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and sought his approval for any and every government proposal that might impact on the privacy of the family home. The doomed Mother and Child Bill of Noel Browne encapsulated that insularity and fear of progress, and seems incredible from today's perspective.
I wrote a review of Brooklyn for Rosita Boland's inaugural Irish Times Book Club, and a snippet of it was in the Saturday Weekend supplement - much to my egotistical delight as it isn't every day I get to see my name in print in such a hallowed place - and this is what I wrote in the online review:
"It’s a great idea to have a bookclub online like this - I am in a bookclub locally which is great - we did Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship and loved it unanimously, but as we have a rule not to repeat authors (as it is so tempting to repeat favourites) Brooklyn won’t get read by our club. I just finished our local library copy. I loved the flow of the language, languid and very evocative of what I imagine life in Wexford must have been like in the 50s or 60s (I was a child in the 60s so I can vaguely relate to it) but I haven’t ever been to Brooklyn so can’t relate there.
I felt he drew a vivid picture of the life of the Irish emigrant there and the claustrophobia that prevailed in Eilís’s life at the boarding house and in her job. I don’t know if the character of Eilís was really credible and she irritated me a lot with her passivity. Her relationship with Tony seemed so doomed to failure in the long term - I would love to revisit them a decade or two down the line. Shades of Charming Billy in the beach scenes, a book we read in our book club which seriously divided opinion - does the emigrant fare better in an Irish ghetto or by integrating?
I read all of Tóibín’s books except The Master and loved them; this one was a bit too stereotypical. Glad I’m not the only one here thinking Rose and Miss Fortini might have been closet Lesbians. Won’t say more as there are enough Spoiler Alerts already in the above comments!
I look forward to the book club progression and best of luck with it - thanks Rosita for starting it up."
That's about it - you get opinions from right now and a few months ago, and I think they reflect my feelings about Brooklyn accurately enough. It's a dynamic process, responding to and reviewing a book, as every day can bring a different reaction, depending on the mood and a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. That's why I try to write reviews from the heart in a stream of consciousness fashion instead of systematically, with quotes and the book beside me, and as my kids say, WYSIWYG*- a snapshot of what the book evokes in me at this moment. I hope it encourages you to read Brooklyn, as it is one that stays with you for a long time, and evokes a place I've never been to as clearly in mind pictures as if I had lived there beside Eilis. Surely an accomplishment for any author, particularly one as skillful as Colm Tóibín.
*What You See Is What You Get
PS: Over at Lily's Blog you will see links to all the other members of the Bloggers' Book Club, as she is the moderator - and I hope you will get to read all their reviews too. It's not nice to write into a void - so comments and feedback will be very welcome!
The Photos below the Brooklyn cover are to give a flavour of our Dutch weekend -
Me in my Dutch domestic goddess kit
Hubby Jan tasteful in the Dutch colours and me - BBQ time
Wheee! Today when I checked my blog I was delighted to see Edie had become my 50th follower - she came on board from the new Bloggers' Book Club that Lily started recently - my last post was the response to that initiative - A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Our next book is to be Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín, an acclaimed Irish writer who won the Man-Booker prize a few years ago for The Master. The Bloggers' Book Club is open to all those who are interested in reading and commenting on the selected book - just check over with Lily and put yourself on her list - so far there are about 16 members, which gives a nice assortment of opinion on the book.
I hope those of you who take the time to read my blog enjoy it - I really like to get your comments and feedback as it makes the blogging worthwhile, I don't think I'd enjoy it half as much if I was blogging into a vacuum! So keep the comments coming. I try to be diligent and reply to all commenters so be sure to enable notification of following comments when you post a comment on this or any blog - a handy tip! I do try to visit a few blogs I follow every day and leave a comment where I feel I have something to say.
I haven't really gone down the road of blog awards of a chain genre that require me to post them on to othe bloggers as I find them a bit intrusive - I see some of the bloggers I follow stay resolutely blog award free which is probably good blog etiquette - I just did one - the High Five (good things that happened in the past year) which was a nice one and didn't put too much strain on the nominees (I hope!). On the other hand it is nice to be recognised and given an award by a cyber friend, and perhaps I'm just being presumptuous that they would bug the recipients who'd feel compelled to do whatever steps are needed.
Of course my ego was deliciously massaged by the nomination for the Irish Blog Awards which got me to two shortlists - and even my son was suitably impressed - in a backhand compliment sort of way he said "You got to the shortlist? The final twenty-five from a longlist of over a hundred? Wow!" So I'm not sure that was flattering or he was in shock - but it encourages blogging - even if purists discount it as not being real writing. I enjoy it and that's the primary reason anyone should blog - for their own enjoyment - even if it's a polemic-type blog or a specialist one like cooking or gardening.
So keep on dropping by and leaving your comments - and invite your friends to join - I might even double the numbers in a year or two. I'm always amazed when I see blogs with hundreds of followers and post comments - and wonder how do the bloggers respond to them all. Perhaps they get impersonal at that stage! I feel I've made some lovely cyber-friends in the past year and a half, with common links like Africa, travel, reading, cooking, and knitting. Even if we never meet in the real world, there's a lot of fun to be had in the blogosphere - so hang in there!
Lily over at her blog has started a virtual Book Club for bloggers, and I was delighted to join up as I am a sucker for a good read and it would nicely doevtail with my real world book club. The only problem is I've got off to a very bad start as I'm running late with this review which I was supposed to have done for today Easter Sunday noon, but I just didn't get organised enough to fit it in. My excuses - the family all round for Easter weekend and working right up to 5pm on Good Friday. (So much for the perception of all public servants having a doddle of a day off on every single holiday - well not this public health nurse!)
So I won't burden you with any more excuses except to say to the other book club members in cyberspace - thanks for dropping by - if you do - and hope you all enjoyed the book too. I have no idea what format your reviews took but I figured to link to Lily's blog and the rest of the current list of Book Club members (highlighted on Lily's post here) I know about would suffice, as well as a notification to Lily on her blog as the host which is courteous at the least.
I have to confess thinking that this would be an easy book to review as I had already read it two years ago and actually have it in hardback. I bought it for our holiday to Spain when our eldest son lived there, and in the days when you could actually include books in your luggage without being charged punitive excess baggage fees for every gram the meagre 15kg allowance and before the rule of one piece of hand baggage was strictly enforced.
Back in those halcyon days my hand baggage consisted of a large African Kikapu - a woven grass basket of the sort used by the local women to bring their produce to the market and which you can buy in most Farmers' Markets in Ireland and certainly in Spanish weekly markets. Into this kikapu I would put all my books and the airport shopping of Tayto crisp 18-packs, Lyon's Tea, and Butlers or Lily O'Briens Chocolates as well as some Denny's rashers and sausages. I guess the now-strictly-enforced rules at departure have put paid to all that largesse and now I am squeezing everything into a tiny little sport bag of specified size, including my handbag and all the books have to be rationed.
In any case it wasn't that easy to review, as I had to skim it again to trigger recall, but it all came flooding back, and I remembered that I was wary of it initially as I thought it wouldn't be as good as The Kite Runner which I loved - we had read The Kite Runner for our local Book Club in Lismore and it was a firm favourite - long before the film came out - and I'd read and heard of this second book and broached it with some trepidation
It was just as harrowing if not more so in many ways. The relationships between the women Mariam and Laila are beautifully portrayed, and the attitude to women in general in Afghan society would make anyone weep. It is a brave book to detail the day-to-day lives of the rural society over a half-century of contemporary Afghanistan and it gives a great historical context to the country's woes that resonate today. I thought the violence was harrowing and wonder how women the world over can cope with such domestic brutality, and none of us can hold the moral high ground as it is pervasive in every society, so-called "civilised" Western ones as well as traditional ones - it is not peculiar to Islam or any faith, and it seems to be a part of the larger opression of women that has been entrenched in law and religion since recorded history began.
There was great love and gentleness in the book, and the maternal love's intensity was well drawn. The resilience of humanity shows through in the way people cope with living in such restricted confinement and yet that is so hard for us in the West to grasp, how women in largely female groupings like harems make life tolerable - not that I wouldn't wish it were different as the lack of choice is the key to the oppression - but I think we underestimate their strength of character at our peril.
Preconceptions go out the window I think - having lived in a traditional Islamic society which was then quite secular - Bangladesh under the martial law era of the late 70s - I witnessed first-hand how wonderfully strong the women were. They were living lives that we would surely see as appallingly oppressed and yet they were fantastically caring mothers - something that shines through in this book too -and they had a great support network of friends and family - and when given the chance were far more capable of managing their finances than would have been thought. These were the women for whom the Grameen Bank was made and who made it in turn such a success that its founder Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
I seem to have digressed all over the place in this review - apologies for that as I am trying to make the deadline before Easter Monday dawns - and I will be more vigilant in future reviews. I take a pragmatic approach to reviews in general - for our local book club we are not very formal and don't prepare written reviews, rather let an organic discussion evolve which is usually very enlightening and generates great debate and passion. I hope this Blogger's Book Club (Acronym notwithstanding!) can do likewise and thanks a lot to Lily for coming up with the idea.
To end - if any of my blog followers/readers who are occasional or avid bookworms would like to join up with this virtual Blogger's Bookclub - please do so, you are very welcome and just sign up with myself or go on over to Lily's blog and tell her.
Please feel free to leave comments on my blog posts and generate some level of debate and communication from like-minded bloggers or blog-readers.
I hope you will become a follower of my blog and share it with your friends, as I am new to the blogosphere and on a steep learning curve. Therefore I will be grateful for any advice or constructive criticism!
Many thanks,
Catherine
(My blog title comes from the name of the ancient principality of the Déise, in roughly the same area as today's Co. Waterford.)
Married to Jan, with four children - three sons in their 20s and a teenage daughter - and two beautiful granddaughters, born in 2010 and 2011. I work as a public health nurse in rural County Waterford. I love my work and enjoy interaction with people, both colleagues and patients. I lived for almost twenty years in developing countries - Bangladesh, Tanzania and Lao PDR - better known as Laos - and loved that life very much. I am Irish and my husband is Dutch. We met in Bangladesh and married in Ireland before going to Tanzania many years ago. We are living in Ireland for the past 11 years, and would love to travel as much as possible in the future, especially back to Africa and Asia.
Political/trade union affiliation - Irish Labour Party member and branch officer, and active in the Irish Nurses Organisation as a section representative and branch officer.
I have to confess that I read this book a few years ago and didn't get a chance or time to re-read it - it was a library copy and I know it is still in the library here but I haven't had a minute to get back there- and I also was being distracted by reading the marvellous new book by Jonathan Franzen, Freedom. I adored that book, as I did his last book, The Corrections, and as I'd read The Reader before, I didn't feel too guilty. Thanks to Lorna for recommending it.
Don't forget to visit the other members of the Bloggers' Book Club - Lily is the terrific moderator who keeps us all coordinated, and as it's late and I'm wrecked after a day in Dublin at the Labour Party Special Delegate Conference deciding to go into Government with Fine Gael later this week, I won't list the other members here - rather you can find them over at Lily's blog. Read their reviews, always entertaining and informative and they're a great bunch of women(thus far, no men, but I'm sure that's always open to change!)
Wheee! Today when I checked my blog I was delighted to see
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