Sufficient Ransom
Sylvia Sarno, 2014
Savvy Scribe Press
326pp.
ISBN-13: 9781484884591
Summary
Ever wonder what it feels like to have it all—family, career, health, money—and not be happy?
Ann Olson takes her life for granted until her young son, Travis, disappears from the backyard one evening. Searching for her son, Ann throws caution to the wind. Soon, she finds herself enmeshed in the seedy world of Mexican drug dealers who operate just across the border in Tijuana.
Does Ann, an atheist, embrace Christianity despite her husband warning that her pastor friend is more interested in converting her than in finding Travis? Does she make it out of the drug tunnel alive, or is her rashness her downfall? And is Travis’s disappearance related to that of other recently missing children in San Diego?
A story of a mother’s love, courage in the face of evil, and her unexpected journey of self-discovery along the way.
Author Bio
• Birth—April 15, 1966
• Where—Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Boston College
• Currently—lives in San Diego, California
In her words:
My love of stories started when I was very young. Listening to my Dad's simplified version of Shakespeare at bedtime awakened my imagination. When I was six, I moved from suburban Boston to Italy with my family. Living in a two-bedroom apartment in the industrial city of Turin we didn’t own a television. I spent my free time reading The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and many other juvenile fiction classics. My passion for literature really took hold during those years.
We returned to the States when I was eleven, to the same house on an acre of grass and trees that we had left. The main floor of our home was always neat and clean, with plastic covers on the common area furniture to keep the children and the dust off, while downstairs my father’s thousands of stacked books held dusty court. To this day, I love well-used books.
As the time to start college drew near, I remember considering, then nixing, the idea of a career as a novelist. My conclusion: too many "he saids" and "she saids" to write. Young and impatient, writing a book seemed so arduous to me. I wanted to work in business and make money. At Boston College, I majored in English because I loved the subject. I figured I would learn about business by working in companies, not by studying them. After a stint in commercial real estate, I decided I didn’t want to be a developer after all. After working on Wall Street I decided that I didn’t want to run a big company or be an analyst or a banker. And after running my own recruiting firm for many years I decided that what I really wanted to do was write novels.
My debut novel was inspired by my years living in Italy. After a high profile kidnapping in Rome in the 1970’s, bodyguards began accompanying some of my Italian classmates to school. I remember my parents talking about their own fears of kidnapping. Decades later, those childhood impressions re-surfaced and inspired Sufficient Ransom.
I am currently at work on my second book—a historical novel set in Italy. I can’t wait to finish it and get it out into the world! Stay tuned. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Sylvia on Facebook.
Book Reviews
The role of religion in tragic circumstances is given a well-crafted twist in this intriguing thriller.
ForeWord Clarion Reviews
In Sufficient Ransom, a fast-paced novel of kidnapping, religion, and drugs, Sylvia Sarno reveals the lengths to which a mother is willing to go in order to find her child.
ForeWord Clarion Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Describe the two ways in which the concept of "ransom" applies to the story.
2. Can a CPS social worker really interview a child at his/her school without parental permission?
3. Why does Kika think Ann is a bad mother?
4. How many people have been killed in Mexico in the past five years in the drug wars?
5. Why does Kika feel she has to prove that she can protect a child?
6. Why does Max Ruiz hate his cousin Julio so much?
7. What does Richard mean when he says that Ann engages in "magical thinking?"
8. Why does Ann feel she needs to be forgiven?
9. Why did Kika's mother Antonia collect information on Nora March?
10. Why does Chet think that being a "fanatic" is a good thing?
11. What do Chet and his mother Nora argue about?
12. How does Ann change at the end of the book?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
The Headmaster's Wife
Thomas Christopher Greene, 2013
St. Martin's Press
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250038944
Summary
An immensely talented writer whose work has been described as “incandescent” (Kirkus) and “poetic” (Booklist), Thomas Christopher Greene pens a haunting and deeply affecting portrait of one couple at their best and worst.
Inspired by a personal loss, Greene explores the way that tragedy and time assail one man’s memories of his life and loves. Like his father before him, Arthur Winthrop is the Headmaster of Vermont’s elite Lancaster School. It is the place he feels has given him his life, but is also the site of his undoing as events spiral out of his control. Found wandering naked in Central Park, he begins to tell his story to the police, but his memories collide into one another, and the true nature of things, a narrative of love, of marriage, of family and of a tragedy Arthur does not know how to address emerges.
Luminous and atmospheric, bringing to life the tight-knit enclave of a quintessential New England boarding school, the novel is part mystery, part love story and an exploration of the ties of place and family. Beautifully written and compulsively readable, The Headmaster’s Wife stands as a moving elegy to the power of love as an antidote to grief. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Hobart College; M.F.A., Vermont College
• Currently—lives in Montpelier, Vermont
Thomas Christopher Greene was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts to Richard and Dolores Greene, the sixth of seven children. He was educated in Worcester public schools and then Suffield Academy in Suffield, Connecticut. He earned his BA in English from Hobart College in Geneva, New York, where he was the Milton Haight Turk Scholar. His MFA in Writing is from the former Vermont College.
Tom has worked as an oyster shucker, delivered pizza, on the line in a staple factory, as a deputy press secretary for a presidential campaign, the director of public affairs for two universities and as a professor of writing and literature. Since 1993, Tom has resided in central Vermont.
Novels
In 2003, his first novel, Mirror Lake, was published to critical acclaim. His second, I’ll Never Be Long Gone, followed two years later and his third, Envious Moon, was published in 2007. His fiction has been translated into 11 languages and has found a worldwide following. His writing has been called incandescent and poetic and has been nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His first novel was named one of the thirty books to be rediscovered by Waterstone’s in the UK, alongside authors Kurt Vonnegut, Jose Saramango, Alice Hoffmann and others.
Tom’s fourth novel is The Headmaster's Wife, published in 2014. Inspired by a personal tragedy he experienced while creating the college, the novel is his most profound and moving work to date.
Academia
In 2006, after years of writing full time, Tom was asked to lead one of the MFA programs at Vermont College where he had graduated from and had previously served as a senior administrator. Shortly thereafter the university that owned the campus announced that the historic 1868 campus was for sale to developers. The three nationally acclaimed MFA programs—MFA in Writing; MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults; and the MFA in Visual Art—were in danger of closing.
Tom mobilized the college community and the larger community in central Vermont to create a non-profit that could buy the campus and the three academic programs. In two years, with his business partner, Bill Kaplan, Tom raised $13.5M in capital, built a national board of trustees, developed a strategic plan and an infrastructure to manage and run a new academic entity. In June, 2008, Vermont College of Fine Arts became the first new college in Vermont in over 30 years—and the fastest to achieve accreditation in the 125 year history of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Tom was named the college’s founding President, a position he still serves in today.
In the five years since its inception, Tom has led Vermont College of Fine Arts on a mission to become a national center for education in the arts. Its writing programs enjoy top national rankings and he has started new programs in graphic design, music composition and film. Today, under his leadership, Vermont College of Fine Arts has arguably a greater influence on American Arts and letters than any small school since the heyday of Black Mountain College almost as century ago.
Tom lives in Montpelier, Vermont with his wife and daughter. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Part of a grand literary tradition… But literary overtones notwithstanding, Greene’s plot has the tight, relentless pacing of a fine detective novel… Deeply felt… and utterly absorbing.
Washington Post
A layered story of love, unbearable loss and grief.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Greene's deft and nimble hand make the story itself a guiltless pleasure to read.
Denver Post
What seems to be a deceptively simple story about the headmaster of a New England boarding school and his wife, facing late middle age and growing apart over a difference of opinion about their teenage son, morphed into a haunting, mysterious page-turner… A meditation on longing in all of life’s stages, a literary mystery, and a novel with much for book clubs to untangle.
Concord Monitor
A tightly woven, atmospheric thriller about a New England academic whose life goes off the rails.
People
Thomas Christopher Greene’s haunting tale tracks the unraveling of a marriage. It starts, eerily, with a naked man’s arrest in New York City’s Central Park, then twists back in time through love, grief, betrayal, and love again.
Good Housekeeping
Nothing is what it appears in this brilliant story of a life gone awry.... Arthur Winthrop, headmaster of the Vermont-based Lancaster School, is found wandering around naked in snow-covered Central Park in New York City.... [The story is] about the trajectory of Arthur’s inauspicious marriage.... [A]t its core, a trenchant examination of one family’s terrible loss and how the aftermath of tragedy can make or break a person’s soul.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Greene has created a brilliant, harrowing novel depicting the spectacular unraveling of a once distinguished and proudly successful man. He has also conceived one of the most convincingly drawn unreliable narrators that readers may ever meet, a character recalling the creations of Edgar Allan Poe… This is a riveting psychological novel about loss and the terrible mistakes and compromises one can make in love and marriage. Essential for fans of literary fiction.
Library Journal
Greene’s genre-bending novel of madness and despair evokes both the predatory lasciviousness of Nabokov’s classic, Lolita, and the anxious ambiguity of Gillian Flynn’s contemporary thriller, Gone Girl (2012). —Carol Haggas
Booklist
The first half of Greene's fourth novel unfolds like a conventional academic tale.... [But] the novel takes a wholly unexpected twist, which is then compounded by another, even more surprising one.... Although the puzzle element threatens to overwhelm the narrative, this is a moving testament to the vicissitudes of love and loss, regret and hope.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What did you think were the central themes of the book, and how did they resonate with
you?
2. The novel explores the taboo subject of a teacher—student affair. What did you think of the
author’s handling of this?
3. "Maybe, I think, this is what love is." There are several varieties of love portrayed in the book:
passionate affairs, marriage and parental love. Discuss the depiction of love in all of its
forms.
4. The river is described as "timeless and uncaring." Explore the symbolic resonance of water in
the book and what it means to the characters.
5. How did your opinion of the headmaster and his wife change throughout the course of the
novel? Did you understand them more having encountered both points of view?
6. "Time is malleable. Memory fails. Memory changes." Discuss the representation of time and
memory throughout the pages of the book.
7. What do you think the structure of the novel brought to your reading experience? Did the
narrative switch surprise you?
8. Ethan’s death has a profound effect upon his parents’ lives. Explore the theme of loss and
grief in the book.
9. What did you think of the author’s representation of the boarding-school culture at
Lancaster? Has it altered any of the views you currently hold?
10. Were you satisfied with the ending of the novel? Which character did you sympathize with
most, and why?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Secrecy
Rupert Thomson, 2013
Other Press
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590516850
Summary
A sorcerer in wax. . . A fugitive. . . Haunted by a past he cannot escape: Threatened by a future he cannot imagine.
Zummo, a Sicilian sculptor, is summoned by Cosimo III to join the Medici court. Late seventeenth-century Florence is a hotbed of repression and hypocrisy. All forms of pleasure are brutally punished, and the Grand Duke himself, a man for whom marriage has been an exquisite torture, hides his pain beneath a show of excessive piety.
The Grand Duke asks Zummo to produce a life-size woman out of wax, an antidote to the French wife who made him suffer so. As Zummo wrestles with this unique commission, he falls under the spell of a woman whose elusiveness mirrors his own, but whose secrets are far more explosive. Lurking in the wings is the poisonous Dominican priest, Stufa, who has it within his power to destroy Zummo’s livelihood, if not his life.
In this highly charged novel, Thomson brings Florence to life in all its vibrant sensuality, while remaining entirely contemporary in his exploration of the tensions between love and solitude, beauty and decay. When reality becomes threatening, not to say unfathomable, survival strategies are tested to the limit. Redemption is a possibility, but only if the agonies of death and separation can be transcended. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth— November 5th 1955
• Where— Eastbourne, East Sussex, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Cambridge University
• Currently—lives in London, England
Rupert Thomson is the author of nine critically acclaimed novels. He was once described by the critic James Wood as "one of the strangest and most refreshingly un-English voices in contemporary fiction," and has been compared to writers as various as Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Charles Dickens, Elmore Leonard, and Mervyn Peake.
Background
Following the sudden death of his mother, Thomson was educated as a boarder at Christ's Hospital School. At the age of seventeen, he was awarded a scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he studied Medieval History and Political Thought. He worked as a copywriter in London from 1978 to 1982, before abandoning his job to write full-time. Thomson has lived in many cities throughout the world, including New York, Sydney and Barcelona. He currently lives in South London.
Novels
• 1987 - Dreams of Leaving
• 1991 - The Five Gates of Hell
• 1993 - Air and Fire
• 1996 - The Insult
• 1998 - Soft
• 1999 -The Book of Revelation
• 2005 - Divided Kingdom
• 2007 - Death of a Murderer
• 2013 - Secrecy
The Insult, Thomason's fourth novel, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and was chosen by David Bowie as one of his "100 Must-Read Books of All Time." The Book of Revelation, his sixth novel, was made into a feature film by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos. His 2007 novel, Death of a Murderer, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year.
With This Party's Got to Stop, Thomson ventured into non-fiction for the first time, exploring events surrounding his father's death and his complex relationships with his brothers and his extended family. The memoir won the Writers' Guild Non Fiction Book of the Year. Secrecy, his 2013 novel, is based on the life and work of the eccentric Sicilian wax artist, Gaetano Giulio Zumbo. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/5/2014.)
Book Reviews
Chillingly brilliant and sinister…masterly.
Financial Times (UK)
Bewitching…Intensely atmospheric…Superb.
Daily Mail (UK)
Scene after scene trembles with breath-stopping tension on the edge of bliss or dread. No one else writes quite like this in Britain today.
Observer (UK)
Beautifully evocative prose...makes this unusual historical novel truly memorable. In 1691, a mysterious artist known as Zummo...is summoned to Florence by Cosimo III, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.... [P]lot twists take a back seat to the complex picture Thomson gives of his oddball protagonist, a man given to wandering around carrying “little theaters filled with...the dead and dying” in the name of art.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Thomson...sets his new work in 17th-century Florence, drawing on the life of Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, a Sicilian sculptor granted patronage by the grand duke of Tuscany to create a replica of his wife in wax. Given the cultural climate of Florence and the looming threat of the Roman Inquisition, it is a dangerous commission.... A page-turning historical thriller by one of Britain's finest writers. —Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH
Library Journal
Thomson brings Renaissance-era Florence to life with rich descriptions and scenic locales. Readers who have toured Florence will enjoy revisiting the sites in the mind’s eye, and historical fiction fans in general will relish the virtual trip brimming with mystery and intrigue.
Booklist
Thomson takes us to 17th-century Florence, which by definition seems to be full of corrupt politicians, unscrupulous clergy and aspiring artists—and this, of course, long after the Renaissance has ended. We begin with a dialogue between Italian sculptor Gaetano Zummo...[whose] reminiscences take him back some 25 years.... Thomson succeeds on a number of levels here, for the novel works as a mystery, as a love story, as a historical novel and, more abstractly, as an exploration of aesthetic theory.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Do you regard Secrecy as a work of historical fiction, literary fiction, suspense, or a mixture of all three? Have you read anything similar to this before?
2. What is unusual about Florence in the late 17th century and why does Thomson choose to set the novel in this time period? What do you think about Thomson’s portrait of post-Renaissance Italy?
3. What is it about Zummo's work that divides people? How do you feel about Zummo’s morbid fascination with death and disease? What could be the source of this fascination?
4. What is Zummo's attitude towards love? Do you think Faustina changes Zummo, or do you feel that he has always been capable of loving someone in such a way? What do you think draws them so close to one another?
5. What might Thomson be trying to say about evil and taking people at face value? Can Zummo be described as evil in any way? What can be said about the relationship between Stufa and Zummo?
6. Is there something that Earhole, Fiore, Faustina, Mimmo, and Zummo have in common? Is Thomson looking to give a voice to the marginalized?
7. Why does Thomson mingle real historical figures with fictional characters? Can you distinguish between them?
8. What do the Grand Duke’s confidants have against Zummo? Why are they so distrustful of him?
9. As Marguerite explains towards the end, “Secrecy had many faces. If it was imposed on you, against your will, it could be a scourge—the bane of your existence. On the other hand, you might well seek it out. Nurture it. Rely on it. You mind life impossible without it. But there was a third kind of secrecy, which you carried unknowingly, like a disease or like the hour of your death. Things could be kept from you, maybe forever.” How does this relate to the structure of the novel?
10. Why does Thomson give Marguerite d'Orleans a voice in the novel?
11. Why does Zummo make the decision he does at the end of the novel? Do you think the reasons he gives Marguerite d’Orelans for his decision are convincing?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Casebook
Mona Simpson, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385351416
Summary
A powerful new novel about a young boy’s quest to uncover the mysteries of his unraveling family. What he discovers turns out to be what he least wants to know: the inner workings of his parents’ lives. And even then he can’t stop searching.
Miles Adler-Hart starts eavesdropping to find out what his mother is planning for his life. When he learns instead that his parents are separating, his investigation deepens, and he enlists his best friend, Hector, to help. Both boys are in thrall to Miles’s unsuspecting mother, Irene, who is “pretty for a mathematician.” They rifle through her dresser drawers, bug her telephone lines, and strip-mine her computer, only to find that all clues lead them to her bedroom, and put them on the trail of a mysterious stranger from Washington, D.C.
Their amateur detective work starts innocently but quickly takes them to the far reaches of adult privacy as they acquire knowledge that will affect the family’s well-being, prosperity, and sanity. Burdened with this powerful information, the boys struggle to deal with the existence of evil and concoct modes of revenge on their villains that are both hilarious and naïve. Eventually, haltingly, they learn to offer animal comfort to those harmed and to create an imaginative path to their own salvation.
Casebook brilliantly reveals an American family both both coming apart at the seams and, simultaneously, miraculously reconstituting itself to sustain its members through their ultimate trial. Mona Simpson, once again, demonstrates her stunning mastery, giving us a boy hero for our times whose story remains with us long after the novel is over and we’ve read the novel’s final page. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 14, 1957
• Where—Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California, Berkeley; M.F.A.,
Columbia University
• Awards— Whiting Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in Santa Monica, California
Mona E. Simpson (born Mona Jandali) is an American author. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College. She won the Whiting Prize for her first novel, Anywhere but Here (1986). It was a popular success and adapted as a film by the same name, released in 1999. She then wrote a sequel for it, The Lost Father in 1992. Her novel Off Keck Road (2000) won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
She is also the biological younger sister of the late Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, whom she did not meet until she was 25 years old.
Early life
Mona Jandali was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Her father Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, originally from Homs, Syria, was a cousin of composer and pianist Malek Jandali. Abdulfattah taught at the University of Wisconsin and later made a career in the food and beverage industry. Her mother, Joanne Carole Schieble, was his student; however, they were the same age because Jandali had received his PhD at a young age. Schieble became a speech language pathologist. They divorced in 1962 and Joanne lost touch with Jandali. Joanne remarried and Mona was given the last name of her stepfather, Simpson.
Career
Simpson received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. After graduating from Columbia, she worked as an editor for Paris Review. In 1994, she returned to Los Angeles with her husband. In 2001, she started teaching creative writing at UCLA, and also has an appointment at Bard College in New York.
Simpson's novels are a mixture of events from her life and pure fiction.[1][7][8] Her first novel, Anywhere But Here (1986), was a critical and popular success, winning the Whiting Prize. In describing her intentions for the novel, Simpson stated:
I wanted to write about American mythologies, American yearnings that might be responses, delayed or exaggerated but in some way typical, to the political and social truths of our part of the world in our century. But I wrote very personally about one family. I think it takes a long time before a crisis—like AIDS—enters the culture to a point where responses exist in a character, where personal gestures are both individual and resonant in a larger way.
It was adapted as the 1999 film Anywhere But Here, starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman. A Regular Guy (1996) explores the strained relationship of a Silicon Valley tycoon with a daughter born out of wedlock, whom he did not acknowledge. Off Keck Road (2000), portraying decades in the lives of three women in the Midwest, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. Stacey D'Erasmo states that "Off Keck Road marks the place where origin leaves off and improvisation begins."
Simpson's most recent novel, My Hollywood, was published in 2011. It explores the complex relationships, issues of class, and perspectives of two women, a European-American composer and mother in her 30s, and her immigrant nanny from the Philippines, who cares for her son and has five of her own in the Philippines whom she is supporting. The novel alternates between the voices of the two women, contrasting their worlds. Liesl Schillinger suggests that the novel is a "compassionate fictional exploration of this complicated global relationship, Simpson assesses the human cost that the child-care bargain exacts on the amah, on her employer and on the children of both." Ron Charles further argues that:
What really invigorates this novel, though, is the way it alternates between Claire's chapters and chapters narrated by Lola, her 50-year-old Filipino nanny. I was worried early on that Lola would be a Southeast Asian version of the Magical Negro, who exists merely to help some self-absorbed white person reach enlightenment. But she's entirely her own wonderful, troubled character, and her relationship with Claire remains complex and unresolved.
Finding family
Abdulfattah "John" Jandali and Joanne Carole Schieble had a baby boy in 1955 prior to both their marriage and Mona's birth, but gave him up for adoption. The boy, computer pioneer Steve Jobs, was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. In the 1980s, Jobs found his birth mother, by then Joanne Simpson, who told him that Mona was his biological sister. The siblings met for the first time in 1985 and developed a close friendship. They kept their relationship secret until 1986, when Simpson introduced Jobs as her brother at her book party for her first novel, Anywhere But Here. The two forged a relationship and he regularly visited her in Manhattan. Simpson said, "My brother and I are very close; I admire him enormously." Jobs said, "We're family. She's one of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her every couple of days."
Simpson had already been looking for their father and found him, then managing a coffee shop. When she reached Jandali, he said, "I wish you could have seen me when I was running a bigger restaurant." Jandali told Simpson that he had once managed a popular Mediterranean restaurant in Silicon Valley. "Everybody used to come there," the Jobs biographer, Walter Isaacson, says Jandali told Simpson. "Even Steve Jobs used to eat there. Yeah, he was a great tipper."
In a taped interview aired on 60 Minutes, Jobs said: "When I was looking for my biological mother, obviously, you know, I was looking for my biological father at the same time, and I learned a little bit about him and I didn't like what I learned. I asked her (Mona) to not tell him that we ever met...not tell him anything about me."
In her eulogy to Jobs (New York Times, October 30, 2011), Simpson wrote:
I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people. Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.
Marriage and family
In 1993, Simpson married the television writer and producer Richard Appel, and they had two children together, Gabriel and Grace. Appel, a writer for The Simpsons, used his wife's name for Homer Simpson's mother, beginning with the episode "Mother Simpson." They later divorced and Simpson currently lives in Santa Monica with her two children.
Awards
• 1986, Whiting Prize
• 1987, Hodder Fellowship (Princeton University)
• 1988, Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1995, Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fellowship
• 2001, Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize
• 2001, Finalist: PEN/Faulkner award
• 2008, Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
(Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/03/2014.)
See New York Times article on Mona Simpson.
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) From an early age, Miles senses the vulnerability of his mother, a recently divorced mathematician, and throughout his childhood and adolescence feels the need to look out for her. When Irene falls in love with Eli Lee, Miles is highly suspicious.... Ultimately, this is a story about a son’s love for his mother, and Simpson’s portrayal of utter loyalty is infectious.
Publishers Weekly
Having won honors ranging from a Whiting Writer's Award to an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts, the beloved Simpson shows up with a young protagonist named Miles Adler-Rich, who's compelled by the recent separation of his parents to spy on them with the help of friend Hector.... The scary secrets they learn give the boys their first real lesson in good and evil.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Ensnaring, witty, and perceptive.... This exceptionally incisive, fine–tuned and charming novel unfolds gracefully as [Simpson] brings fresh understanding and keen humor to the complexities intrinsic to each stage of life and love. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
A child of divorce turns private eye in the latest well-observed study of domestic dysfunction.... Simpson's sixth novel...features a teenage narrator struggling to comprehend a parental split. But the new book is...framed as a detective story about discovering the deceptions that can swirl around relationships.... [Simpson's] command of the story is rock-solid. A clever twist on a shopworn theme by a top-shelf novelist.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In the opening note from Hershel Geschwind of Neverland Comics, Hershel writes that Hector and Miles will continue to go back and forth with this manuscript “until they get their story straight or until they grow up, whichever comes last, or never.” How different do you think the boys’ accounts are of what happened, and what role do Hector’s footnotes play throughout the manuscript? What exactly do you think Herschel means by “grow up”?
2. This book is in many ways a coming-of age -story, but Miles learns many of his life lessons by spying on his mother, not through his own actual experience. Why do you think the author has chosen to focus so extensively on the effects of adult lives—the secret lives of parents—on their children?
3. How the motto of Miles’s and Hector’s school—motto, "is it true, is it kind, is it necessary? Will it improve on the silence?”shape their view of the world? What impact does Eli have on this view?
4. Did Miles’s extensive involvement with his mother’s personal life have a negative impact on his ability to focus on his own experiences, or did he gain greater insight into what it means to love than he might have otherwise?
5. What do we learn about Irene and about her relationships with Carey and Eli—and about adult lives in general—that we might not find out about were the novel not told through Miles’s perspective? What do we gain? Do you think most teenagers are as fascinated by the lives of their parents as Miles and Hector are?
6. Miles mentions that when Eli promises to put up Christmas lights, it was the “first feeling I had for Eli. We could be men who did that shit. I liked the idea of putting up lights ourselves” (page 28). What do the Christmas lights represent to Miles?
7. Why is Hector just as invested in uncovering the truth about Eli as Miles is? Or is he even more invested?
8. What is the significance of the notes on the kitchen blackboard? How do the quotes act as a reflection of what is going on in the story, whether or not Irene is aware of it at the time? For example, on page 41, what is the significance of the quote “benighted: in a state of pitiful or contemptible intellectual or moral ignorance.” Do you think Eli ever found Irene’s lack of awareness of his own deceit contemptible?
9. Several times throughout the novel Eli mentions his love for animals. The only stories he tells that Miles never doubts involve this deep love. Miles says at one point that he saw Eli holding the dead kittens, and he knew how to do it. Do you think the story about the sick cat, Coco, was true? Eli seems to be able to care for animals and not people. What does this say about who he is?
10. Does Eli ever really love Irene, Miles, and the Boops? What were his motives for stringing them along, and, do you think he ever believed the outcome would be different than it was?
11. On page 104 Miles describes romance as seeming like “friendship, but with a fleck of sparkle.” How do Miles’s feelings about romantic and platonic love change over the course of the novel? What does he learn from his parents’ relationship, from Eli and the Mims’ relationship, and from his friendship with Hector? Do you think Miles ever really questions his own sexuality?
12. On page 108, Miles says that when he “thinks of [his] life as a boy, it ended there that night, while the Mims stared out at the Pacific Ocean with its barreling waves, the world indifferent to our losses.” What causes this turning point?
13. What role does Ben Orion play? Why does he help Miles and Hector without asking for payment?
14. How does hearing directly from an older Hector through his comments in footnotes to the text alter or inform your impression of him as a character? What, if anything, does it bring to light about his relationship with Miles? Did it surprise you that he got into drugs when he went off to school? Do you think one of them needed the other more, and if so, why?
15. Why do you think Irene puts up with all of Eli’s broken promises? What is it about him that keeps drawing her back, despite never seeing where he lives, never meeting his child or his brother, and the fact that he never follows through on any of the futures he proposes, even with things as small as the buying of silverware?
16. On page 181, at Irene’s forty-fifth birthday party, Eli makes this speech: “All of you love Reen for many reasons.... But I, I love her, I love her because I, I can’t help loving her. No matter what ever happens, I am and I will always be in love with Irene Adler.” What does he mean, and what is it about Irene that makes Eli love her, or at least claim to love her, so much?
17. Who is “C” in Jean’s book dedication? Why do you think she tolerates Eli’s transgressions, and how much do you think she actually knows about them? Do you think she discovered Irene on her own? Do you think that Eli would eventually have told her?
18. What leads Miles to say that “hope for happiness is happiness” (page 229)? Do you think this statement is true?
19. Why do you think Miles lies to Eli about his mother dying in the arms of a man she loved when he runs into him years later?
20. Mona Simpson is known as an author of voice. How do you think the voice of Miles stacks up? Does he feel real?
21. What do you think Irene got out of her relationship with Eli? Does she, and do we, learn anything about her through her sexual experiences with him that give insight into who she is, or into what may have gone wrong with her marriage? Do you think she ultimately found happiness?
22. Bonus question 1: Did you notice parallels to Sherlock Holmes? Which boy is Holmes and which is Watson? Did their identities keep shifting, as they disguise their real details, change their appearances and hair colors?
23. Bonus question 2: Why do you think the heroine is called Irene Adler?
24. Bonus recipe: OLIVE OIL BUNDT CAKE (This is adapted from the pastry chef at Maialino—imagine Marge barging into Danny Meyer’s Gramercy Park Hotel restaurant and getting the men in aprons to scribble this on a napkin)
CAKE
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 cup whole milk
• 3 large eggs
• 2 tablespoons grated orange zest
• 1/4 cup Grand Marnier
1. Preheat the oven to 350°. Spray a 10-inch cake pan with cooking spray and line the bottom with parchment paper. In a bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, salt, baking soda and powder. In another bowl, whisk the olive oil, milk, eggs, orange zest and Grand Marnier. Add the dry ingredients; whisk until just combined.
2. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 1 hour, until the top is golden and a cake tester comes out clean. Transfer the cake to a rack and let cool for 30 minutes. Run a knife around the edge of the pan, invert the cake onto the rack and let cool completely, 2 hours.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
In Paradise
Peter Matthiessen, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594633171
Summary
A profoundly searching new novel by a writer of incomparable range, power, and achievement.
In the winter of 1996, more than a hundred women and men of diverse nationality, background, and belief gather at the site of a former concentration camp for an unprecedented purpose: a weeklong retreat during which they will offer prayer and witness at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform, while eating and sleeping in the quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews to their deaths.
Clements Olin, an American academic of Polish descent, has come along, ostensibly to complete research on the death of a survivor, even as he questions what a non-Jew can contribute to the understanding of so monstrous a catastrophe. As the days pass, tensions, both political and personal, surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to healing or closure. Finding himself in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observer’s role and to embrace a history his family has long suppressed—and with it the yearnings and contradictions of being fully alive.
In Paradise is a brave and deeply thought-provoking novel by one of our most stunningly accomplished writers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 22, 1927
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Death—April 5, 2014
• Where—Sagaponack, New York
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—3 National Book Awards
Peter Matthiessen is an American novelist, naturalist, and wilderness writer. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review and a three-time National Book Award-winner, he has also been a prominent environmental activist. His nonfiction has featured nature and travel—notably The Snow Leopard (1978)—or American Indian issues and history—notably a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). His fiction has occasionally been adapted for film: the early story "Travelin' Man" was made into The Young One (1960) by Luis Bunuel and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) into the 1991 film of the same name.
In 2008, at age 81, Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction for Shadow Country, a one-volume, 890-page revision of his three novels set in frontier Florida that had been published in the 1990s.
According to critic Michael Dirda, "No one writes more lyrically about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops, savannas, and the sea."
Youth and education
Matthiessen was born in New York City to Erard A. and Elizabeth (Carey) Matthiessen. (Erard, an architect, joined the Navy during World War II and helped design gunnery training devices. Afterwards, he gave up architecture to become a spokesman and fundraiser for the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy.) The well-to-do family lived in both New York City and Connecticut where, along with his brother, Matthiessen developed a love of animals that influenced his future work as a wildlife writer and naturalist.
He attended the Hotchkiss School, and—after briefly serving in the U.S. Navy (1945–47)—Yale University (B.A., 1950), spending his junior year at the Sorbonne. At Yale, he majored in English, published short stories (one of which won the prestigious Atlantic Prize), and studied zoology. Marrying and resolving to undertake a writer’s career, he soon moved back to Paris, where he associated with other expatriate American writers such as William Styron, James Baldwin, and Irwin Shaw.
There, in 1953, he became one of the founders (with Harold L. Humes, Thomas Guinzburg, Donald Hall,and George Plimpton) of the literary magazine The Paris Review. As revealed in a 2006 film, he was working for the CIA at the time, using the Review as his cover. In a 2008 interview with Charlie Rose, Matthiessen stated that he "invented The Paris Review as cover" for his CIA activities.) He returned to the U.S. in 1954, leaving Plimpton (a childhood friend of his) in charge of the Review. Matthiessen divorced in 1958 and began traveling extensively.
Career
In 1959, Mathiessen published the first edition of Wildlife in America, a history of the extinction and endangerment of animal and bird species as a consequence of human settlement, throughout North American history, and of the human effort to protect endangered species. It was one of the first books to call attention to climate change (then called global warming), by mentioning that polar ice cap formation caused the lowering of the seas, and that the isthmus over which Mongoloid people crossed from Asia to present-day Alaska (North America's first human immigration) is now submerged by the Bering Strait.
In 1965, Matthiessen published At Play in the Fields of the Lord, a novel about a group of American missionaries and their encounter with a South American indigenous tribe. The book was adapted into the film of the same name in 1991.
In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[7]
His work on oceanographic research, Blue Meridian, with photographer Peter A. Lake, documented the making of the film Blue Water, White Death (1971), directed by Peter Gimbel and Jim Lipscomb.
Late in 1973 Matthiessen joined field biologist George Schaller on an expedition in the Himalaya Mountains, which was the basis for The Snow Leopard (1978), his double-award-winner.
Interested in the Wounded Knee Incident and the 1976 trial and conviction of Leonard Peltier, an American Indian Movement activist, Mathiessen wrote a non-fiction account, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983).
In 2008, Matthiessen revisited his trilogy of Florida novels published during the 1990s: Killing Mr. Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997) and Bone by Bone (1999), inspired by the frontier years of South Florida and the death of plantation owner Edgar J. Watson shortly after the Southwest Florida Hurricane of 1910. He revised and edited the three books, which had originated as one 1,500-page manuscript, which now yielded the single-volume Shadow Country, his latest award-winner.
Crazy Horse lawsuits
Shortly after the 1983 publication of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Matthiessen and his publisher Viking Penguin were sued for libel by David Price, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, and William J. Janklow, the former South Dakota governor. The plaintiffs sought over $49 million in damages; Janklow also sued to have all copies of the book withdrawn from bookstores. After four years of litigation, Federal District Court Judge Diana E. Murphy dismissed Price's lawsuit, upholding Matthiessen's right "to publish an entirely one-sided view of people and events." In the Janklow case, a South Dakota court also ruled for Matthiessen. Both cases were appealed. In 1990, the Supreme Court refused to hear Price's arguments, effectively ending his appeal. The South Dakota Supreme Court dismissed Janklow's case the same year. With the lawsuits settled, the paperback edition of the book was finally published in 1992.
Personal life
In his book The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen reports having had a somewhat tempestuous on-again off-again relationship with his wife Deborah, culminating in a deep commitment to each other made shortly before she was diagnosed with cancer. Matthiessen and Deborah had practiced Zen Buddhism. She died in New York City near the end of 1972.
In September of the following year came the field trip to Himalayan Nepal. Matthiessen later became a Buddhist priest of the White Plum Asanga. Before practicing Zen, Matthiessen was an early pioneer of LSD. He says his Buddhism evolved fairly naturally from his drug experiences.
In 1980, Matthiessen married Maria Eckhart, born in Tanzania, in a Zen ceremony on Long Island, New York. They live in Sagaponack, New York.
In 2005, Matthiessen, along with Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin, was hailed in The Land's Wild Music by Mark Tredinnick, which analyzed how the landscape nourished and developed Matthiessen's writing.[14]
Awards
• 1979 National Book Award, Contemporary Thought, for The Snow Leopard
• 1980 National Book Award, General Non-Fiction (paperback), for The Snow Leopard
• 1993 Helmerich Award (the Tulsa Library Trust)
• 1995–1997 - designated the State Author of New York
• 2000 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities
• 2008 National Book Award, Fiction, for Shadow Country
• 2010 Spiros Vergos Prize for Freedom of Expression.
(Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/3/2014.)
Book Reviews
[A] meditative retreat at Auschwitz.... Passages about Olin’s family history, in particular, stand out. But the novel focuses mainly on the abstract: what it feels like to spend days on end at the death camp—the frustration, alienation, and otherworldliness of it. Throughout, there’s a hum of absurdity.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Not a mere recounting but a persuasive meditation on Auschwitz's history and mythology, this novel from three-time National Book Award winner Matthiessen uses scenes of confrontation, recollection, bitterness, and self-examination to trace aspects of culture that led to the Holocaust and that still reverberate today. —Jim Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) The two-time National Book Award–winner doesn’t shy away from boldly tackling the most profound of subjects… Matthiessen expertly raises the challenges and the difficulties inherent in addressing this subject matter, proving…that the creation of art "is the only path that might lead toward the apprehension of that ultimate evil . . . [that] the only way to understand such evil is to reimagine it.
Booklist
In Paradise as a whole feels overly formal; the framing device of the retreat makes the philosophizing feel potted...and Clements' emotional longings, constricted. A burst of spontaneous dancing on the retreat gives the book a similarly surprising lift, but it's quickly back to hand-wringing and self-loathing. An admirable, if muted, minor-key study of the meaning of survivorship.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Soon after arriving at Auschwitz, Olin wonders if it’s even possible to "bear witness" to the Holocaust, especially given the number of years that have passed in the interim and how few survivors remain from that time. "Their mission here, however well-intended, is little more than a wave of parting to a ghostly horror withdrawing into myth," he says. What do you think? Is it still possible to bear witness to the Holocaust? If yes, what does that witness look like to you? If not, why not?
2. Peter Matthiessen was a lifelong naturalist who wrote prolifically about the "wild places" of the world—about far-flung landscapes and people who "lived on the edge of life." Do you see elements of the natural or the wild in In Paradise? Where?
3. A distinct thread of dark humor wends its way through In Paradise, emerging in Earwig’s provocations, Olin’s musings, and the interactions of the disparate groups on the retreat. What purpose can humor serve in a work like this?
4. Olin, when reflecting on the seminal Holocaust works of Levi and Borowski, muses that even the victims weren’t truly innocent in the death camps—that everyone was complicit, except for the children. He echoes Viktor Frankl’s infamous line, "We who have come back, we know. The best of us did not return." As members of the same race, Olin insists, we all share culpability. What do you think?
5. The epigraph that opens In Paradise is quoted again during the scene of "the dancing." How do you interpret Akhmatova’spoem? What is that "something not known...but wild in our breast for centuries"? How does it relate to the dance? To In Paradise as a whole?
6. On the surface, Olin and Earwig seem to be diametrically opposed. Do you see any parallels between their characters, in what they are searching for, or how they make sense of their personal histories? What does In Paradise have to say about questions of home and longing and identity?
7. What do you think Ben Lama means when he says, "In this place, we are all struggling with our dark angels?"
8. Olin, after reading Sister Catherine’s diary, recites the parable from the Gospel of Luke about Christ and the penitent thief crucified alongside him, in which the thief begs to be taken to Paradise, and Christ responds, "No, friend, we are in Paradise right now." Why do you think Matthiessen drew the title of his book from this story?
9. A longtime student of Zen Buddhism, Matthiessen participated in three witness-bearing retreats at Auschwitz in the later years of his life and had long wanted to write about what he experienced there. But as "a non-Jewish American journalist" he felt he had "no right to do so" as nonfiction. Who do you feel has agency when it comes to telling the stories of genocide? Does this differ from the telling of other truths? Should this be true?
10. One of the major themes of In Paradise is love—sacred love, but also erotic love, and, as with Olin’s feelings for Sister Catherine, the connection between the two. How did you perceive their relationship? Why?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)