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The Forgotten Waltz
Anne Enright, 2011
W.W. Norton & Co.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393342581
Summary
A new, unapologetic kind of adultery novel. Narrated by the proverbial other woman—Gina Moynihan, a sharp, sexy, darkly funny thirtysomething IT worker—The Forgotten Waltz charts an extramarital affair from first encounter to arranged, settled, everyday domesticity....
This novel’s beauty lies in Enright’s spare, poetic, off-kilter prose—at once heartbreaking and subversively funny. It’s built of startling little surprises and one fresh sentence after another.
Enright captures the heady eroticism of an extramarital affair and the incendiary egomania that accompanies secret passion: For all their utter ordinariness, Sean and Gina feel like the greatest lovers who've ever lived. (From Elle Magazine.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 11, 1962
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., Trinity College (Dublin); M.A., University of
East Anglia
• Awards—Awards—Rooney Prize, Irish Writing Award, Royal Society
of Authors Encore Prize, Booker Prize
• Currently—lives in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland
Anne Enright is a Booker Prize-winning Irish author. She has published essays, short stories, a non-fiction book and four novels. Before her novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, Enright had a low profile in Ireland and the United Kingdom, although her books were favourably reviewed and widely praised. Her writing explores themes such as family relationships, love and sex, Ireland's difficult past and its modern zeitgeist.
Enright won an international scholarship to Lester Pearson United World College of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, where she studied for an International Baccalaureate for two years. She received an English and philosophy degree from Trinity College Dublin. She began writing in earnest when her family gave her an electric typewriter for her 21st birthday. She won a scholarship to the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course, where she was taught by Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury and earned an M.A.
Enright was a television producer and director for RTE in Dublin for six years. She was a producer for the ground-breaking RTE programme Nighthawks for four years. She then worked in children's programming for two years and wrote at the weekends. The Portable Virgin, a collection of her short stories, was published in 1991. The Portable Virgin won the 1991 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Enright began writing full-time in 1993.
Enright's first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, was published in 1995. The book explores themes such as love, motherhood, Roman Catholicism, and sex. The narrator of the novel is Grace, who lives in Dublin and works for a tacky game show. Her father wears a wig that cannot be spoken of in front of him. An angel called Stephen who committed suicide in 1934 and has come back to earth to guide lost souls moves into Grace's home and she falls in love with him.
Enright's next novel, What Are You Like? (2000), is about twin girls called Marie and Maria who are separated at birth and raised apart from each other in Dublin and London. It looks at tensions and ironies between family members. It was short-listed in the novel category of the Whitbread Awards.
The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002) is a fictionalised account of the life of Eliza Lynch, an Irish woman who was the consort of Paraguayan president Francisco Solano López and became Paraguay's most powerful woman in the 19th century. Her book Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004) is a collection of candid and humorous essays about childbirth and motherhood. Enright's fourth novel, The Gathering, was published in 2007, and The Forgotten Waltz in 2011.
Enright's writings have appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, London Review of Books, Dublin Review, and the Irish Times. She was once a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, and now reviews for the Guardian and RTE. The 4 October 2007 issue of the London Review of Books published her essay, "Disliking the McCanns", about Kate and Gerry McCann, the British parents of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in suspicious circumstances while on holiday in Portugal in May 2007. The essay was criticized by some journalists.
Enright won the Davy Byrne's Irish Writing Award for 2004. She also won the Royal Society of Authors Encore Prize.On 16 October 2007 Enright was awarded the Man Booker Prize, which included a cash award of £50,000, for The Gathering.
Enright lives in Bray, County Wicklow. She is married to Martin Murphy, who is director of the Pavilion Theatre in Dun Laoghaire. They have two children. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The Forgotten Waltz is a nervy enterprise, an audacious bait-and-switch. Cloaked in a novel about a love affair is a ferocious indictment of the self-involved material girls our era has produced. Enright's channeling of Gina's interior monologue is so accurate and unsparing that reading her book is, at times, like eavesdropping on a very long, crazily intimate cellphone conversation. It's a testament to the unwavering fierceness of Enright's project that I mean this as high praise. We've all met people like the characters in her book. Neither evil nor good, they're merely awful in entirely ordinary ways. And it's impressive, how skillfully Anne Enright has gotten them on the page.
Francine Prose - New York Times Book Review
[S]o beautifully written that you could read it once just for the dazzle of the prose, then start over for the content…The sensibility is subtle and complex, as the narrative explores connections between desire and responsibility…and the complicated ways in which duty is refracted into the rest of our lives. It's about love, and sex, and the sinuous, unexpected paths they create, and the way they are inevitably entwined with family. It's about fear and obligation and passion and ways in which we explain our actions to ourselves. The way we give up something we thought essential, for something that is. It's hard to say which is more satisfying about this book: its emotional complexities or the frugal elegance of its prose.
Roxanna Robinson - Washington Post
A new, unapologetic kind of adultery novel. Narrated by the proverbial other woman—Gina Moynihan, a sharp, sexy, darkly funny thirtysomething IT worker—The Forgotten Waltz charts an extramarital affair from first encounter to arranged, settled, everyday domesticity.... This novel’s beauty lies in Enright’s spare, poetic, off-kilter prose—at once heartbreaking and subversively funny. It’s built of startling little surprises and one fresh sentence after another. Enright captures the heady eroticism of an extramarital affair and the incendiary egomania that accompanies secret passion: For all their utter ordinariness, Sean and Gina feel like the greatest lovers who've ever lived.
Elle
In this gorgeous critique of Ireland as the Celtic Tiger draws its dying breaths, Enright chronicles an affair between 32-year-old Gina Moynihan, and Seán Vallely, a rich, dutiful husband and a devoted if somewhat inept father to the otherworldly, epileptic Evie, not yet 13. Set against a backdrop of easy money, second homes, and gratuitous spending, the dissolution of Gina's and Sean's marriages is both an antidote to and a symptom of the economic prosperity that gripped the country until its sudden and devastating fall from grace in 2008: "In Ireland, if you leave the house and there is a divorce, then you lose the house.... You have to sleep there to keep your claim.... You think it is about sex, and then you remember the money." There are, as with any affair, casualties, but what weighs most heavily on Gina is not what will become of her husband, Conor, but rather Evie, who sees Gina kissing her father, and innocently asks if she might be kissed too, oblivious to the fact that this moment heralds the end of her family. She eventually becomes all too aware that her father is gone and that she's stuck with her sad, neurotic mother. And so the question that remains at the end of this masterful and deeply satisfying novel is not just what will happen to Ireland, but what will happen to Evie?
Publishers Weekly
She's a sharp-tongued home wrecker who doesn't try to ingratiate herself. But in this corrosively beautiful novel from Man Booker Prize winner Enright (The Gathering), you want to drag back Gina Moynihan as she recounts plunging headlong into the affair that will change her life. Gina met Seán Vallely at sister Fiona's house and first made love to him, without much preamble, while drunk at a business conference. Lectured by her sister, who proclaims that their just-deceased mother would have been mortified, Gina silently disagrees. Surely Mum would have appreciated this affair, which has liberated Gina from…what? The dread of domesticity with teddybearish but somewhat dense husband Conor? Boredom with a lock-step job in Ireland's grim economy? Writing with cool, clear-eyed logic, Enright is brave and persuasive enough to paint Seán as less than ideal; he's a rigid bully and not overwhelmingly attractive. Through Gina's determined pursuit of their relationship, we see the stupefying nature of desire, which Enright deftly contrasts with the sometimes equally stupefying nature of parenting; Gina's big competition is not Seán's wife but his sweet, not-quite-right daughter. Verdict: A breathtaking work that will surprise you; highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
(Starred review.) This stunning novel by a Booker Prize winner....offers up its brilliance by way of astonishingly effective storytelling.
Booklist
In rueful, witty, unpredictable and compassionate prose, Enright gives expression to subtle, affecting shades of human interaction.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How does Gina’s relationship with Sean evolve throughout the story? Is she ever truly in love with him? What does it say about Gina that she was "slightly repulsed" by Sean after they slept together for the first time?
2. In what ways does the book’s setting, that of early 2000s boom Ireland and the recession that followed, intertwine with Gina and Sean’s relationship? Is the setting a metaphor for their affair or is the affair a metaphor for Ireland?
3. Gina says that she was "properly in love" with Conor and that falling in love with him "was the right thing to do." Can you call what she had with Conor love? What does this say about love?
4. What role do Gina’s parents play throughout the novel? What do you think about her saying of her father, "it was the right parent who had died"? How does it relate to "the right thing to do" in the previous question about Conor?
5. How much agency does Gina have as a character? To what extent is she making her own decisions versus letting Sean and outside forces dictate her life?
6. At first it seems as though the story follows a chronological timeline. Then we discover that there are several time arcs. How does Enright move her characters backward and forward through time to better tell the story?
7. In what ways does Evie’s character evolve throughout the novel? Or is it Gina’s perception of her that changes? How does Evie’s development into a full-fledged human being force Gina to confront the effects of her affair?
8. There is a lot of unsold real estate at the end of the story, including Gina’s mother’s house, for which Gina and Fiona had high hopes. Trace the ways in which the characters’ aspirations for wealth and love are forced to contend with the reality of a broken housing market and a flawed lover. Do Gina and Fiona react in the same ways?
9. It becomes clear that Sean has had other affairs and that his unfaithfulness began well before Evie’s first episode. What does this say about Sean? How do both he and Gina use Evie’s sickness to account for Sean’s relationship problems with Aileen? Will Sean be faithful to Gina?
10. Enright makes distinctions between passion and love, between lust and passion. How do these different emotions come into play throughout Gina’s affair with Sean? What sentiments did she experience with Sean that she never experienced with Conor?
11. Is Gina truly happy with Sean? What is she searching for? Does she find it?
12. At one point Gina says, "I think we should own up to what we know. We should know why we do the things that we do." In what way is the novel Gina’s attempt to own up to and explain what she did?
13. Gina is constantly describing and noting what the children around her do, although she is not a mother. What makes her so interested in them? Why is she so negative about women who have children?
14. At the end of the story, Gina seems to have come to terms with her situation. Is it because she believes her affair was inevitable and that meeting Sean was destiny?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)
The Natural
Bernard Malamud, 1952
Macmillan : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
231 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374502003
Summary
The Natural, Bernard Malamud’s first novel, published in 1952, is also the first—and some would say still the best—novel ever written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material—the story of a superbly gifted “natural” at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era—and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work.
Decades later, Alfred Kazin’s comment still holds true: “Malamud has done something which—now that he has done it!—looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology.” (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 26, 1914
• Where—Brooklyn, New York (USA)
• Death—March 18, 1986
• Where—New York City, New York
• Education—B.A., City University of New York; M.A.,
Columbia University
• Awards—National Book Award (twice); Pulitizer Prize
Bernard Malamud was an author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in Tsarist Russia, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Biography
Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Max and Bertha (Fidelman) Malamud, Russian Jewish immigrants. A brother, Eugene, was born in 1917. Malamud entered adolescence at the start of the Great Depression. From 1928 to 1932, Bernard attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. During his youth, he saw many films and enjoyed relating their plots to his school friends. He was especially fond of Charlie Chaplin's comedies.
Malamud worked for a year at $4.50 a day as a teacher-in-training, before attending college on a government loan. He received his B.A. degree from City College of New York in 1936. In 1942, he obtained a Master's degree from Columbia University, writing a thesis on Thomas Hardy. He was excused from military service in World War II because he was the sole support of his widowed mother. He first worked for the Bureau of the Census in Washington D.C., then taught English in New York, mostly high school night classes for adults.
Starting in 1949, Malamud taught four sections of freshman composition each semester at Oregon State University (OSU), an experience fictionalized in his 1961 novel A New Life. Because he lacked the Ph.D., he was not allowed to teach literature courses, and for a number of years his rank was that of instructor. In those days, OSU, a land grant university, placed little emphasis on the teaching of humanities or the writing of fiction. While at OSU, he devoted 3 days out of every week to his writing, and gradually emerged as a major American author. In 1961, he left OSU to teach creative writing at Bennington College, a position he held until retirement. In 1967, he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 1942, Malamud met Ann De Chiara, an Italian-American Roman Catholic, and a 1939 Cornell University graduate. They married on November 6, 1945, despite the opposition of their respective parents. Ann typed his manuscripts and reviewed his writing. Ann and Bernard had two children, Paul (b. 1947) and Janna (b. 1952). Janna Malamud Smith is the author of a memoir about her father, titled My Father is a Book.
Malamud died in Manhattan in 1986, at the age of 71.
Writing career
Malamud wrote slowly and carefully; he was not especially prolific. He is the author of eight novels and 65 short stories, and his 1997 Collected Stories is 629 pages long. Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent in 1942 and 1945.
He completed his first novel in 1948, but later burned the manuscript. His first published novel was The Natural (1952), which has become one of his best remembered and most symbolic works. The story traces the life of Roy Hobbs, an unknown middle-aged baseball player who achieves legendary status with his stellar talent. The Natural also focuses upon a recurring writing technique that marked much of his work. This novel was made into a 1984 movie starring Robert Redford (described by the film writer David Thomson as "poor baseball and worse Malamud").
Malamud’s second novel, The Assistant (1957), set in New York and drawing on Malamud's own childhood, is an account of the life of Morris Bober, a Jewish immigrant who owns a grocery store in Brooklyn. Although he is struggling financially, Bober takes in a drifter of dubious character.
In 1967, his novel The Fixer, about anti-semitism in Tsarist Russia, won the both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other novels include Dubin's Lives, a powerful evocation of middle age which uses biography to recreate the narrative richness of its protagonists' lives, and The Tenants, an arguably meta-narrative on Malamud's own writing and creative struggles, which, set in New York, deals with racial issues and the emergence of black/African American literature in the American 1970s landscape.
Malamud is also renowned for his short stories, often oblique allegories set in a dreamlike urban ghetto of immigrant Jews. Of Malamud the short story writer, Flannery O'Connor wrote: "I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself." He published his first stories in 1943, "Benefit Performance" in Threshold and "The Place Is Different Now" in American Preface. In the early 1950s, his stories began appearing in Harper's Bazaar, Partisan Review, and Commentary.
Most of the stories in his first collection, like The Magic Barrel (1958), depict the search for hope and meaning within the bleak enclosures of poor urban settings. Much of Malamud’s fiction touches lightly upon mythic elements and explores themes like isolation, class, and the conflict between bourgeois and artistic values. His prose, like his settings, is an artful pastiche of Yiddish-English locutions, punctuated by sudden lyricism.
Writing in the second half of the twentieth century, Malamud was well aware of the social problems of his day: rootlessness, infidelity, abuse, divorce, and more. But he also depicted love as redemptive and sacrifice as uplifting. In his writings, success often depends on cooperation between antagonists.
Posthumous tributes
Philip Roth: "A man of stern morality," Malamud was driven by "the need to consider long and seriously every last demand of an overtaxed, overtaxing conscience torturously exacerbated by the pathos of human need unabated."
Saul Bellow's 1986 eulogy (in which he also quotes Anthony Burgess):
Well, we were here, first-generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us. Malamud in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York. He was a myth maker, a fabulist, a writer of exquisite parables.
The English novelist Anthony Burgess said of him that he "never forgets that he is an American Jew, and he is at his best when posing the situation of a Jew in urban American society." "A remarkably consistent writer," he goes on, "who has never produced a mediocre novel .... He is devoid of either conventional piety or sentimentality ... always profoundly convincing."
Let me add on my own behalf that the accent of hard-won and individual emotional truth is always heard in Malamud's words. He is a rich original of the first rank. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
An unusually fine novel...Malamud’s interests go far beyond baseball. What he has done is to contrive a sustained and elaborate allegory in which the ‘natural’ player, who operates with ease and the greatest skill without having been taught, is equated with the natural man who, left alone by, say, politicians and advertising agencies, might achieve real fulfillment.... Malamud has made a brilliant and unusual book.
New York Times
What gives the novel its liveliness is Malamud’s inspired mixture of everyday American vernacular (it’s reminiscent of Ring Lardner) with suggestions of the magical and the mythic. He tucked a lot into that mixture, [including] a sense of mystery—the kind that charms you and you don’t need explained. And he makes it all seem easy. The novel is in the pink—it’s fresh.
Pauline Kael - The New Yorker
[Malamud is] one of our greatest prose writers—and one of our keenest and most disturbing moralists.
Philadelphia Inquirer
A preposterously readable story about life.
Time
Malamud has done something which—now that he has done it!—looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology.
Alfred Kazin - Author and Critic
Discussion Questions
1. Why is The Natural is divided into two sections (“Pre-Game” and “Batter Up!”). What sets the two sections apart, and what has occurred between them?
2. What do we learn about Roy Hobbs in the book’s opening pages? What is he carrying in his bassoon case? What do learn about Hobbs’ past—his boyhood and background—over the course of the narrative? And what aspects of Hobbs remain mysterious throughout the book?
3. Why does Hobbs reject the locker-room lecture and accompanying hypnotism of Doc Knobb, the pop-psych guru who “pacifies” the New York Knights? How do the other Knights regard Doc Knobb? (p. 66)
4. When Hobbs replaces Bump Baily as the premier hitter for the Knights—if not in the entire league—some of his teammates start wondering (and, behind his back, talking) about “whether [Hobbs is] for the team or for himself.” (p. 85) Which is it, in your view? Is Hobbs ultimately playing for the Knights or himself? Or does his allegiance change over the course of the book? Defend your answers by citing key passages from throughout the text.
5. Some time after Bump’s accidental death while chasing a fly ball in the outfield, Memo tells Hobbs that Bump “made you think you had been waiting for a thing to happen for a long time and then he made it happen.” (p. 112) Could the same be said of Hobbs himself? If so, who might say it? And where else in the book do we see ballplayers rendered in a majestic, larger-than-life, or deity-like manner?
6. When Memo and Hobbs take a long night’s drive out to Long Island in his new Mercedes-Benz, Hobbs is at one point certain that they have hit a boy or his dog. He wants to turn back and investigate. Memo, who is driving, refuses. But later Hobbs thinks differently, as we read: “It did not appear that there ever was any kid in those woods, except in his mind.” (p. 123) Is this boy-and-his-dog image merely a figment of Hobbs’ imagination? Or is it real? Discuss.
7. What link(s) do you recognize in Hobbs’ disastrous hitting slump and his decision to visit Lola, the fortune teller in Jersey City? What does Lola predict for Hobbs? Is she accurate? Also, what other baseball-oriented superstitions are depicted in The Natural? How do such rites and practices get started? Why do they remain popular?
8. On his first and only date with Iris, Hobbs tells her a secret. What is it? What does Iris mean when she says, shortly thereafter, that people have “two lives” to live? (p. 152) Identify the “two lives” at the core of this narrative. Finally, why does Hobbs eventually dismiss his affection for Iris? Do you think his dismissal is fair, given Hobbs’ own age and background? Discuss.
9. When Hobbs eventually regains his hitting ability, winning games for the Knights anew and reviving their chances in the pennant race, we gain various insights into what Hobbs the slugger thinks and feels. We read, for example: “Sometimes as he watched the ball soar, it seemed to him all circles, and he was mystified at his devotion to hacking at it, for he had never really liked the sight of a circle. They got you nowhere but back to the place where you were to begin with.” (p. 163) Looking at our protagonist in a more personal or philosophical way, explain why Hobbs dislikes circles. Also, who or what causes him to start hitting again in the first place? (And if possible, talk about how and why this
happens.)
10. What is a “Rube Goldberg contraption”? (p. 170)
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Share your thoughts.
Sashenka
Simon Montefiore, 2008
Simon & Schuster
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416595557
Summary
Winter 1916: St. Petersburg, Russia, is on the brink of revolution. Outside the Smolny Institute for Noble Girls, an English governess is waiting for her young charge to be released from school. But so are the Tsar's secret police.
Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and their dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her part in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction.
Twenty years on, Sashenka is married to a powerful, rising Red leader with whom she has two children. Around her people are disappearing, while in the secret world of the elite her own family is safe. But she's about to embark on a forbidden love affair that will have devastating consequences.
Sashenka's story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin's private archives and uncovers a heartbreaking tale of betrayal and redemption, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism—and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1965
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Awards—British Book Award, Costa Book
Award, Bruno Kreisky Award, Prix de la
Biographie Politque (all for Young Stalin).
• Currently—lives in London, England
Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore is a British historian and writer.
Biography
Montefiore's father, a doctor, is descended from a famous line of wealthy Sephardic Jews who became diplomats and bankers all over Europe. At the start of the 19th century, by playing the markets based on intelligence about the Battle of Waterloo, Simon's great-great uncle, Sir Moses Montefiore, became a banking partner of N M Rothschild & Sons. By contrast, Simon’s mother, April, a novelist, comes from a Lithuanian Jewish family of poor scholars. Her parents fled the Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century. They bought tickets for New York City but were cheated and dropped off at Cork, Ireland. During the Limerick boycott of 1904 they left Ireland, despite offers of hospitality in Irish homes, and moved to Newcastle, England.
Simon was educated at Ludgrove School, Harrow, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read history. He went on to work as a banker and foreign affairs journalist.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children.
Writings
Montefiore’s books are world bestsellers, published in 33 languages. His first history book, Catherine the Great & Potemkin, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper, and Marsh Biography Prizes. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won History Book of the Year at the 2004 British Book Awards. Young Stalin won the LA Times Book Prize for Best Biography, the Costa Book Award, the Bruno Kreisky Award for Political Literature, the Prix de la Biographie Politique and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Miramax Films and Ruby Films have bought the rights and are currently developing a movie of Young Stalin.
He also wrote a novel, Sashenka (2008), and his latest history book is Jerusalem: the Biography, a fresh history of the Middle East. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Sashenka is an intriguing portrait of the people who brought down the czars and went on to serve the Soviet state during Stalinism…has some pleasures of the great Russian novels.
New York Times
Simon Montefiore's first novel, is a historical whodunit with the epic sweep of a Hollywood movie. The author of the bestselling biography Young Stalin, Montefiore is a natural storyteller who brings his encyclopedic knowledge of Russian history to life in language that glitters like the ice of St. Petersburg.... Here's hoping we get more spellbinding historical fiction from him.
Washington Post
Despite [some] overblown sex scenes and cartoonish dialogue...Sashenka is an intriguing portrait of the people who brought down the czars and went on to serve the Soviet state during Stalinism.... Much of the novel's interest is the result of the years of prodigious research that Montefiore, a British journalist and author of several widely praised books of nonfiction...has done in once-sealed Russian archives.
Denver Post
(Starred review.) Lauded historian Montefiore (Young Stalin) ventures successfully into fiction with the epic story of Sashenka Zeitlin, a privileged Russian Jew caught up in the romance of the Russian revolution and then destroyed by the Stalinist secret police. The novel's first section, set in 1916, describes how, under the tutelage of her Bolshevik uncle, Sashenka becomes a naive, idealistic revolutionary charmed by her role as a courier for the underground and rejecting her own bourgeois background. Skip forward to 1939, when Sashenka and her party apparatchik husband are at the zenith of success until Sashenka's affair with a disgraced writer leads to arrests and accusations; in vivid scenes of psychological and physical torture, Sashenka is forced to choose between her family, her lover and her cause. But as this section ends, many questions remain, and it is up to historian Katinka Vinsky in 1994 to find the answers to what really happened to Sashenka and her family. Montefiore's prose is unexciting, but the tale is thick and complex, and the characters' lives take on a palpable urgency against a wonderfully realized backdrop. Readers with an interest in Russian history will particularly delight in Sashenka's story.
Publishers Weekly
Despite [Sashenka's] unscathed Stalin’s purges of 1937 and 1938, the revolution’s need to devour its children eventually overtakes even true believers made especially vulnerable by indiscreet love affairs. In 1994 the Soviet Union has collapsed, but Sashenka’s legacy cannot so easily be put to rest. Montefiore’s command of Russian history makes the novel’s details especially vibrant. —Mark Knoblauch
Booklist
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)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Sashenka:
1. Why is Sashenka arrested at the age of 16...and why is she released?
2. Why does Sashenka disapprove of her mother, Ariadna?
3. What do you think of Sashenka's uncle Mendel? Is it right that he has the amount of influence over his niece that he has? Is she too young to become involved in such a dangerous undertaking?
4. Talk about the ambiguous position of the Jews during the revolution. What is the Pale of Settlement? In what capacity were some Jews tolerated by the Czar...and in what way were some Jews useful to the Bolsheviks?
5. How does Montefiore portray Stalin in this work? How are other Bolsheviks portrayed? Are they as multilayered or complex in their characterizations as Stalin? Or are they more one-dimensional? Overall, how would you describe the author's attitude toward the Bolsheviks?
5. Why does Sashenka risk all to have an affair?
6. Why does Sashenka's world begin to fall apart after the May Day party at her Dacha?
7. What do you think of Sashenka's husband Vanya's response to the knowledge of her affair?
8. A number of reviewers have singled out the sexual episodes in the book as over-the-top. What do you think? Do you agree with the critics...or do you think the scenes are necessary to further the plot?
9. Were you surprised by the twists and turns of plot? What about the identity of Katinka?
10. Did you come away from this novel having learned something about the history of Russia, especially the Soviet Union and the monstrous cruelty of Stalin's regime? Did you gain an understanding of why the Bolshevik revolution occurred? What inspired it...what driving forces were behind it?
11. Do you feel the novel's three different sections are equal in their ability to engage readers? Do they merge well into a unifying story?
Still Life (Inspector Gamache series, 1)
Louise Penny, 2006
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312948559
Summary
Winner, "New Blood" Dagger; Arthur Ellis; Barry; Anthony; and Dilys Awards.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal and yet a world away. Jane Neal, a long-time resident of Three Pines, has been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it’s a tragic hunting accident and nothing more but Gamache smells something foul this holiday season…and is soon certain that Jane died at the hands of someone much more sinister than a careless bowhunter.
With this award-winning first novel, Louise Penny introduces an engaging hero in Inspector Gamache, who commands his forces—and this series—with power, ingenuity, and charm. (From the publisher.)
See all our Reading Guides for Chief Inspector Gamache novels by Louise Penny.
Author Bio
• Birth—1958
• Where—Toronto, Canada
• Education—B.A, Ryerson University
• Awards—Agatha Award (4 times) "New Blood" Dagger Award;
Arthur Ellis Award; Barry Award, Anthony Award; Dilys Award.
• Currently—lives in Knowlton, Canada (outside of Montreal)
In her words
I live outside a small village south of Montreal, quite close to the American border. I'd like to tell you a little bit about myself. I was born in Toronto in 1958 and became a journalist and radio host with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, specializing in hard news and current affairs. My first job was in Toronto and then moved to Thunder Bay at the far tip of Lake Superior, in Ontario. It was a great place to learn the art and craft of radio and interviewing, and listening. That was the key. A good interviewer rarely speaks, she listens. Closely and carefully. I think the same is true of writers.
From Thunder Bay I moved to Winnipeg to produce documentaries and host the CBC afternoon show. It was a hugely creative time with amazingly creative people. But I decided I needed to host a morning show, and so accepted a job in Quebec City. The advantage of a morning show is that it has the largest audience, the disadvantage is having to rise at 4am.
But Quebec City offered other advantages that far outweighed the ungodly hour. It's staggeringly beautiful and almost totally French and I wanted to learn. Within weeks I'd called Quebecers "good pumpkins", ordered flaming mice in a restaurant, for dessert naturally, and asked a taxi driver to "take me to the war, please." He turned around and asked "Which war exactly, Madame?" Fortunately elegant and venerable Quebec City has a very tolerant and gentle nature and simply smiled at me.
From there the job took me to Montreal, where I ended my career on CBC Radio's noon programme.
In my mid-thirties the most remarkable thing happened. I fell in love with Michael, the head of hematology at the Montreal Children's Hospital. He'd go on to hold the first named chair in pediatric hematology in Canada, something I take full credit for, out of his hearing.
It's an amazing and blessed thing to find love later in life. It was my first marriage and his second. He'd lost his first wife to cancer a few years earlier and that had just about killed him. Sad and grieving we met and began a gentle and tentative courtship, both of us slightly fearful, but overcome with the rightness of it. And overcome with gratitude that this should happen to us and deeply grateful to the family and friends who supported us.
Fifteen years later we live in an old United Empire Loyalist brick home in the country, surrounded by maple woods and mountains and smelly dogs.
Since I was a child I've dreamed of writing and now I am. Beyond my wildest dreams (and I can dream pretty wild) the Chief Inspector Gamache books have found a world-wide audience, won awards and ended up on bestseller lists including the New York Times. Even more satisfying, I have found a group of friends in the writing community. Other authors, booksellers, readers—who have become important parts of our lives. I thought writing might provide me with an income—I had no idea the real riches were more precious but less substantial. Friendships.
There are times when I'm in tears writing. Not because I'm so moved by my own writing, but out of gratitude that I get to do this. In my life as a journalist I covered deaths and accidents and horrible events, as well as the quieter disasters of despair and poverty. Now, every morning I go to my office, put the coffee on, fire up the computer and visit my imaginary friends, Gamache and Beauvoir and Clara and Peter. What a privilege it is to write. I hope you enjoy reading the books as much as I enjoy writing them.
Chief Inspector Gamache was inspired by a number of people, and one main inspiration was this man holding a copy of En plein coeur. Jean Gamache, a tailor in Granby. He looks slightly as I picture Gamache, but mostly it was his courtesy and dignity and kind eyes that really caught my imagination. What a pleasure to be able to give him a copy of En plein coeur! (From the author's website with permission.)
Book Reviews
Like her neighbors in the picturesque Canadian village of Three Pines, the dear old thing had hidden depths, courtesy of an author whose deceptively simple style masks the complex patterns of a well-devised plot—rather like the subtle designs of Jane’s "primitive" pictures. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec, who is as bemused as we are by life in Three Pines, has the wit and insight to look well beyond its idyllic surface.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times
It’s hard to decide what provides the most pleasure in this enjoyable book: Gamache, a shrewd and kindly man constantly surprised by homicide; the village, which sounds at first like an ideal place to escape from civilization; or the clever and carefully constructed plot.
Chicago Tribune
(Starred review.) Canadian Penny's terrific first novel, which was the runner-up for the CWA's Debut Dagger Award in 2004, introduces Armand Gamache of the Sorete du Quebec. When the body of Jane Neal, a middle-aged artist, is found near a woodland trail used by deer hunters outside the village of Three Pines, it appears she's the victim of a hunting accident. Summoned to the scene, Gamache, an appealingly competent senior homicide investigator, soon determines that the woman was most likely murdered. Like a virtuoso, Penny plays a complex variation on the theme of the clue hidden in plain sight. She deftly uses the bilingual, bicultural aspect of Quebecois life as well as arcane aspects of archery and art to deepen her narrative. Memorable characters include Jane; Jane's shallow niece, Yolande; and a delightful gay couple, Olivier and Gabri. Filled with unexpected insights, this winning traditional mystery sets a solid foundation for future entries in the series.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) This is a real gem of a book that slowly draws the reader into a beautifully told, lyrically written story of love, life, friendship, and tragedy. And it's a pretty darn good mystery too. This belongs in the same league with such other outstanding Canadian mysteries as Eric Wright's Charlie Salter series. —Emily Melton
Booklist
Cerebral, wise and compassionate, Gamache is destined for stardom. Don’t miss this stellar debut.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. At the beginning of Still Life, we are told that “violent death still surprised” Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Why is that odd for a homicide detective, and how does it influence his work? What are his strengths and his weaknesses?
2. The village of Three Pines is not on any map, and when Gamache and Agent Nicole first arrive there, they see “the inevitable paradox. An old stone mill sat beside a pond, the mid morning sun warming its fieldstones. Around it the maples and birches and wild cherry trees held their fragile leaves, like thousands of happy hands waving to them on arrival. And police cars. The snakes in Eden.” Can you find other echoes of Paradise in Three Pines, and what role do snakes—real or metaphorical—play there?
3. There are three main couples in the book: Clara and Peter, Olivier and Gabri, and Gamache and Reine-Marie. How would you characterize each of these relationships?
4. Gamache says “I’ve never met anyone uniformly kind and good,” yet no one has anything bad to say about Jane—except regarding her art. What is your impression of that art? How do you understand the game Jane used to play with Yolande and the Queen of Hearts?
5. When the charred arrowhead is found in his home, it is said that Matthew Croft “had finally been hurt beyond poetry.” How does poetry help him and other characters in this novel? Does it ever have the power to hurt? What do you think of Timmer Hadley’s idea that “there’s something about Ruth Zardo, something bitter, that resents happiness in others, and needs to ruin it. That’s probably what makes her a great poet, she knows what it is to suffer.”
6. Consider Gamache’s advice to Nichol: “Life is choice. All day, everyday. Who we talk to, where we sit, what we say, how we say it.And our lives become defined by our choices. It’s as simple and as complex as that. And as powerful.” Similarly, Myrna stopped practicing psychology because she lost patience with people who lead “still” lives, “waiting for someone to save them….The fault lies with us, and only us. It’s not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it’s definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately it’s us and our choices.” How do their choices affect the principal characters in the novel? Do any of their choices remind you of ones you have made in your own life?
7. There’s a huge clue to the murder early in the book, when Jane gives Ben a meaningful look and then quotes from W. H. Auden: “Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.” Why is it so easy to overlook that clue at the time, and what impact does it have when it’s quoted again in the last chapter?
8. Who do you think Gamache has in mind when he tells Gabri and Olivier: “You’re not the types to do murder. I wish I could say the same for everyone here.”
9. Clara has “very specific tastes” in murder mysteries: “Most of them were British and all were of the village cozy variety.” Do you see Still Life as a typical “cozy”? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by publisher.)