Umbrella
Will Self, 2012
Grove/Atlantic
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802120724
Summary
A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. —James Joyce, Ulysses
Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community—the so-called Concept House in Willesden—maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades.
A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life—with wholly unforeseen consequences.
Is Audrey’s diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all—perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey’s two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive?
Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self’s most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date. (From the British publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1961
• Where—North London, England, UK
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Aga Khan
Prize for Fiction; Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize
• Currently—lives in Stockwell, South London, England
William Woodard "Will" Self is an English author, journalist and television personality. He is the author of nine novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and five collections of non-fiction writing, of which his novel Umbrella was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work has been translated into 22 languages.
His fiction is known for being satirical, grotesque, and fantastical, and is predominantly set within London. His fiction often deals with such themes as mental illness, illegal drugs and psychiatry. Self's regular columns for Building Design on the built environment, and for the Independent Magazine on the psychology of place brought him to prominence as a thinker concerned with the politics of urbanity.
Self is a regular contributor to publications including Playboy, Harpers, New York Times and London Review of Books. He currently writes two fortnightly columns for New Statesman, and over the years he has been a columnist for The Observer, The Times and the Evening Standard. He is a regular contributor on British television, initially as a guest on comic panel shows and, more lately, on serious political programs. He is also a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 4.
Early life
Self was born and raised in North London. His parents were Peter Self, Professor of Public Administration at the London School of Economics, and Elaine (nee Rosenbloom), an American from Queens, New York, who worked as a publisher's assistant. His father was from an Anglican family and his mother was Jewish.
As a child, Self spent a year living in the U.S.—in Ithaca, in upstate New York. His parents separated when he was nine and divorced when he was eighteen. Self was a voracious reader from a young age. At ten an interest in science fiction grew, with notable works such as Frank Herbert's Dune, J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick—reflecting the precociousness of Self's reading. Into his teenage years, Self claimed to have been "overawed by the canon," stifling his ability to express himself. Self's dabbling with drugs grew in step with his prolific reading: he started smoking marijuana at the age of twelve, graduating through amphetamines, cocaine, and acid to heroin, which he started injecting at eighteen.
Of Self's background Nick Rennison has written that he:
Self is sometimes presented as a bad-boy outsider, writing, like the Americans William S Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr, about sex, drugs and violence in a very direct way. Yet he is not some class warrior storming the citadels of the literary establishment from the outside, but an Oxford educated, middle-class metropolitan who, despite his protestations to the contrary in interviews, is about as much at the heart of the establishment as you can get, a place he has occupied almost from the start of his career.
Career
After graduating from Oxford, Self worked for the Greater London Council, including a period as a road sweeper, while living in Brixton. He then pursued a career as a cartoonist for the New Statesman and other publications and as a stand-up comedian. In 1986 he entered a treatment centre, where he claims that his heroin addiction was cured. Then "through a series of accidents," he ended up running a small publishing company.
The publication of his short story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity brought him to public attention in 1991. Self was immediately hailed as an original new talent by Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Beryl Bainbridge, A. S. Byatt, and Bill Buford. In 1993 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 "Best Young British Novelists." Conversely, Self's second book, My Idea of Fun, was "mauled" by the critics.
He gained some notoriety in 1997 when he was sent by the broadsheet The Observer to cover the election campaign of John Major and was caught by a rival journalist using heroin on the Prime Minister's jet. He was fired as a result. He says that he has abstained from drugs, except for caffeine and nicotine, since 1998.
Self has made many appearances on British television, especially as a panellist on Have I Got News for You and as a regular on Shooting Stars. Since 2008 Self has appeared five times on Question Time. Since 2007, Self has later stopped appearing in Have I Got News for You, stating the show has become a pseudo-panel show.
Since 2009 Self has written two alternating fortnightly columns for the New Statesman. The Madness of Crowds explores social phenomena and group behaviour, and in Real Meals he reviews high street food outlets.
In 2012, Self was appointed Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University. In July 2012, Self received his first Man Booker Prize long list nomination for Umbrella, which the Daily Telegraph described as "possibly Self's most ambitious novel to date." The book was later placed on the prize shortlist.
Personal life
Self was married from 1989 to 1997 to Kate Chancellor. They have two children, a son Alexis and a daughter Madeleine. In 1997, Self married journalist Deborah Orr, with whom he has sons Ivan and Luther. His brother is the author and journalist Jonathan Self. He lives in Stockwell, South London.
Self has described himself as a Psychogeographer and modern flaneur and has written about walks he has taken. In December 2006, he walked 26 miles from his home in South London to Heathrow Airport. Upon arriving at Kennedy Airport he walked 20 miles from there to Manhattan.
Self is 6' 5" tall, collects and repairs vintage typewriters and smokes a pipe; he claims that a psychologist once described him as schizoid personality and borderline personality.
Awards
1991: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Quantity Theory of Insanity
1998: Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review for Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys
2008: Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction for "The Butt"
Self has been shortlisted three times for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award: in 2002 for Dorian, in 2004 for "Dr Mukti" in Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe and in 2006 for The Book of Dave. (Author bio from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Brilliant but chaotic…Umbrella is a work of throwback modernism. It has no chapters and few paragraph breaks…It shuffles points of view without warning. It is freckled with Joycean neologisms…it's an erudite yet barking mad novel about barking madness. It's as much performance piece as novel. It will force you to hold contradictory ideas in your head…You give yourself over to Umbrella in flashes, as if it were a radio station you're unable to tune in that you suspect is playing the most beautiful song you will ever hear. Just when you are ready to give up on it entirely, this novel locks into moments of ungodly beauty and radiant moral sympathy. It tests your patience. It tests your nerve.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Warning: Umbrella is what's known as a "difficult" novel. If that sounds as appealing as a difficult pregnancy, stop reading now. But if you enjoy challenges, in literature as well as life, read on because Umbrella…is a virtuosic performance…What's admirable about Umbrella is Self's ingenious treatment of his material: He welds form with content, using modernist techniques to deal with an epidemic that occurred during the heyday of modernism…Self's wildly nonlinear narrative offers other delights: richly detailed settings that bring the Edwardian era and mental hospitals sensuously alive, kaleidoscopic patterns of symbolism…and loads of mordant satire. Yes, Umbrella is a "difficult" novel, but it amply rewards the effort.
Steven Moore - Washington Post
A savage and deeply humane novel.... Umbrella is an old-fashioned modernist tale with retrofitted ambitions to boot.... Self has always been a fabulous writer... The result is page after page of gorgeously musical prose. Self’s sentences bounce and weave, and like poetry, they refract. The result is mesmerizing.... In its best moments, Umbrella compels a reader to the heights of vertigo Woolf excelled at creating...a triumph of form. With this magnificent novel Will Self reminds that he is Britain’s reigning poet of the night.
John Freeman - Boston Globe
Self’s latest novel...is a strange and sprawling modernist experiment that takes the human mind as its subject and, like the human mind, is infinitely capacious, wretchedly petty and ultimately magnificent.... It may not be beautiful, but it is extraordinary
NPR Books
A hefty, challenging stream-of-consciousness story whose engagement with modernist themes and techniques is announced in its epigraph from Joyce’s Ulysses.
New Yorker.com
In prose uninterrupted by chapters or line breaks, a twisted version of the 20th century is woven and unpicked again. It is a postmodern vivisection of Modernism, analyzing the dream and the machine, war as the old lie and a new liberation, and rituals sacred, profane and banal...a linguistically adept, emotionally subtle and ethically complex novel.
Guardian
An ambitiously conceived and brilliantly executed novel in the high modernist tradition of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.... Its scope is dazzling.... The switches between perspective and chronology are demanding (there are no chapters), but Self handles them with bravura skill, setting up imagery and phrases that echo suggestively between different episodes.... Umbrella is an immense achievement.
Financial Times
Entertaining and enthralling...extensively researched.... An experimental novel that is also a compassionate and thrilling book—and one that, despite its difficulty, deserves to be read.
Economist
Will Self’s Joycean tribute is a stream of consciousness tour de force.... [It] builds into a heartbreaking mosaic, a sardonic critique of the woefully misdirected treatment of the mentally ill and the futility of war and, above all, a summation of the human condition. Despite the bleakness of the message, by the end you are filled with elation at the author’s exuberant ambition and the swaggering way he carries it all off, and then a huge sense of deflation at the realization that whatever book you read next, it won’t be anything like this.
Daily Mail
Umbrella is old-school modernism. It isn’t supposed to be a breeze. But it is, to use the literary critical term of art, kind of amazing … It may not be his easiest, but I think this may be Will Self’s best book.”—The Observer (London)Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Self’s sweeping experimental new novel (after Walking to Hollywood) creaks under the weight of chaotic complexity. At its core lies a fractured matrix only partially resembling a coherent story. For more than 50 years, octogenarian Audrey Death aka De’Ath, Deeth, Deerth has languished in North London’s Friern Mental Hospital, suffering from encephalitis lethargica—a brain-damaging sleeping sickness she contracted in 1918 that renders patients either “whirled into a twisted immobility, or else unwound spastic, hypotonic.” In 1971, whiz-bang psychiatrist Zachary Busner attempts to revive her and other “enkies” by plying them with L-Dopa (an anti-Parkinson’s drug). A fleeting reawakening reveals jarring glimpses into Audrey’s past (a hardscrabble childhood in Edwardian England; a job at a WWI munitions factory; a raunchy love affair with a married man), with alternating flashbacks to the lives of her brothers Stan (a gunner in the war) and Bert (a puffed-up civil servant), and jumps forward to Busner in 2010 reminiscing about his past (a failed marriage; adultery; his mixed career). Lacking chapter breaks, paragraph separations (mostly), and hopping between these four characters’ stream-of-consciousness points of view, the already puzzling tome can be difficult to follow, let alone grasp. But with snippets of dialects, stylistic flourishes, and inventive phrases loose with meaning, for those who grab hold and hang on, the experience falls just shy of brilliant.
Publishers Weekly
Cutting-edge psychiatrist Zachary Busner is concerned about some of the patients at a 1970s London mental hospital—in particular, Audrey Dearth, who was born in the slums in 1890 and unfolds her life story in alternate passages—but efforts to reach them don't end well. Long-listed for the 2012 Man Booker Prize.
Library Journal
Brainy and outlandish, though still in the mainstream of modernist fiction, this book captures a number of eccentric voices and sends the reader running to the dictionary. The epigraph to the novel is, fittingly, from Joyce's Ulysses: "A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella," and Self offers us an account of Audrey Death and her two brothers, Albert and Stanley. Originally Audrey De'Ath, her name transmutes to Deerth and then to Dearth, a prime example of Self's--dare I say self-consciously?—Joycean word play. By whatever name, Audrey was born in 1890, came of age in the Edwardian era, involved herself in the suffragette movement, worked for a while in an umbrella shop, became ill with encephalitis lethargica (aka "sleeping sickness") toward the end of World War I and was institutionalized in 1922 at a mental hospital in north London. Now it's 1971, and Dr. Zachary Busner, a recurring character in Self's novels and stories, tries to treat her—and other sufferers from the illness—to bring them out of their catatonia. Self plunges the reader into the twisted conscious minds of both Audrey and Zach, a feat that's in equal parts exhilarating and bewildering. Consider the following description of a pianist Audrey had heard in her past: "Ooh, yairs, isn't it luvverly, such fine mahoggerny—while the fellow's knees rose and fell as he trod in the melody, Doo-d'doo, doo d'doo, doo d'dooo, doo d'dooo, triplets of notes going up and down." The novel disdains such literary conventions as chapters and just plunges us into the inner worlds of its characters. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this novel is uncompromising and relentless in the demands it makes upon the reader, yet there's a lyrical, rhapsodic element that continually pulls one into and through the narrative. .
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.
Life Among Giants
Bill Roorbach, 2012
Algonquin Books
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616203245
Summary
At seventeen, David “Lizard” Hochmeyer is nearly seven feet tall, a star quarterback, and Princeton-bound. His future seems all but assured until his parents are mysteriously murdered, leaving Lizard and his older sister, Kate, adrift and alone.
Sylphide, the world’s greatest ballerina, lives across the pond from their Connecticut home, in a mansion the size of a museum, and it turns out that her rock star husband’s own disasters have intersected with Lizard’s—and Kate’s—in the most intimate and surprising ways.
Over the decades that follow, Lizard and Kate are obsessed with uncovering the motives behind the deaths, returning time and again to their father’s missing briefcase, his shady business dealings and shaky finances, and to Sylphide, who has threaded her way into Lizard’s and Kate’s lives much more deeply than either had ever realized.
From the football fields of Princeton to a stint with the NFL, from elaborate dances at the mansion to the seductions lying in wait for Lizard, and ultimately to the upscale restaurant he opens in his hometown, it only takes Lizard a lifetime to piece it all together.
A wildly entertaining novel of murder, seduction, and revenge—rich in incident, in expansiveness of character, and in lavishness of setting—it’s a Gatsby-esque adventure, a larger-than-life quest for answers that reveals how sometimes the greatest mystery lies in knowing one’s own heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August, 1953
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Raised—New Cannan, Connecticut
• Education—B.A., Ithaca College; M.F.A, Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Maine
Bill Roorbach is an American novelist, short story and nature writer, memoirist, journalist, blogger and critic. He has authored fiction and nonfiction works including Big Bend, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. His recent novels include Life Among Giants (2012) and The Remedy for Love (2014). Roorbach and his wife, painter Juliet Karelsen, live in Maine. They have a daughter.
Background
Bill Roorbach was born in Chicago, Illinois. The next year his family moved to suburban Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended kindergarten, and in 1959 moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where he attended public schools from first grade on, graduating from New Canaan High School in 1971. In 1976, he received his B.A. (cum laude) from Ithaca College.
During what he has called his "writing apprenticeship," Roorbach traveled and worked a series of different jobs. He played piano and sang in a succession of bands, bartended, worked briefly on a cattle ranch, and worked extensively as a carpenter, plumber, and handyman. In January, 1987, he enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts Writing Program of the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts, where he was awarded a School of the Arts Fellowship, a Fellowship of Distinction and an English Department teaching assistantship. In addition, he was a fiction editor of Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose. He graduated in May 1990.
Soon after he published his first book, Summers with Juliet.
Teaching
Roorbach taught at the University of Maine at Farmington from 1991 to 1995 and subsequently at the Ohio State University from 1995 to 2001, winning tenure in 1998. In 2001, he quit his tenured position and returned with his family to Maine where he taught odd semesters as visiting full professor at Colby College.
He wrote full-time until Fall, 2004, when he was awarded the William H.P. Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, a five-year position as full professor. He commuted from Maine to Worcester until April, 2009, when he returned to full-time writing.
Works
Roorbach sold his first book, Summers with Juliet shortly after graduating from Columbia. In 1998, he published Writing Life Stories. During the interim, he published short work, both fiction and nonfiction, in a number of magazines and journals, including The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Playboy, Missouri Review, and Granta,
His first novel, The Smallest Color; a collection of stories, Big Bend; and a collection of essays, Into Woods, written incrementally during the preceding decade, were published in a flurry in 2000 and 2001. Big Bend was featured on the NPR program Selected Shorts, performed by the actor James Cromwell. Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth, a widely used anthology, was published in 2002. A Place on Water, which Roorbach wrote with poet Wesley McNair and essayist Robert Kimber, was published in 2004. In 2005, Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey was published. Roorbach based on an article of the same name he wrote for Harper’s Magazine. More recently, he published two novels, Life Among Giants in 2012 and The Remedy for Love in 2014.
Awards
2001 - Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
1999 - National Endowment for the Arts Fellow
2002 - O. Henry Prize
2004 - Kaplan Foundation Fellow
2006 - Maine Prize for Literary Nonfiction
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrived 10/14/2014.)
Book Reviews
Life Among Giants is a larger-than-life production. Yet all of its wild characters feel genuine, their aches and flaws and desires wholly organic; and the plot they’re tangled in moves forward at a breakneck pace. It’s a dizzy romp. There’s murder and intrigue and sex and terror, and Roorbach is generous with it all.
Haley Tanner - New York Times Book Review
Life Among Giants, is a bighearted, big-boned story about a young man's entanglement with celebrities. Without a hint of satire, it offers a savvy reflection on America's conflicted relationship to fame: beguiled one minute, horrified the next; desperate to touch the Beautiful People, but just as eager to rebuke them…Roorbach is a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Consistently surprising and truly entertaining...Part thriller, part family drama, Life Among Giants is deliciously strange and deeply affecting.
Boston Globe
What lingers after finishing Life Among Giants is the beauty of Roorbach’s appreciation of his characters’ exceptional physical abilities, as they play football, cook, make love and dance.
Dallas Morning News
Besides being a compelling mystery, the kind to keep one reading well after bedtime, and a novel that almost insists on being immediately reread, Life Among Giants is a reminder of the ways we all shape our lives into stories, and the ways those stories, in turn, shape us.
Columbus Dispatch
An exploration of lives touched by greatness and tragedy in equal measure, Roorbach’s latest novel traces towering Princeton graduate and NFL player-cum-restaurateur David “Lizard” Hochmeyer in his attempt to unravel the tangled conspiracy behind his parents’ murder in 1970. When his parents are killed in front of him at a restaurant, David believes the culprits are connected to his neighbor, the elegant ballerina Sylphide, whose rock star husband also died under mysterious circumstances.... Roorbach (Big Bend) has written a mystery free of contemporary cynicism and recalling the glitter and allure of a kind of stardom that has also, in its way, been collateral damage to a greedy financial machine.
Publishers Weekly
This ambitious, energetic novel from Roorbach (Big Bend) has something for everyone—steamy sex, rock stars, ballet stars, professional football, a dysfunctional family, an unsolved murder, and a complicated revenge plot.... Verdict: This big, sprawling novel has so much going on that it's easy to lose track of the murder mystery at its heart. It would pack more of a punch if it had a sharper focus. —Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA
Library Journal
This is one of those novels you read because you care about what happens to the people and the connections between them as those connections grow, fray, and snap. By turns surreal and gritty, the book is written with the same muscular grace possessed by the dancers and athletes who are its main characters,
Booklist
With memories of people tangled "in a hopeless knot," David "Lizard" Hochmeyer attempts to unravel the Gordian in Roorbach's latest novel. The people include his assassinated parents; Emily, his African-American-Korean first love; and Sylphide, prima ballerina and widow...a mere sampling of the exotic, eye-catching cast, the best thing about this book.... Great setup, sparkling characters, but one-third into the book readers will hunger for less setup and characterization and want the story to get moving. It does, in complex fashion.... The rich-and-famous lifestyle is nicely rendered, too. A narrative threaded through with corruption and an appreciable number of love stories.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Specific questions will be added if and when they're made available by the publisher.
See Now Then
Jamaica Kincaid, 2013
Farrar, Straus and Girox
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374180560
Summary
In See Now Then, the brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica Kincaid—her first in ten years—a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies.
This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters—a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England—as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future: for, as she writes, “the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then.” Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. See Now Then is Kincaid’s attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.
Since the publication of her first short-story collection, At the Bottom of the River, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In See Now Then, she envelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling—creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Elaine Potter Richardson
• Birth—May 25, 1949
• Where—St. John's, Antigua
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Center for Fiction's Clifton Fadiman Medal;
Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, Prix Femina Etranger;
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest
Award
• Currently—lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and
Claremont California.
Jamaica Kincaid, Caribbean novelist, gardener, and gardening writer, is the author of six novels, including her most recent, So Then Now (2013)
She was born in the city of St. John's on the island of Antigua, which she left at age seventeen for the U.S. After working as an au pair in Manhattan, she fell in with a group of writers for The New Yorker where she began writing the magazine's "Talk of the Town" column. Then-editor William Shawn started publishing her fiction in the late 1970s, and in 1979 she married his son Allen (a composer and the brother of actor Wallace).
Kincaid's short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and The New Yorker, where her novel Lucy was originally serialized. Her first book, At the Bottom of the River (1983), was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Her novels are loosely autobiographical, though Kincaid has warned against interpreting their autobiographical elements too literally: "Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence. Her work often prioritizes "impressions and feelings over plot development" and often features conflict with both a strong maternal figure and colonial and neocolonial influences.
Kincaid's marriage to Allen Shawn ended in 2002. They have two grown children, Harold (music producer/songwriter), and a daughter, Annie (singer/songwriter Annie Rosamond). Kincaid lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, during the academic year.(Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Ms. Kincaid writes with passion and conviction, and she also writes with a musical sense of language, a poet’s understanding of how politics and history, private and public events, overlap and blur.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Writers make uncomfortable kin.... There’s a reflex in every writer that trumps even the maternal instinct, a part of her that, even while her newborn suckles at her breast, is cold-eyed, choosing words to describe the pit-bull clamp of its gums, the crusted globe of its skull, with the same dispassion which she might describe fellow passengers on a bus.... The intimate treachery, the permanent duality that this entails...are lucidly examined in Jamaica Kincaid’s latest novel.... Kincaid has the gift of endowing common experience with a mythic ferocity.... [She] is one of our most scouringly vivid writers.
Fernanda Eberstadt - New York Times Book Review
Most readers feel protective of that little unit, the family. When it breaks, as it so often does and most certainly will in this story, we experience the tragedy.... Was it ever any different? Did Mr. Sweet, who so utterly resembles the absent-minded Mr. Ramsay from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, ever truly love Mrs. Sweet, a modern-day Mrs. Ramsay—the mother who struggles every day to save her family from destruction, or just unhappiness?
Susan Salter Reynolds - New York Newsday
Man marries. Woman grows old and fat. Man throws her over for a prettier version. It's a familiar story. Yet, in Jamaica Kincaid's voice, the scorned woman's fury becomes a spellbinding tale, as lyrical as Paradise Lost, as resonant as a Greek epic. This is hell like none other. You descend it circle by circle, and, word by word, you yield to the storyteller's art.... Kincaid is not easy reading. Not much that is worthwhile in literature is. But she is fierce and true. Certainly, that is so of See Now Then. After 10 years of inexplicable fictional silence, she comes forth with a mighty roar.
Marie Arana - Washington Post
Kincaid conscientiously and expertly manipulates language the way a photographer adjusts a camera’s lens, bringing her characters into clear focus and accentuating their profiles against their natural backdrop.
Liza Weisstuch - Boston Sunday Globe
Bold and beautiful.... Joycean? Yes, and also much like the role of Winnie in the Samuel Beckett play Happy Days—both Winnie and Kincaid addressing us in a rush that we recognize as an actual process of thought.... See Now Then is—by turns—lovely, even lilting, difficult, and condemning of Mr. Sweet. The good news is that everything works—Kincaid’s style, story and startling way of telling a tale of the cosmos in terms of domesticity . . . There is courage and brilliance here, and an unusual way of going about it. We hurt for Mrs. Sweet, we pull for her, we identify with her passion for her children while we somewhat understand Mr. Sweet – and fairly jump for joy when Mrs. Sweet notes that, "Death has no Then and Now."
Karen Brady - Buffalo News
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath meets Virginia Woolf!.... With the intensity of Virginia Woolf, Kincaid creates a palimpsest of time past, time present and time future . . . Mrs. Sweet in these pages makes a verbal symphony.... Kincaid’s attempt to capture living itself may just be, as she puts it, "always just out of reach," but her talent for trying remains palpable on every page.... Connoisseurs will find it delicious.
Alan Cheuse - Chicago Tribune (Book of the Month)
Damned, haunted and psychological.... Kincaid’s heady fiction doesn’t unfold dramatically, but her prose does, vining and clinging to readers’ ears, blooming into a tritone musical theory—see-now-then.... Churning through the tenses, Mrs. Sweet’s stream of consciousness is the narrative form: an aesthetic rendering of how time, memory and imagination create the fabric of being... In her earlier novels, misaligned family relations produce the potential for human failure. Kincaid’s female protagonist-narrators triumph against those circumstances through literary intelligence. Mrs. Sweet’s grappling with time is beautiful and brutal: It acknowledges that our failures sometimes deny surmounting and, instead, resonate across memory into persistent, heart-rending permanence.
Walton Muyumba - Dallas Morning News
Kincaid continues to write with a unique, compelling voice that cannot be found anywhere else. Her small books are worth a pile of thicker—and hollower—ones
Jeffrey Rodgers - San Francisco Chronicle
See Now Then is a hurricane of a book, a novel of psychic bewilderment and seething inaction that relentlessly defines and redefines the sense of otherness and displacement that is the permanent legacy of slavery and colonialism. An existential crisis if there ever was one, Jamaica Kincaid mines it with seriousness, tenderness and frequently savage humor in this novel, showing that it touches not just blacks, but all people, however loathe they may be to admit it. But See Now Then gives us no choice. From the first pages, its intimate, matter of fact, stream of consciousness style blurs the lines between us and them, now and then, poetry and prose, reality and imagination.... With Kincaid, it’s never a matter of what wins, only of what is.
Ms. Magazine
In her first novel in a decade, Kincaid (Autobiography of My Mother) brings her singular lyricism and beautifully recursive tendencies to the inner life of Mrs. Sweet, who is facing the end of her marriage, and who, over the course of the book, considers the distinctions between her nows and her thens, particularly when recounting what was while the memories bleed with a pain that still is. Particularly touching is Kincaid’s rendering of motherhood. What’s startling is the presumably autobiographical nature of the plot..... While evidence of fictionalization is obvious (naming the children after Greek myths), the book feels precariously balanced between meticulous language and raw emotion. The distinction between life and art is not always clear, but only a writer as deft as Kincaid can blur the lines so elegantly.
Publishers Weekly
Fans of Lannan Literary Award winner Kincaid have waited more than ten years for this novel, originally scheduled for September 2012, ostensibly about a small-town New England family but really about the characters' minds.
Library Journal
The plot centers on Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, a couple whose marriage is shot through with passivity and resentment, though the source of the tension is never quite explicit.... Their two children are named Persephone and Heracles, and the story sometimes shifts into a broad allegorical mode that, like those names, echoes Greek mythology. (In one scene, Heracles pulls off his father's testicles and throws them all the way to the Atlantic.) In some ways, this book is a tribute to modernism, in its surrealism, in its [Gertrude] Stein-ian prose and in the way Kincaid cannily merges past and present events to evoke mood... It's not a total success.... Yet Kincaid's audaciousness is winning. She's taken some much-needed whacks at the conventional domestic novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
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Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for
Little Known Facts
Christine Sneed, 2013
Bloomsbury USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781608199587
Summary
The people who orbit around Renn Ivins, an actor of Harrison Ford-like stature—his girlfriends, his children, his ex-wives, those on the periphery—long to experience the glow of his flame.
Anna and Will are Renn's grown children, struggling to be authentic versions of themselves in a world where they are seen as less important extensions of their father. They are both drawn to and repelled by the man who overshadows every part of them. Most of us can imagine the perks of celebrity, but Little Known Facts offers a clear-eyed story of its effects—the fallout of fame and fortune on family members and others who can neither fully embrace nor ignore the superstar in their midst.
With Little Known Facts, Christine Sneed emerges as one of the most insightful chroniclers of our celebrity-obsessed age, telling a story of influence and affluence, of forging identity and happiness and a moral compass; the question being, if we could have anything on earth, would we choose correctly? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Green Bay, Wisconsin; Libertyville,
Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Georgetown University; M.F.A.,
Indiana University
• Awards—AWP Grace Paley Prize
• Currently—lives in Evanston, Illinois
Christine M. Sneed is an author and visiting professor at DePaul University. Her short story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, won the 2009 AWP Grace Paley Prize. Her debut novel Little Know Facts was published in 2013. Sneed's work has appeared in 2008 Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, New England Review, Southern Review, Meridian, Pleiades, Massachusetts Review, Greensboro Review.
Sneed grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Libertyville, Illinois. She graduated from Georgetown University, and from Indiana University with an MFA. She lives in Evanston, Illinois. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Impressive... hypnotic...hard to put down...Little Known Facts is juicy enough to appeal to our prurience but smart enough not to make us feel dirty afterward…. Sneed is such a gifted writer.... Her depiction of both proximity to celebrity and celebrity itself had me totally convinced.
Curtis Sittenfeld - NewYork Times Book Review
An entertaining, formally inventive read...the world that Sneed creates in Little Known Facts— a blend of truth and fiction that weaves real life actors and directors into Renn's everyday life—makes for a clever take and a fun read.
Los Angeles Times
Christine Sneed's impressive debut novel, Little Known Facts, is a Hollywood tale that aspires to complicate the traditional Hollywood narrative. Its characters want to swap sincerity for surface, real anxiety for contrived problems.
Mark Athitakis - Minneapolis Star Tribune
In Sneed's unimaginative debut novel, middle-aged Hollywood heartthrob Renn Ivins, blessed with fame, fortune, and good looks, is unable to keep his personal life from falling apart. He philanders and makes questionable decisions, disappointing and confounding his children (rudderless 20-something Billy and young medical intern Anna), not to mention his ex-wives and lovers. On a sentence level, Sneed's prose is confident and seamless. She expends a great deal of narrative time fleshing out the insecurities and emotions of Renn and his entourage. Chapters unfold with eight different points of view, but instead of adding complexity or perspective to what has already been represented, these shifts are mostly skin-deep, revealing tawdry but predictable details, romantic betrayals, and other "little known facts" one might find in the tabloids.... While real-life fans may zealously follow the ups and downs of their idols' lives, Sneed (Portraits of a Few People I've Made Cry) takes for granted that readers will feel the same fascination for her fictional superstar and his private struggles.
Publishers Weekly
Sneed's Portraits of a Few People I've Made Cry won AWP's 2009 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, among other awards, so the cognoscenti will want her first novel. Here, the glow from legendary actor Renn Ivins blots out his ex-wives, girlfriends, and two grown children.
Library Journal
An ensnaring first novel that delves into the complex challenges and anguish of living with and in the shadow of celebrity. Sneed’s wit, curiosity, empathy, and ability to divine the perfect detail propel this psychologically exquisite, superbly realized novel of intriguing, caricature-transcending characters and predicaments… As Sneed illuminates each facet of her percussively choreographed plot via delectably slant disclosures—overheard conversations, snooping, tabloids, confessions under duress, and journal entries, among them—she spotlights "little known facts" about the cost of fame, our erotic obsession with movie-star power, and where joy can be found.
Booklist
Sneed's debut novel, which follows a short story collection (Portraits of a Few People I've Made Cry, 2010), goes beyond the tabloid headlines and chronicles the lives of those who orbit a famous actor. Celebrity has its perks as well as its drawbacks, and revered movie icon Renn Ivins' life is no exception. Adored by fans throughout the world, those closest to him also are affected by his aura and not necessarily in a positive way. His earnings provide financial security for his children, ex-wives, family members and girlfriends, but Ivins' fame is a double-edged sword.... Sneed effectively blurs the line between fact and fiction and brings each character to life.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.
Above All Things
Tanis Rideout, 2012
Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399160585
Summary
[A] breathtaking debut novel of obsession and divided loyalties, which brilliantly weaves together the harrowing story of George Mallory’s ill-fated 1924 attempt to be the first man to conquer Mount Everest, with that of a single day in the life of his wife as she waits at home in England for news of his return.
A captivating blend of historical fact and imaginative fiction, Above All Things moves seamlessly back and forth between the epic story of Mallory’s legendary final expedition and a heartbreaking account of a day in the life of Ruth Mallory.
Through George’s perspective, and that of the newest member of the climbing team, Sandy Irvine, we get an astonishing picture of the terrible risks taken by the men on the treacherous terrain of the Himalaya. But it is through Ruth’s eyes that a complex portrait of a marriage emerges, one forged on the eve of the First World War, shadowed by its losses, and haunted by the ever-present possibility that George might not come home.
Drawing on years of research, this powerful and beautifully written novel is a timeless story of desire, redemption, and the lengths we are willing to go for honour, glory, and love.. (From the British edition.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Belgium
• Raised—Bermuda; Kingston, Ontario, Canada
• Education—M.F.A., University of Guelph-Humber
• Awards—Poet Laureate for Lake Ontario
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Ontario
Born in Belgium, Tanis Rideout grew up in Bermuda and Canada, particularly Kingston, Ontario where she became involved with the thriving music scene. She received her MFA from the University of Guelph-Humber.
Rideout has often been referred to as the "Poet Laureate of CanRock." She has performed on CBC Radio, BookTelevision, ZeD and Citytv. She has toured extensively in North America. Her work has appeared in a range of quarterlies and magazines including A Room of One's Own, Black Heart Magazine, grey borders, Spire, Pontiac Quarterly, Fireweed, echolocation, Witual and Chart, and has been short-listed for a number of prizes, including the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award, and has received a grant from the Toronto Arts Council.
In the spring of 2005 Rideout joined Sarah Harmer to read her poetry on Harmer’s I Love the Escarpment Tour to draw attention to damage being done to the Niagara Escarpment by ongoing quarrying; as a result, she appears in the 2006 June award-winning documentary Escarpment Blues. In August 2006 she was named the Poet Laureate for Lake Ontario by the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper and joined Gord Downie (of Canadian band The Tragically Hip) on a tour to promote environmental justice on the lake.
In 2010 Rideout won second prize in the CBC Literary Awards for her poems about Marilyn Bell. Her first novel Above All Things was released in Canada in 2012 and 2013 in the US and UK. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Timeless romance, an unflinching love story that touches the very core of the human condition. Rideout leaves readers holding the book close to their chest, knowing that the purpose of life, above all else, is love.
Telegraph (UK)
Rideout's debut is provocative, challenging, captivating and polished—quite possibly perfect.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
A must-read for Everest buffs with a sensitive side, and for those who want to understand the anatomy of climbing accidents. It is also the perfect summer read for anyone lured by the romance of adventure, as the story goes well beyond the vast summit of Everest into much trickier terrain: the unmapped topography of the heart.
Toronto Globe and Mail
[Rideout's] graceful turns of phrase, her realistic knack of winging us back and forth between Cambridge and Everest, and her powerful portraits of Mallory and his climbing team allow Above All Things to reach its own spectacular literary summit.
Toronto Star
This vivid, assured, and confident debut novel scales great heights of obsession and desire, both on the face of Mount Everest and in the loving bond between doomed explorer George Mallory and his wife, Ruth. Against the backdrop of Mallory’s disastrous third expedition to attempt the summit in 1924, the explorer’s tenacity and motives get thoughtful treatment...while Ruth, waiting for news and caring for their three children, is torn between understanding and resentment.... The inevitable, terrible end remains in sight for the reader throughout, as compelling as the mountain peak that Mallory pursued at all costs. But Ruth’s reactions, from her own sense of foreboding to her surprising fortitude in the face of deep loss, reassuringly ground the novel with the sense, as another doomed climber mused, of how “time keeps passing when we’re away.”
Publishers Weekly
Having published widely in journals and been short-listed for various awards, Rideout here reimagines George Mallory's assault on Everest from the perspective of his wife. In 1924, as Mallory readies his third expedition, lovely young Ruth says, "Tell me about this mountain that's stealing you away from me."
Library Journal
Canadian Rideout's debut novel about Mallory's disastrous last climbing attempt is the story of a love triangle: a man, a woman and a mountain. After two failures, George has promised his wife, Ruth, that he is done with Everest, but in 1924, he leaves Ruth with their three small children in Cambridge.... Ruth supported his earlier attempts, but now she is jealous of his time away climbing.... Although a large portion of the novel takes place in Cambridge, where Ruth waits for letters from George...[it] cannot compete with the drama on Everest itself.... A plodding quality slips in, the sense that Rideout is following the historical dots, but she does a terrific job describing both the extreme physical conditions and the dreamlike consciousness George and Sandy drift into as their memories of home intertwine with their moment-to-moment climb.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel is told in three different narratives: that of Ruth, of George, and of Sandy. What do you think the reader gains by being able to see the viewpoints of these three main characters? What does each of these perspectives bring to the telling of the story?
2. George and Sandy’s stories are told in the past tense though Ruth’s is told in present tense. Why do you think that is? Ruth’s story is told over the course of one day, whereas George and Sandy’s are told over a period of time. How do these different time frames enhance the novel?
3. When asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, George Mallory replied, “because it’s there.” In your opinion, why did George attempt Everest the first time? Do you think his reasoning was different for his final, fated attempt? Why do people embark on similar endeavours, such as running marathons, skydiving, rock climbing, etc.? Have you or would you ever consider a challenge like these?
4. The question of climbing with or without oxygen was a serious issue in the early twentieth century—an ethical and moral question. Today, nearly everyone who climbs the mountain uses oxygen and much more sophisticated equipment and clothing. Do you think this changes the value of climbing Everest?
5. In reading a telegram meant for her husband, Ruth finds out that George has agreed to return to Everest. Do you think it would have changed things between them if he had told her himself? How do you think he should have told her? Have you ever discovered terrible news by reading something you shouldn’t have?
6. Ruth makes a great many sacrifices to support George. What does it mean to be a supportive wife or husband? Do you think George acted selfishly? How do you support someone in something if it requires sacrificing so much for yourself?
7. While in New York George has a brief affair with another woman. Do you think Ruth knew about this affair? Should George have told her? What does this say about their marriage? Do you think this betrayal is more or less significant than George’s return to Everest against Ruth’s wishes?
8. George is determined to conquer Everest for himself, but also for his country. In the end, the mountain overcomes him. What does this mean to George? For those at home in England? How would you characterize George’s relationship with Everest?
9. George decided to go on the expedition against Ruth’s wishes and so she must stay at home and anxiously wait for his return. Do you think Ruth is a strong woman? In what ways is she at the mercy of her love for her husband? Do you feel sympathy for her? Do you think there are any contemporary parallels to her staying at home with her husband away, out to conquer the world, so to speak?
10. Many explorers, astronauts, adventurers, etc., take tremendous risks at the edge of their pursuits for numerous reasons. Do you think George is justified in his pursuit of his obsession? Is it fair to his wife and children? At what point must one consider the needs of others more than one’s own? How does pride influence—or skew—the clarity of George’s decision making?
11. As the youngest and most inexperienced member of the expedition, Sandy has to rely on the experience and knowledge of those around him. Do you think George should have chosen a more veteran climber? If so, why? How much confidence does George have in Sandy? Have you ever been in a position to take on a challenging task that you were not fully prepared for? Did you rise to the occasion?
12. What do you make of the relationship between Will and Ruth? George asks Will to look after Ruth, and Will agrees. Do you think George made a mistake? What do you think Ruth’s feelings are for Will?
13. Ruth had a whole lifetime in front of her in the aftermath of George’s death as well as the burden of raising three small children by herself. How do you imagine her life to have been during the months and years following the death of her husband?
14. Consider the extravagance (i.e., champagne) of what the climbers brought with them up the mountain. Meanwhile, when the little coolie boy died, no one seemed to bat an eye. What do you think about this? Were the white men’s achievements done at the expense of the indigenous people?
(Questions issued by publisher.)