There's Nothing 86 Tonight
Maeve Kim, 2014
Shires Press
311 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781605712093
Summary
A comment from Lydia, one of the main characters: Love … Sometimes incomprehensible but still unmistakable.
Nick, Kim and Lydia have each been isolated by circumstance and self-preservation. When they start working in the same restaurant, their lives follow parallel courses through traumatic events to triumph and love.
Two comments from readers:
"Rich characters, excitement, descriptions that made me feel like I was there, believable and touching love scenes. There were places where I got teary and places where I laughed out loud."
"Absolutely magnificently written, complexly plotted and with characters not to be forgotten!"
Book may be purchased through Northshire Bookstore.
Author Bio
• Birth—March 23, 1944
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Raised—upstate New York
• Education—B.A., State University of New York, Binghamton; M.Ed.,
University of Vermont
• Currently—lives in Jericho Center, Vermont
Maeve Kim has been an author since age 11, when she wrote a mystery in pencil, on a ruled school notebook. She has published several short stories and articles, but until this book her three and a half novels have been read only by friends.
Maeve started There's Nothing 86 Tonight over twenty-five years ago. When work demands increased to 60-80 hours a week, she put the story away—but the characters of Nick, Kim and Lydia continued to haunt her. When Maeve retired for the third time in June 2013, she dedicated herself toward finishing the book, revising and editing until one morning she thought, "I'm done. Ahhhhh". (From the author.)
Discussion Questions
1. 86 is a term used in restaurants. It’s used in several ways and as different parts of speech. 86 can mean being out of something, or doing away with something. A restaurant kitchen usually starts the evening with “nothing 86”. Later, when there isn’t any more Key Lime pie, the head cook or the restaurant manager goes around and tells all the servers to “86 the Key Lime”—meaning there aren’t any more servings left so the servers shouldn’t take any more orders for that dessert.
How does the title relate to the story? To the three main characters?
2. The author knew about two themes when she was writing: loneliness and the power of friendship. It wasn’t until she’d completely finished the book that she recognized a third theme: identity. How do we discover who we really are, so we can be at home in ourselves?
Nick wants to be more than his father’s son. Lydia wants to be more than her mother’s daughter. How do these characters invent themselves as adults without having had adult role models to respect or honor?
Where else in the book can you see the related themes of identity and one’s real or proper name?
3. Nick’s story is told in narrative, Lydia’s in the form of letters. Does this work for you, the reader? What benefits might come from having Lydia tell her own story?
4. Do you consider Sam a true character in the book? Or do you think of him as just part of Lydia?
5. Kim is isolated from others by her self-destructive choice of men, her cynical view of the world and her place in it, and her negative ideas about what life holds for women in general. Read the section on page 90 that starts with “Once at work”. What does this say about Kim’s expectations as a woman? How does she begin to overcome these beliefs?
6. Lydia is also isolated from others, but she’s generally more upbeat and sunny than Kim. Do you think this is just a difference in the two women’s personalities? What other factors might have contributed?
7. After a traumatic occurrence that shakes everyone at the Steak and Stine, Lydia writes to Sam, “I don’t want you to feel the burden of knowing that so many of us distrust you just because you’re male, but even more I don’t want to keep the secrecy of female fear”. Do you agree with her that many, or maybe even most, females fear men at times just because they’re male?
8. Nick’s search for a church wasn’t part of the first several drafts of the book. How do his religious beliefs and doubts relate to his life history? To his struggle to become a man worthy of respect?
9. As Lydia’s mother ages and becomes more dependent, it is increasingly difficult for Lydia to protect herself from her mother’s lifelong disapproval of almost everything in Lydia’s life. Do you predict Lydia’s attempts to cope with her mother’s demands will be successful?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie
Barbara Goldsmith, 2004
W.W. Norton
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393327489
Summary
The myth of Marie Curie—the penniless Polish immigrant who through genius and obsessive persistence endured years of toil and deprivation to produce radium, a luminous panacea for all the world's ills, including cancer—has obscured the remarkable truth behind her discoveries.
Madame Curie's shrewd but controversial insight was that radioactivity was an atomic property that could be used to discover new elements. While her work won her two Nobel prizes and transformed our world, it did not liberate her from the prejudices of either the male-dominated scientific community or society.
In Obsessive Genius, the acclaimed author and historian Barbara Goldsmith has discovered the woman behind the icon we have come to believe in—an all too human woman trying to balance a spectacular scientific career with the obligations of family, the prejudice of society, the constant search for adequate funding, and the battle for recognition.
Using original research (diaries, letters, and family interviews) to peel away the layers of myth, Goldsmith offers a dazzling portrait of Marie Curie, her amazing discoveries, and the immense price she paid for fame. (Hardcover inside flap.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1937
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Wellesley College
• Currently—lives in New York City
Barbara Goldsmith is an American author, journalist, and philanthropist. She has received critical and popular acclaim for her best selling books, essays, articles and her philanthropic work. She was born in New York City and received a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College, after which she took art courses at Columbia University.
Her first assignments as a journalist were in the art field, where she simultaneously amassed an art collection comprising mostly contemporary American painting and sculpture. In her early twenties, she wrote a series of prize-winning profiles of such Hollywood luminaries as Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, and Audrey Hepburn.
In the late 1960s she initiated the "The Creative Environment" series of the creatie process, based on in-depth interviews with Marcel Breuer, I.M. Pei, George Balanchine and Pablo Picasso, among others. The series caught the eye of Clay Felker, editor of the Sunday magazine supplement of the New York Herald Tribune. In 1967, after the Tribune failed, Goldsmith provided Felker with the money to purchase the name “New York.” In 1968 she became a founding editor and writer of New York magazine, where she wrote not only about art, but also about the colorful characters in the art world.
In 1968 Goldsmith wrote "Bacall and the Boys," a television special about Lauren Bacall in Paris with then young, unproven avant-garde designers—Yves St. Laurent, Giorgio Armani, Pierre Cardin, and Marc Bohan of Dior. This earned her an Emmy award.
In 1974 Goldsmith became Senior Editor of Harper’s Bazaar, attracting top writers to the publication. But somewhere along the way she declared that at magazines she "got tired of making other writers look good through my re-writing." Since the mid-1970s, she concentrated on writing books while still continuing to write for the New Yorker and the New York Times among other publications
Biography & Books
Goldsmith completed her first book in 1975, The Straw Man, a novel about the New York art world. The book reached #1 on the bestseller lists and was praised in New York magazine by reviewer John Kenneth Galbraith as “brilliant social criticism.”
Her second book Little Gloria...Happy At Last was published in 1980. The work tracks the 1930s custody battle for Gloria Vanderbilt (Little Gloria, then). The book reached the top of the New York Times and was adapated to both film and and an NBC mini-series of the same name. The TV version starred Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Plummer, and Maureen Stapleton.
Johnson v. Johnson, Goldsmith’s third book, issued in 1987, recounts the longest, most expensive will contest in United States history between Basia Johnson, the widow of pharmaceutical heir J. Seward Johnson, and his children from previous marriages.
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, out in 1998, chronicles the women of the Gilded Age who fought for equality and the right to vote.
Her 2005 work Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie is based on the workbooks, letters, and diaries of Marie Curie, which had been sealed for sixty years because they were still radioactive. It won the prize for the Best Book of 2006 from the American Institute of Physics.
Recognition
In 2013, Goldsmith was awarded the Wellesley Alumnae Achievement Award, the highest honor given by her alma mater. That same year, she also received the Erwin Piscator Honorary Award for her writing. She has been awarded four honoris causa doctorates; she has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, two Presidential Commissions, and the New York State Council on the Arts; she has been honored by the New York Public Library Literary Lions as well as the Literacy Volunteers, American Academy in Rome, Authors Guild, and Guild Hall Academy of Arts for Lifetime Achievement. In 2009, she received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit medal from the Republic of Poland.
Philanthropy
Goldsmith spearheaded a project to convert books and documents to permanent paper that wold lastng 300 years instead of disintegrating in 30. She secured $20 million from the Federal government for the work. Other literary preservation efforts include the donation of two preservation and conservation laboratories at The New York Public Library and at New York University. She also funded a state-of-the-art rare book library at the American Academy in Rome and a preservation and conservation treatment facility at Wellesley College. She served on the Presidential Commission on Preservation and Access during the Clinton administration and received the American Archival Association’s top award. Earlierin 1968, she helped found the Center for Learning Disabilities at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
In 1987 she founded and still funds the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom-to-Write Award in order to spotlight writers of conscience in 113 countries who have disappeared, were tortured, or in prison at the time of the awards. The award was instrumental in starting the campaign that led to the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo winning the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Since the award's inception, 34 out of 37 imprisoned writers have been released, often within months of the award. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/2/2014.)
Book Reviews
Feminism is one of the most distorting of lenses. To see Marie Curie forced to sit among the audience in Stockholm while her husband, Pierre, gave the lecture following their joint receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1903 is infuriating. What a way to treat a woman! One of the strengths of Obsessive Genius, Barbara Goldsmith's excellent short biography of Marie Curie, is its suppression of anger.... [A] poignant—and scientifically lucid—portrait.
Brenda Maddox - New York Times
Goldsmith leads the reader through a wonderland of facts with just the right blend of science and story.
San Francisco Chronicle
Goldsmith's straightforward biography illuminates both the public Curie, a tireless scientist obsessed with work, and the private one, a woman who suffered bouts of severe depression, was distant from her children and scarred deeply by the accidental death of her scientist husband, Pierre.... [Goldsmith] is weakest at explaining the theoretical basis for Curie's scientific breakthroughs.
Publishers Weekly
Goldsmith has produced a finely detailed and well-researched biography.... [She] focuses on the social and economic hurdles that Curie had to overcome to manage the roles of scientist, wife, mother, and staunch French wartime ally. She also provides an excellent portrait of the age in which Marie Curie was to do so much for the world. —Hilary Burton, formerly with Lawrence Livermore National Lab, CA
Library Journal
Best-selling historian Goldsmith incisively chronicles the intensely dramatic life of the first woman scientist to win the Nobel Prize, neatly explicating both scientific breakthroughs and complex personal and societal conflicts.... Marie Curie's life, Goldsmith concludes, was "tragic and glorious." Her powerful portrait reveals a woman of great passion, genius, and pain who changed the world in ways she would have deplored. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
[A] sharp, sprightly, refreshing portrait of the brilliant, melancholic scientist, affording a sensible look into her head and into the body of her work..... In a world of vicious, institutionalized sexism, Curie was as "rare as a unicorn." Nothing came easy, notes Goldsmith.... Opens the door on Curie as she opened the door on atomic science (15 photos).
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Her own illness and those of her family defined Marie Curie's life. In what way can you point to her scientific drive as a way to cope with the repercussions of illness? How did Marie's own bipolar illness affect her career?
2. As the young Polish Manya, how did Marie's distant relationship with her mother shape her personality? To what extent did Marie, as a mother, pattern herself after her own mother?
3. How did the inherent contradiction of Marie Curie's childhood—growing up Polish under a repressive Russian tsar—play itself out throughout Marie's adult life? How, in some ways, did this early schism help her control her emotions?
4. Marie Curie's achievements are astonishing and her success as a female scientist in a sexist scientific climate is a further tribute to her character and conviction. How has the mythology of Marie's life, and the misattribution of her merits (she is better remembered for the discovery of radium than for the inroads she made into radioactivity and atomic science), eroded the impact of her work? How did Marie's partnership with her husband enable her to make a great discovery? How did this partnership affect her standing as a scientist? Reviewing Marie's insatiable desire for knowledge, would she, in your opinion, have succeeded in her discoveries, with or without Pierre?
5. Marie planned to return to Poland upon finishing her degree at the Sorbonne, but she remained in France for the rest of her life. Do you think she would have left Warsaw for Paris, knowing this? What effect did her decision to remain in France have on her patriotism?
6. A week before his death, Wladyslaw Sklodowski wrote to his daughter, then Marie Curie, about her success at isolating radium. "What a pity it is that this work has only theoretical interest." How do you understand his remark?
7. In contrast to her unwavering sensibility as a scientist, Marie Curie's ability to judge amorous relationships proved somewhat impaired: twice she suffered the debilitating effects of unrealistic love affairs. Discuss this fundamental lack in her understanding of the mores of society.
8. Marie Curie's relationship with her daughters was complex. Her relationship with her younger daughter, Eve, took years to fully develop. Was Marie's treatment of Eve understandable? In what ways do you think Marie was insensitive to Eve's differences? Was she helpful or hurtful to her older daughter, Irene?
9. What do you think of Eve Curie's description of her mother, after the death of Pierre Curie, as "a pitiful and incurably lonely woman"? How would you describe Marie's communication with Pierre even after his death? How did her loyalty to his memory influence her later work?
10. As the winner of two Nobel Prizes, did Marie Curie effectively secure the future of women in science?
11. Marie Curie seemed oblivious to the dangers of working with radium. Barbara Goldsmith attributes her denial of the dangers of the substance to "love." How else might you explain Marie's denial?
12. When the author visited Helene Langevin-Joliot, the granddaughter of Marie Curie, Helene, asked her, "Haven't we [Curies] all had wonderful lives?" Discuss this statement with regard to what we know of Marie, her daughters, and her granddaughter.
13. Did Marie realize the full implications of radioactivity (a word she coined)? When Irene said she was glad her mother died before the advent of the atomic bomb, what did she mean by this statement?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Kommandant's Girl
Pam Jenoff, 2007
Mira Books
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780778323426
Summary
Nineteen-year-old Emma Bau has been married only three weeks when Nazi tanks thunder into her native Poland. Within days Emma's husband, Jacob, is forced to disappear underground, leaving her imprisoned within the city's decrepit, moldering Jewish ghetto.
But, then, in the dead of night, the resistance smuggles her out. Taken to Krakow to live with Jacob's Catholic cousin, Krysia, Emma takes on a new identity as Anna Lipowski, a gentile.
Emma's already precarious situation is complicated by her introduction to Kommandant Richwalder, a high-ranking Nazi official who hires her to work as his assistant. Urged by the resistance to use her position to access details of the Nazi occupation, Emma must compromise her safety—and her marriage vows—in order to help Jacob's cause.
As the atrocities of war intensify, so does Emma's relationship with the Kommandant, building to a climax that will risk not only her double life, but also the lives of those she loves. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., George Washington University; M.A., Cambridge University; J.D., University of Pennsylvania
• Currently—lives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey
Pam Jenoff was born in Maryland and raised outside Philadelphia. She attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge University in England.
Upon receiving her master's in history from Cambridge, she accepted an appointment as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. The position provided a unique opportunity to witness and participate in operations at the most senior levels of government, including helping the families of the Pan Am Flight 103 victims secure their memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, observing recovery efforts at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing and attending ceremonies to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of World War II at sites such as Bastogne and Corregidor.
Following her work at the Pentagon, Pam moved to the State Department. In 1996 she was assigned to the U.S. Consulate in Krakow, Poland. It was during this period that Pam developed her expertise in Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust. Working on matters such as preservation of Auschwitz and the restitution of Jewish property in Poland, Pam developed close relations with the surviving Jewish community.
Pam left the Foreign Service in 1998 to attend law school and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She worked for several years as a labor and employment attorney both at a firm and in-house in Philadelphia and now teaches law school at Rutgers.
Pam is the author of The Kommandant's Girl, which was an international bestseller and nominated for a Quill award, as well as The Diplomat's Wife, The Ambassador's Daughter, Almost Home, A Hidden Affair and The Things We Cherished.
She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and three children. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) With luminous simplicity, Jenoff's breathtaking debut chronicles the life of a young Jewish bride during the Nazi occupation of Krakow, Poland, in WWII.... [A] handsome Nazi is so impressed by [Emma's] German language skills (and her beauty) that he asks her to become his personal assistant.... [T]he chemistry between them presents challenges that test her loyalties to Jacob and her heart. This is historical romance at its finest.
Publishers Weekly
During a dinner party, Emma/Anna is introduced to Nazi Kommadant Richwalder.... [and] becomes intimate with the enemy to gather information. In her moving first novel, Jenoff offers an insightful portrait of people forced into an untenable situation and succeeds in humanizing the unfathomable as well as the heroic. —Patty Engleman
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Did you find Emma's choices believable? Which ones? Why?
2. Do you think the ends that Emma's was seeking justified the means of her choices and actions?
3. How did Emma's character change/evolve throughout the story?
4. What was the most difficult challenge faced by Emma in the ook?
5. What role does Krysia play in the story? Lukasz?
6. Do you agree with Emma's decision to keep the paternity of her unborn child a secret from her husband? Why or why not?
7. Emma kept secrets from both of the men in her life—the Kommandant and Jacob. Do you think real intimacy is possible in such circumstances?
8. What is it that you think Emma really wanted?
9. How do you think Marta felt about Emma?
10. Where do you think Emma winds up one month after the end of the book? One year? Five years?
11. Who is your favorite character in the book and why?
12. What is the central theme of the book and how did you feel about it?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
When the Emperor Was Divine
Julie Otsuka, 2002
Knopf Doubleday
160 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385721813
Summary
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert.
In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism.
When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 15, 1962
• Where—Palo Alto, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship; Asian|Aerican Literary Award
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. After studying art as an undergraduate at Yale University she pursued a career as a painter for several years before turning to fiction writing at age 30. She received her MFA from Columbia.
Her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), is about the internment of a Japanese-American family during World War II. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers finalist. The book is based on Otsuka's own family history: her grandfather was arrested by the FBI as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and her mother, uncle and grandmother spent three years in an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. When the Emperor Was Divine has been translated into six languages and sold more than 250,000 copies. The New York Times called it "a resonant and beautifully nuanced achievement" and USA Today described it as "A gem of a book and one of the most vivid history lessons you'll ever learn."
Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic (2011), is about a group of young Japanese 'picture brides' who sailed to America in the early 1900s to become the wives of men they had never met and knew only by their photographs.
Otsuka's fiction has been published in Granta and Harper's and read aloud on PRI's "Selected Shorts" and BBC Radio 4's "Book at Bedtime." She lives in New York City, where she writes every afternoon in her neighborhood cafe.
Extras
When asked what book most influenced her life or career, here is what she said:
When I first started writing I read all of Hemingway's short stories, beginning with the Nick Adams stories in In Our Time. I remember thinking, 'oh, so that's how you do it.' Now I'm much less convinced, however, that there's a right way to do it. Still, he was the writer I first imprinted myself on, and I go back to his stories often, if only for the pleasure of listening to the sound of his sentences, his cadences. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Spare, incisive.... The mood of the novel tensely reflects the protagonists’ emotional state: calm surfaces above, turmoil just beneath.
Boston Globe
Prose so cool and precise that it’s impossible not to believe what [Otsuka] tells us or to see clearly what she wants us to see.... A gem of a book and one of the most vivid history lessons you’ll ever learn.
USA Today
This exceptional first novel is about a Japanese family in Berkeley, California, during the Second World War.... The implicit questions about culpability resonate with particular power right now, but Otsuka's incantatory, unsentimental prose is the book's greatest strength. It turns our ideas of beauty on their head, as when the boy uneasily remembers a treasured glimpse of the horses he now eats: "They had long black tails and dark flowing manes and he had watched them galloping in the moonlight across the flat dusty plain and then for three nights in a row he had dreamed of them."
New Yorker
The novel’s voice is as hushed as a whisper.... An exquisite debut...potent, spare, crystalline.
Oprah Magazine
This heartbreaking, bracingly unsentimental debut describes in poetic detail the travails of a Japanese family living in an internment camp during World War II, raising the specter of wartime injustice in bone-chilling fashion.... Events are viewed from...different perspectives [which] are defined by distinctive, lyrically simple observations. The novel's honesty and matter-of-fact tone in the face of inconceivable injustice are the source of its power.
Publishers Weekly
Otsuka researched historical sources and her own grandparents' experiences as background for this spare yet poignant first novel about the ordeal of a Japanese family sent to an internment camp during World War II. Its perspective shifts among different family members as the story unfolds.... Otsuka's clear, elegant prose makes [her] themes accessible to a range of reading levels from young adult on. —Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
Otsuka eloquently chronicles in five chapters, one from each family member, their reactions as they are removed from their friendly neighborhoods and thrust into a strange new world where they are now the enemy.... With precise detail, succinct but sensitive prose, and great emotional restraint, Otsuka's enlightening, deeply stirring, Alex Award-winning book will affect all readers.
VOYA
Otsuka has created an intriguing story about Japanese internment during WW II. This powerful book is characterized by sparse, contained prose detailing the lives of a Japanese American family in California.... Each has invisible but lasting scars from their experience. When the Emperor Was Divine could easily be categorized as psychological fiction as well as historical fiction with its in-depth look at the minds of its characters and how each of them copes with their situation (ages 15 to adult). — Courtney Lewis
KLIATT
A carefully researched little novel...that's perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn't stir the heart.... [T]he narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper....information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When the Emperor Was Divine gives readers an intimate view of the fate of Japanese Americans during World War II. In what ways does the novel deepen our existing knowledge of this historical period? What does it give readers that a straightforward historical investigation cannot?
2. Why does Otsuka choose to reveal the family’s reason for moving—and the father’s arrest—so indirectly and so gradually? What is the effect when the reason becomes apparent?
3. Otsuka skillfully places subtle but significant details in her narrative. When the mother goes to Lundy’s hardware store, she notices a “dark stain” on the register “that would not go away” [p. 5]. The dog she has to kill is called “White Dog” [see pp. 9–12]. Her daughter’s favorite song on the radio is “Don’t Fence Me In.” How do these details, and others like them, point to larger meanings in the novel?
4. Why does Otsuka refer to her characters as “the woman,” “the girl,” “the boy,” and “the father,” rather than giving them names? How does this lack of specific identities affect the reader’s relationship to the characters?
5. When they arrive at the camp in the Utah desert—“a city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain”—the boy thinks he sees his father everywhere: “wherever the boy looked he saw him: Daddy, Papa, Father, Oto-san” [p. 49]. Why is the father’s absence such a powerful presence in the novel? How do the mother and daughter think of him? How would their story have been different had the family remained together?
6. When the boy wonders why he’s in the camp, he worries that “he’d done something horribly, terribly wrong.... It could be anything. Something he’d done yesterday—chewing the eraser off his sister’s pencil before putting it back in the pencil jar—or something he’d done a long time ago that was just now catching up with him” [p. 57]. What does this passage reveal about the damaging effects of racism on children? What does it reveal about the way children try to make sense of their experience?
7. In the camp, the prisoners are told they’ve been brought there for their “own protection,” and that “it was all in the interest of national security. It was a matter of military necessity. It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty” [p. 70]. Why, and in what ways, are these justifications problematic? What do they reveal about the attitude of the American government toward Japanese Americans? How would these justifications appear to those who were taken from their homes and placed behind fences for the duration of the war?
8. What parallels does the novel reveal between the American treatment of citizens of Japanese descent and the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany?
9. Much of When the Emperor Was Divine is told in short, episodic, loosely connected scenes—images, conversations, memories, dreams, and so on—that move between past and present and alternate points of view between the mother, daughter, and son. Why has Otsuka chosen to structure her narrative in this way? What effects does it allow her to achieve?
10. After the family is released from the camp, what instructions are they given? How do they regard themselves? How does America regard them? In what ways have they been damaged by their internment?
11. When they are at last reunited with their father, the family doesn’t know how to react. “Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father’s place” [p. 132]. Why do they regard him as a stranger? How has he been changed by his experience? In what ways does this reunion underscore the tragedy of America’s decision to imprison Japanese Americans during the war?
12. After the father returns home, he never once discusses the years he’d been away, and his children don’t ask. “We didn’t want to know.... All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget” [p. 133]. Why do the children feel this way? Why would their father remain silent about such an important experience? In what ways does the novel fight against this desire to forget?
13. The mother is denied work because being a Japanese American might “upset the other employees” or offend the customers. She turns down a job working in a dark back room of a department store because she is afraid she “might accidentally remember who I was and...offend myself” [pp. 128–129]. What does this statement reveal about her character? What strengths does she exhibit throughout her ordeal?
14. Flowers appear throughout the novel. When one of the prisoners is shot by a guard, a witness believes the man had been reaching through the fence to pluck a flower [see p. 101]. And the penultimate chapter ends with the following sentence: “But we never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger’s backyard, our mother’s rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light” [p. 139]. What symbolic value do the flowers have in this final passage? What does this open-ended conclusion suggest about the relationship between the family and the “strangers” they live among?
15. When the Emperor Was Divine concludes with a chapter titled “Confession.” Who is speaking in this final chapter? Is the speech ironic? Why has Otsuka chosen to end the novel in this way? What does the confession imply about our ability to separate out the “enemy,” the “other,” in our midst?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Family Life
Akhil Sharma, 2014
W.W. Norton
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393060058
Summary
Hailed as a "supreme storyteller" (Philadelphia Inquirer) for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice "as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky" (The Nation).
In his highly anticipated second novel, Family Life, he delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision.
We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America.
America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them.
Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family’s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family’s new life.
Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 22, 1971
• Where—Delhi, India
• Raised—Edison, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; Harvard Law School
• Awards—O. Henry Prizes ("several"); PEN/Hemingway Award;
Whiting Writers' Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Akhil Sharma, an Indian-American author, was born in Delhi, India. He immigrated to the United States when he was eight, growing up in Edison, New Jersey.
Sharma studied at Princeton University, where he earned his B.A. in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School. While there, he also studied under a succession of notable writers, including Russell Banks, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster, John McPhee, and Tony Kushner. He then won a Stegner Fellowship to the writing program at Stanford, where he won several O. Henry Prizes. He then attempted to become a screenwriter, but, disappointed with his fortunes, left to attend Harvard Law School.
Sharma is the author of the 2000 novel, An Obedient Father, for which he won the 2001 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2001 Whiting Writers' Award. His second novel, Family Life, was published in 2014.
He has also published stories in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Quarterly, Fiction, Best American Short Stories (anthology), and O. Henry Award Winners (anthology). His short story "Cosmopolitan," anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 1998, was also made into an acclaimed 2003 film of the same name, which has appeared on the PBS series Independent Lens. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/24/2014.)
Book Reviews
deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender at its core…Family Life is devastating as it reveals how love becomes warped and jagged and even seemingly vanishes in the midst of huge grief. But it also gives us beautiful, heart-stopping scenes where love in the Mishra family finds air and ease…I found Family Life riveting in its portrayal of an immigrant community's response to loss…But where Family Life really blazes is in its handling of Mrs. Mishra's grief. Sharma is compassionate but unflinching as he tells of this mother's persistent and desperate efforts to cope over the years
Sonali Deraniyagala - New York Times Book Review
Surface simplicity and detachment are the hallmarks of this novel, but hidden within its small, unembellished container are great torrents of pity and grief. Sedulously scaled and crafted, it transforms the chaos of trauma into a glowing work of art.
Wall Street Journal
I cannot think of a more honest or unsparing novelist in our generation.
Lorin Stein - Paris Review
Bracingly vivid… Has the ring of all devastatingly good writing: truth.
Molly Langmuir - Elle
[F]ine and memorable.
Meg Wolitzer - NPR
A heartbreaking novel-from-life… [Sharma] takes after Hemingway, as each word of his brilliant novel feels deliberate, and each line is quietly moving.
Maddie Crum - Huffington Post
Sharma spent 13 years writing this slim novel, and the effort shows in each lucid sentence and heartbreaking detail.
Stephen Lee - Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review,) The immigrant experience has been documented in American literature since those first hardy souls landed at Plymouth, and as the immigrants keep coming, so too do their stories. Sharma (An Obedient Father), who acknowledges the autobiographical elements in his new novel, tells a simple but layered tale of assimilation and adaptation. The Mishras come to America in the late-1970s, the father first, in the wake of new U.S. immigration laws and the Indian Emergency, when the narrator, Ajay, is eight, and his brother Birju is 12. There are lovely scenes of their life in Delhi before they leave, the mother making wicks from the cotton in pill bottles, the parade of neighbors when their plane tickets to America arrive. Sharma captures the experience for Ajay of being transported to a different country: the thrill of limitless hot water flowing from a tap; the trauma of bullies at school; the magic of snow falling; watching Birju, the favored son, studying hours each day and spending entire weekends preparing for the entrance exam at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. Then a terrible tragedy irreparably alters the family and their fortunes. Sharma skillfully uses this as another window into the Indian way of accepting and dealing with life. A loving portrait, both painful and honest. (Apr.)
Publishers Weekly
The Mishra family has a harder time than most adjusting to a new life in America in the 1970s.... The one drawback is that the last few brief chapters feel rushed after the more deliberate pace of the rest of the novel, which leaves readers wanting to know more. Verdict: This brave and honest work offers an unsentimental look at growing up and overcoming adversity when family life is very difficult indeed. —Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA
Library Journal
In Sharma's world, as in Leo Tolstoy's, unhappy families continue to be unhappy in different ways. In 1978, narrator Ajay's father emigrates from Delhi to New York to take a job as a clerk in a government agency, and a year later, his family joins him..... A moving story of displacement and of the inevitable adjustments one must make when life circumstances change.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel opens in the present, when Ajay is forty and his parents are elderly. How does this opening affect your experience of the rest of the novel, which takes place during Ajay’s childhood?
2. America is marvelous to the Mishra family at first. If tragedy hadn’t struck, do you think that America would have met the Mishras’ expectations for it? Or do you think that at least certain elements of their disillusionment were inevitable?
3. How does the Mishras’ status as immigrants affect their experience of Birju’s accident? How might their lives following the accident have played out differently if they weren’t strangers in a strange land?
4. What do you make of Ajay’s conversations with God following his brother’s accident? Describe the God that Ajay invents for himself. How does his God help him, and how doesn’t he? Can you pinpoint the moment in the novel when Ajay stops talking to God?
5. Describe the process by which Ajay becomes a writer. How does writing change the way he experiences his childhood?
6. In the aftermath of Birju’s accident, Ajay’s mother turns to religion and his father to alcohol. How are these two coping mechanisms different? Do you think they have anything in common? Do you think that Ajay’s own way of coping—academic success—has anything in common with his parents?
7. Did you find moments in Family Life funny, despite its darkness? What kind of humor does the novel possess?
8. Describe the prose style in Family Life. What do you think the author achieves through the candor and lack of sentimentality in his storytelling?
9. On the second anniversary of his brother’s accident, Ajay thinks, "I couldn’t believe that everything had changed because of three minutes" (page 129). What do you make of this? How does the brevity of the accident itself affect your experience of the passage of time in the novel, which takes place over many years? Has your own life ever changed so drastically, so quickly?
10. Compare and contrast the scenes when the family is awaiting news of Ajay’s college acceptances to the scenes when they are awaiting news of Birju’s high school acceptance.
11. Describe Ajay’s love life in high school and beyond. What is he seeking from his girlfriends? In what ways is he being honest with them, and in what ways, dishonest? How are his relationships with women affected by his experience with his brother? His experience as an immigrant? Describe some of your own high school relationships.
12. Family Life ends in a moment of ambiguity. "I got happier and happier," Ajay says. "In the distance was the beach and the breaking waves and the red seaplane bobbing in the water. The happiness was almost heavy. And that was when I knew I had a problem" (page 218). What is it about this moment and about Ajay’s happiness that tells him he has a problem? How would you describe his problem? Do you think he’ll ever escape or solve it?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)