The Daughter Novels What are all these daughter titles about? No idea, but that didn't stop us from finding 360 of them, if for no other reason than it seemed like a neat way to pass the time. |
Daughter Novels Aaes's Daughter Abel's Daughter - (Hutchinson) Abel's Daughter - (Maddux, series) Abortionist's Daughter Abram's Daughters Abuser's Daughter Activitist's Daughter Addiction's Daughter Admiral's Daughter Agitator's Daughter Alchemist's Daughter Ambassador's Daughter Angel's Daughter Aphrodite's Daughter Aphrodite's Daughters Artist's Daughter Astrologer's Daughter Baker's Daughter Cabalist's Daughter Daughter of Ancients Daughters of a Coral Dawn Dairyman's Daughter Eagle's Daughter Failure's Daughter Galileo's Daughter Hades' Daughter Inmate's Daughter Jacob's Daughter Keeper's Daughter |
Daughter Novels Liberty's Daughters Light-Bearer's Daughter Lincoln's Daughter Lord Lyttelton's Daughters Lord-Protector's Daughter Lot's Daughter Lucifer's Daughter Lydia's Daughter Magda's Daughter Mage's Daughter Mamba's Daughters Mapmaker's Daughter Martian General's Daughter Mayor's Daughter Memory Keeper's Daughter Methuselah's Daughter Midnight's Daughter Miller's Daughter Miner's Daughter Minister's Daughter - (Dixelius, 1926) Minister's Daughter - (Egbuna) Minister's Daughter - (Geelan, trilogy) Minister's Daughter - (Hearn) Minister's Daughter - (Ruheni) Minstrel's Daughter Mirel's Daughter Misfortune's Daughters Mistress's Daughter Moneylender's Daughter Montezuma's Daughter - (Haggard, 1896) Mortician's Daughter Mr. Darcy's Daughters Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters Murderer's Daughters Muscian's Daughter Narcissist's Daughter Packinghouse Daughter Quilter's Daughter Rabbi's Daughter Salvatore's Daughter Templar's Daughter Undertaker's Daugher, Isaac and the Vermeer's Daughter Warrior's Daughter - (Easley) |
The Crossing (The Border Trilogy #2)
Cormac McCarthy
Knopf Doubleday
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679760849
Summary
In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth.
In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning—a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there."
An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once. (From the publisher.)
About the Author
• Birth—July 20, 1933
• Where—Providence, Rhode Island, USA
• Education—University of Tennessee, US Air Force
• Awards— Ingram-Merrill Aware, 1959 and 1960; Faulkner
Prize, 1965; Traveling Fellowship from American Academy
of Arts and Letters, 1965; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1969;
MacArthur Fellowship, 1981; National Book Award, 1992;
National Book Critics Circle Award, 1992; James Tait Black
Memorial Prize UK, 2006; Pulitzer Prize, 2007 for The Road.
• Currently—lives in Tesuque, New Mexico (Santa Fe area)
Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy) is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, ranging from the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He has also written plays and screenplays.
He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He received a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for his 1992 novel, All the Pretty Horses.
His previous novel, Blood Meridian, (1985) was among Time Magazine's poll of the best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005 and he placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by the New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years.
Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. In 2010 the London Times ranked The Road no.1 on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner.
Early years
McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island on July 20, 1933, and moved with his family to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937. He is the third of six children, with three sisters and two brothers. In Knoxville, he attended Knoxville Catholic High School. His father was a successful lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority from 1934 to 1967.
McCarthy entered the University of Tennessee in 1951-1952 and was a liberal arts major. In 1953, he joined the United States Air Force for four years, two of which he spent in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show. In 1957, he returned to the University of Tennessee. During this time in college, he published two stories in a student paper and won awards from the Ingram Merrill Foundation in 1959 and 1960. In 1961, he and fellow university student Lee Holleman were married and had their son Cullen. He left school without earning a degree and moved with his family to Chicago where he wrote his first novel. He returned to Sevier County, Tennessee, and his marriage to Lee Holleman ended.
Writing
McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published by Random House in 1965. He decided to send the manuscript to Random House because "it was the only publisher [he] had heard of." At Random House, the manuscript found its way to Albert Erskine, who was William Faulkner's editor until Faulkner's death in 1962. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy for the next twenty years.
In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania, hoping to visit Ireland. While on the ship, he met Anne DeLisle, who was working on the ship as a singer. In 1966, they were married in England. Also in 1966, McCarthy received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark. Afterward he returned to America with his wife, and Outer Dark was published in 1968 to generally favorable reviews.
In 1969, McCarthy and his wife moved to Louisville, Tennessee, and purchased a barn, which McCarthy renovated, even doing the stonework himself. Here he wrote his next book, Child of God, based on actual events. Child of God was published in 1973. Like Outer Dark before it, Child of God was set in southern Appalachia. In 1976, McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas. In 1979, his novel Suttree, which he had been writing on and off for twenty years, was finally published.
Supporting himself with the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellowship, he wrote his next novel, Blood Meridian, which was published in 1985. The book has grown appreciably in stature in literary circles. In a 2006 poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century, Blood Meridian placed third, behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld.
McCarthy finally received widespread recognition in 1992 with the publication of All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was followed by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, completing a Western trilogy. In the midst of this trilogy came The Stonemason, McCarthy's second dramatic work. He had previously written a film for PBS in the 1970s, The Gardener's Son.
McCarthy's next book, 2005's No Country for Old Men, stayed with the western setting and themes, yet moved to a more contemporary period. It was adapted into a film of the same name by the Coen Brothers, winning four Academy Awards and more than 75 film awards globally. McCarthy's latest book, The Road, was published in 2006 and won international acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize for literature. A film adaptation starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee was released on November 25, 2009. Also in 2006, McCarthy published a play entitled The Sunset Limited.
Extras
• According to Wired magazine in December, 2009, McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter was put up for auction at Christie's. The Olivetti Lettera 32 has been in his care for 46 years, since 1963. He picked up the used machine for $50 from a pawn shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy reckons he has typed around five million words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of “blowing out the dust with a service station hose”. The typewriter was auctioned on Friday, December 4 and the auction house, Christie’s, estimated it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500. The Olivetti’s replacement for McCarthy to use is another Olivetti, bought by McCarthy’s friend John Miller for $11. The proceeds of the auction are to be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization.
• McCarthy now lives in the Tesuque, New Mexico, area, north of Santa Fe, with his wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. He guards his privacy. In one of his few interviews (with The New York Times), McCarthy reveals that he is not a fan of authors who do not "deal with issues of life and death," citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples. "I don't understand them," he said. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange." McCarthy remains active in the academic community of Santa Fe and spends much of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded by his friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
• Talk show host Oprah Winfrey chose McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road as the April 2007 selection for her Book Club. As a result, McCarthy agreed to his first television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5, 2007. The interview took place in the library of the Santa Fe Institute; McCarthy told Winfrey that he does not know any writers and much prefers the company of scientists.
• During the interview he related several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he has endured at times during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his now-eight-year-old son was the inspiration for The Road. Cormac noted to Oprah that he prefers "simple declarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but "never a semicolon." He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to "block the page up with weird little marks." (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Young Billy Parham, in a horse stall, dreams of his father's eyes, "those eyes that seemed to contemplate with a terrible equanimity the cold and the dark and the silence that moved upon him." Billy could as well be dreaming of McCarthy's prose and the unsparing tone of this, the second volume in the Border Trilogy. The Crossing , following the award-winning and bestselling All the Pretty Horses , is set in the American Southwest and in Mexico, and features, like its predecessor, teenage boys, their horses, a girl and the recurring spectacles of desert days and nights, awful wonders and appalling deprivations, and no small amount of roadside philosophizing. The story of Billy, his younger brother Boyd, the fates of their horses, a wolf, their parents and their dog, set against a vague and distant backdrop of the coming Second World War, throws little light upon a universe without much meaning, though it is in the nature of McCarthy characters to try to anyway. In the end, when the last dog is hanged, so to speak, what survives is the rhythm of McCarthy's open, ropey sentences circling a logic as inscrutable as an animal's or a god's. Although no mysteries are solved, and no comfort gained for these lonely characters, there is that language wrestling to earth all that it cannot know and all that it can. Readers again will be in awe of McCarthy's extraordinary prose attentions—the biblical cadences, the freshened vocabulary, the taut, vivid renderings of the struggle to live.
Publishers Weekly
Sixteen-year-old Billy Parham is obsessed with trapping a renegade wolf that has crossed the border from Mexico to raid his father's cattle ranch. By the time he finally succeeds, Billy has formed such a close bond with his prey that he decides to return the wolf to its home, and the two head off into the mountains. Billy returns months later to find that his parents have been murdered by horse thieves. He abducts his kid brother from a foster home, and they ride into Mexico to retrieve their property, encountering gypsies, desperadoes, and itinerant philosophers along the way. Essentially a boy's adventure story written for adults, The Crossing is thematically related to the award-winning bestseller All The Pretty Horses, but it is not a sequel. McCarthy's luminous prose style, spare as the desert landscapes it describes, is almost Beckett-like in its blend of deadpan humor and existential despair. An exceptionally vivid and rewarding novel. —Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Library Journal
Volume two of McCarthy's Border Trilogy—following the much- acclaimed National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses (1992)—treads familiar territory but probes deeper into the darkness of the human animal. Like its predecessor, The Crossing concerns a young American rancher living near the Mexican border in the 1930s, a time when the old West is grudgingly entering the modern world while Mexico is being torn apart by revolution. And like volume one's memorable hero, John Cole Grady, 16-year-old Billy Pawson is drawn south in a nearly mythical journey to find himself. Billy initially crosses into Mexico to take a wolf he had trapped on his New Mexico ranch back to the animal's native mountains. When he returns, he finds that his home has been plundered, and he and his 14-year-old brother set off for Mexico to find their family's stolen horses. Traveling through the lawless ruins of the post-revolutionary Mexican countryside, they encounter Gypsy wanderers, carnival actors, horse-traders, horse thieves, revolutionary soldiers, and men of various religions. All offer sage advice about the journey, and Billy's failure to heed their wisdom sometimes has horrifying results. Relentless, frequently brutal, and morbidly fatalistic, the novel expresses once again McCarthy's essentially bleak vision. Because he is one of America's foremost literary craftsmen, it is also passionate and compelling. The author convincingly elevates seemingly ordinary events into near-religious moments: "They smoked the way poor people eat which is a form of prayer." Written in McCarthy's trademark prose—clear, blunt, and often startlingly beautiful—The Crossing "tells the tale of that solitary man who is all men." Like the tales of Homer and Melville, his timeless work will resonate for ages.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
(A different set of questions—for the complete Border Trilogy—can be found at the end of the third novel, Cities of the Plain.)
1. What is the significance of the book's title?
2. Discuss the meaning of the observation: "The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before" [p. 278]. How are these words applicable to the novel's action?
3. Early in the book Boyd Parham is struck by the sight of his reflection in the eyes of an Indian who asks them for food. What he sees is not so much himself as a "cognate child... windowed away in another world where the red sun sank eternally" [p. 6]. What themes do this moment of mirroring and self-estrangement suggest?
4. How would you characterize Billy's relationship with Boyd? Why does he return to Mexico to find out what happened to his brother? What else is he looking for?
5. Who do you think murdered the Parhams? Why didn't Boyd try to escape when he had the chance?
6. The people in The Crossing are characterized by a kind of psychological opaqueness. Since we rarely know their direct thoughts, we must infer their motives from their words and actions, which often seem cryptic or irrational. How do we come to know these characters? What vision of human nature does their opaqueness suggest?
7. What role do animals play in this book? Why, for example, does Billy endure such great danger and hardship for the sake of a wolf? Do any of the characters he meets in Mexico share his feelings about animals?
8.The Crossing is a book of dreams and auguries. Early in the novel Boyd has a dream of people burning on a dry lake [p. 35]; Billy dreams he sees his father wandering lost in the desert and being swallowed by darkness [p. 112]. Later in his journey, Billy istaken in by Indians whose elder calls him "huerfano"--orphan [p. 134]—thus predicting the murder of his parents. What is the role of portents—both accurate and inaccurate—in this book?
9.The Crossing is an account of three journeys. The book is also divided into four sections. Why do you think McCarthy has divided The Crossing in this asymmetrical fashion? Does he employ a similar structure elsewhere in this book? Is its overall structure similar to that of All the Pretty Horses?
10. What role does hospitality play in this book? Is there any relation between the novel's scenes of hospitality and its moments of violence?
11. Is The Crossing a violent book? Why do you think the author has chosen to recount some of the worst instances of bloodshed (the slaughter of the opera company's mule, the blinding of the rebel soldier) secondhand? At a time when graphic and gratuitous descriptions of mayhem are standard in much popular fiction for purposes of mere shock and titillation, has McCarthy succeeded in restoring to violence its ancient qualities of pity and terror? How has he managed this?
12. What things does Billy lose in the course of this novel? Which of these losses is voluntary?
13. The Crossing is a book about human beings and their relationship with God and, in particular, about their attempt to decipher divine justice. McCarthy explores this theme with Dostoyevskian eloquence in Billy's conversations with the sexton of a ruined church [pp. 140-59] and a blind veteran of the Revolution [pp. 274-93]. What kind of God have these men come to understand? Is that God the same one that Billy and Boyd encounter?
14. In what ways does The Crossing resemble classic myths and fairy tales? How do Billy and Boyd Parham compare to the figures that Joseph Campbell describes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Attack
Yasmina Khadra, 2005 (Trans., by John Collin, 2006)
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307275707
Summary
Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Arab-Israeli citizen, is a surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. Dedicated to his work, respected and admired by his colleagues and community, he represents integration at its most successful.
He has learned to live with the violence and chaos that plague his city, and on the night of a deadly bombing in a local restaurant, he works tirelessly to help the shocked and shattered patients brought to the emergency room. But this night of turmoil and death takes a horrifyingly personal turn. His wife’s body is found among the dead, with massive injuries, the police coldly announce, typical of those found on the bodies of fundamentalist suicide bombers.
As evidence mounts that his wife, Sihem, was responsible for the catastrophic bombing, Dr. Jaafari is torn between cherished memories of their years together and the inescapable realization that the beautiful, intelligent, thoroughly modern woman he loved had a life far removed from the comfortable, assimilated existence they shared.
From the graphic, beautifully rendered description of the bombing that opens the novel to the searing conclusion, The Attack portrays the reality of terrorism and its incalculable spiritual costs. Intense and humane, devoid of political bias, hatred, and polemics, it probes deep inside the Muslim world and gives readers a profound understanding of what seems impossible to understand. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Mohammed Moulessehoul
• Birth—January 10, 1955
• Where—Kenadsa, Sahara, Algeria
• Education—Officer in Algerian Army
• Currently—Aix-en-Provence, France
Yasmina Khadra is the nom de plume of the Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul, who is the author of four other books published in English: Double Blanc, Morituri, In the Name of God and Wolf Dreams. He took the feminine pseudonym to avoid submitting his manuscripts for approval by military censors while he was still in the army. He lives in France. (From the publisher.)
Extras
From an interview with Barnes & Noble:
When asked about his favorite books, here is what he said:
•The Stranger by Albert Camus—for the calm power of its simplicity in translating the absurdity of the human condition.
•The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck—for its realism and the extraordinary handling of its characters. John Steinbeck is my favorite author.
•Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky—for its talent at revealing the pettiness of humans and their awful stupidity.
•The Days by Taha Hossein—for the lucidity of its story and for the beauty of its language.
•Sophie's Choice by William Styron—for the crudeness of its humanism and its implacable concern with reconstructing horror in its absolute cruelty, human cruelty.
•Regain by Jean Giono—for his poetry and the sobriety of his talent.
•The Quai of Flowers Doesn't Answer by Malek Haddad —for its beauty.
•Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy—for his genius.
•The Trial by Franz Kafka—for many reasons.
•The Swallows of Kabul—because I wrote it.
Book Reviews
By the end of The Attack, Israel's heavy firepower appears to have marginally eclipsed Palestinian suicide bombing in the ugly-weapon stakes for Khadra, but his achievement in this novel is neither his take on the local politics nor his moral finessing. Instead, it is the way that he limns, quite brilliantly, the character of a man torn to pieces by extremism and extreme social distress, neither of which has been of his own making.
Jonathan Wilson - Washington Post
Khadra, the pseudonym of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an exiled Algerian writer celebrated for his politically themed fiction (The Swallows of Kabul), turns his attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this moving novel unlikely to satisfy partisans on either side of the issue. Dr. Amin Jaafari is a man caught between two worlds; he's a Bedouin Arab surgeon struggling to integrate himself into Israeli society. The balancing act becomes impossible when the terrorist responsible for a suicide bombing that claims 20 lives, including many children, is identified as Jaafari's wife by the Israeli police. Jaafari's disbelief that his secular, loving spouse committed the atrocity is overcome when he receives a letter from her posthumously. In an effort to make sense of her decision, Jaafari plunges into the Palestinian territories to discover the forces that recruited her. Khadra, who nicely captures his hero's turmoil in trying to come to terms with the endless violence, closes on an appropriately grim note.
Publishers Weekly
Khadra (The Swallows of Kabul) has the ability to convey that damning sense of unrelenting anxiety that may indeed be the object of terrorism. His latest novel concerns Dr. Amin Jaafari, an esteemed surgeon of Arab-Bedouin descent who has worked against the odds to become a relatively well-appointed citizen of Tel Aviv. In an instant, the doctor's life is turned inside-out by a suicide-bomb attack near the hospital where he practices. The very worst of it comes when he learns that his beloved wife, who perished in the attack, is believed to have been the one who actually carried out the bombing. Incensed by this accusation, Amin rejects the idea that their idyllic marriage may not have been all that it seemed. His relentless search for the truth leads him back to a place from his past, and the story comes full circle. This could prove to be a book of some importance owing to its fine technique and relevance to current world affairs. Yasmina Khadra is a pseudonym for Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former officer in the Algerian army who lives in France. Recommended for all fiction collections. —Susanne Wells, P.L. of Cincinnati and Hamilton Cty.
Library Journal
Within relatively few pages, The Attack tells us so much about the complex realities of life in modern Israel. The narrator is a much-honored surgeon in Tel Aviv, Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Arab-Israeli. As Amin works on the victims of a suicide attack, saving lives, his friend, a Jewish policeman, tells him his wife was also in the attack. Amin is horrified by his wife's death, and stunned to learn the police believe it was she who was the suicide bomber. What unfolds is Amin's determination to find out if indeed his wife was the bomber, and then to learn why she did this outrageous act. Amin had believed their marriage was happy, that their comfortable life in Israel, their assimilation in Israeli society, was a success. What follows is a tense few weeks as Amin follows every tiny lead that might bring him to the truth. He is doing this as he is lost in grief and irrational rage. His once-friendly neighbors have trashed his home and threatened him, since he is the husband of a terrorist. So, with his life completely upturned, he uses his intelligence and family ties to discover the truth about his wife, about her decision, about the condition of the Palestinian community, including Amin's own relatives. You may recognize the author because of his book The Swallows of Kabul. He is a former Algerian army officer, now living in France, and seems to be an ideal interpreter of the life of an Arab living an assimilated life in a Western country. The Attack is suspenseful and insightful. —Claire Rosser
KLIATT
"How could she?" That's the question haunting an eminent Arab Israeli surgeon, whose wife has become the latest suicide bomber. Khadra (pseudonym of a retired Algerian army officer) moves from Algeria (Wolf Dreams, 2003) and Afghanistan (The Swallows of Kabul, 2004) to Israel/Palestine. A huge explosion kills 19 people, 11 of them schoolchildren, in a fast-food restaurant in Tel Aviv. Amin Jaafari operates on the injured before returning to his beautiful home, under the illusion that his wife Sihem is visiting her grandmother's farm. Then he gets a call to identify her body in the morgue and is interrogated by the cops for three days before being cleared. Amin is still in denial; after all, they were a close, loving couple, they were not practicing Muslims, and most of their friends were Jews. Only when he finds a note from her implying her guilt does he accept the truth. He is attacked by a mob outside his home and is given shelter by a fellow doctor and old flame, Kim Yehuda. Desperately confused and angry, Amin drives to Bethlehem; that is where Sihem had mailed her note. He exposes himself to danger by forcing a meeting with the radical imam, but gets nowhere; Kim sympathetically points out that he needs a shrink more than a sheikh. But Amin feels betrayed, doubly so when he suspects, on flimsy evidence, that Sihem was having an affair with his nephew Adel, whom he tracks down in Jenin after scary encounters with Intifada leaders. Yes, says Adel, Sihem had been part of an Intifada cell; no, they were never lovers. Khadra keeps the story moving at a good clip, but there's a flaw at its center; how could Amin's intimate marriage have contained such a devastating secret? Sihem is a shadowy figure, and her freelance self-destruction, opposed by her cell, is unconvincing. Amin's question is never satisfyingly answered. The action is always convincing, the relationships less so.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What was your reaction to the novel’s powerful opening scene? How did your perception of this scene shift as the narrator’s life later unfolded for you?
2. What were your initial perceptions of Amin and Sihem’s marriage? Whom did you trust during the interrogation in chapter four?
3. Why does Kim remain so supportive of Amin? In what way is her friendship different from Navid’s? Why are they more patient with him than most of their colleagues are?
4. Discuss the very concept of an attack, which forms the novel’s title. What is the nature of the attacks that take place in the book, including not only the terrorist explosions but also the beating Amin receives when he tries to return to home. What emotional and psychological attacks take place? What motivates the novel’s numerous attackers?
5. How were you affected by the structure of the novel, including the author’s use of present tense, the first-person narration, and the way the timeline unfolds? What makes fiction itself a useful form in examining horrific realities?
6. Revisit the passages that emphasize two of the novel’s elderly characters: Kim’s grandfather, Old Yehuda, who in chapter six recalls Hitler’s rise; and in chapter sixteen, Omr, Amin’s great-uncle, who recalls the destruction of family orchards to make way for an Israeli colony. What do Yehuda and Omr reveal about the history of violence, not only in the Middle East but throughout humanity?
7. At the end of chapter seven, Amin tells Kim he has no idea why he did not tell Navid about the letter. In your opinion, why did he keep the receipt of Sihem’s letter asecret?
8. In the novel’s latter chapters, Amin believes his wife was having a romantic affair with Adel. What parallels exist between her actual liaisons with him and the infidelities usually associated with adultery? Was Sihem seduced?
9. In chapter nine, Amin’s taxi driver lauds a militant imam and plays one of his recordings. What elements of persuasion did you detect in the imam’s diatribe? What similar tactics are used by religious and political leaders in other circumstances around the world?
10. In chapter eleven, the imam at the Grand Mosque tells Amin, “The margin between assimilation and disintegration is quite narrow. There’s not much room for maneuver.” Do you agree? Is assimilation a dangerous goal? Knowing what you do about Amin’s upbringing, is it surprising that he was an advocate for assimilation? Does assimilation require a secular society?
11. What is Amin’s goal in investigating the truth about Sihem himself, and confronting those who assisted her, rather than letting the Israeli authorities handle it? In the end, has he achieved his quest?
12. Adel and the militants Amin encounters emphasize their anger about being humiliated, saying emotional and cultural destruction are just as devastating as physical destruction. What do these observations imply about solutions for peace? What did you learn from the novel—not only about daily life in the Middle East but also about the prospects for peace?
13. The author is a retired army officer from Algeria, a former French colony. After he won a small French literary prize for a collection of short stories, his writing came to the attention of Algerian army officials and he was forced to submit future works to army censors. Thus, he created a female pseudonym to avoid censorship. He now lives in France and has since revealed his true name, Mohammed Moulessehoul. In what way did his life prepare him to write The Attack? Would your impressions of the novel have been different had you thought the author was female?
14. Compare The Attack to the author’s previous novel, The Swallows of Kabul, which is set in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s rule. In what ways do these novels complement each other? How do the dynamics of marriage play out in each of these books?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Space Between Us
Thrity Umrigar, 2006
HarperCollins
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060791568
Summary
Each morning, Bhima, a domestic servant in contemporary Bombay, leaves her own small shanty in the slums to tend to another woman's house. In Sera Dubash's home, Bhima scrubs the floors of a house in which she remains an outsider. She cleans furniture she is not permitted to sit on. She washes glasses from which she is not allowed to drink.
Yet despite being separated from each other by blood and class, she and Sera find themselves bound by gender and shared life experiences.
Sera is an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife whose opulent surroundings hide the shame and disappointment of her abusive marriage. A widow, she devotes herself to her family, spending much of her time caring for her pregnant daughter, Dinaz, a kindhearted, educated professional, and her charming and successful son-in-law, Viraf.
Bhima, a stoic illiterate hardened by a life of despair and loss, has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years. Cursed by fate, she sacrifices all for her beautiful, headstrong granddaughter, Maya, a university student whose education—paid for by Sera—will enable them to escape the slums.
But when an unwed Maya becomes pregnant by a man whose identity she refuses to reveal, Bhima's dreams of a better life for her granddaughter, as well as for herself, may be shattered forever.
Poignant and compelling, evocative and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world.
Set in modern-day India and witnessed through two compelling and achingly real women, the novel shows how the lives of the rich and the poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and vividly captureshow the bonds of womanhood are pitted against the divisions of class and culture. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Where—Mumbai, India
• Education—B.A., Bombay, University; M.A., Ohio State
University; Ph.D., Kent State University
• Awards—Neiman Fellowship to Harvard
• Currently—lives in Cleveland, Ohio, USA
A journalist for seventeen years, Thrity Umrigar has written for the Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and other national newspapers, and contributes regularly to the Boston Globe's book pages. She teaches creative writing and literature at Case Western Reserve University.
The author of The Space Between Us; Bombay Time, the memoir First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood, and The Weight of Heaven, she was a winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University. She has a Ph.D. in English and lives in Cleveland, Ohio. (From the publisher.)
Learn more about Umrigar from an interview on author's website.
Book Reviews
Umrigar is a perceptive and often piercing writer, although her prose occasionally tips into flamboyant overstatement....[H]er portrait of Sera as a woman unable to "transcend her middle-class skin" feels bracingly honest. But Umrigar never makes a similar imaginative leap with Bhima. The housekeeper seems exaggeratedly ignorant and too good-hearted to be true.Yet this novel does allow for one moment when Sera and Bhima close up the space between them. In a flashback, Bhima sees the results of a savage beating the young Sera has received from her husband and...gently rubs medicinal oil over her mistress's bruises. At first, Sera recoils from Bhima's touch, then tearfully submits. It's a powerful scene, with an uncomfortable echo of the age-old way the social classes have come together: furtively, in silence, in the dark.
Ligaya Mishan - New York Times Book Review
Against terrible odds, Bhima must find the strength and the will to keep going. The tragedy is that there is so little to hope for. Which brings us to the implicit, pivotal question raised at the beginning and end of the book: Why survive at all in the face of continuous despair? The life of the privileged is harshly measured against the life of the powerless, but empathy and compassion are evoked by both strong women, each of whom is forced to make a separate choice. Umrigar is a skilled storyteller, and her memorable characters will live on for a long time.
Frances Itani - Washington Post
Umrigar's schematic novel (after Bombay Time) illustrates the intimacy, and the irreconcilable class divide, between two women in contemporary Bombay. Bhima, a 65-year-old slum dweller, has worked for Sera Dubash, a younger upper-middle-class Parsi woman, for years: cooking, cleaning and tending Sera after the beatings she endures from her abusive husband, Feroz. Sera, in turn, nurses Bhima back to health from typhoid fever and sends her granddaughter Maya to college. Sera recognizes their affinity: "They were alike in many ways, Bhima and she. Despite the different trajectories of their lives—circumstances...dictated by the accidents of their births—they had both known the pain of watching the bloom fade from their marriages." But Sera's affection for her servant wars with ingrained prejudice against lower castes. The younger generation—Maya; Sera's daughter, Dinaz, and son-in-law, Viraf—are also caged by the same strictures despite efforts to throw them off. In a final plot twist, class allegiance combined with gender inequality challenges personal connection, and Bhima may pay a bitter price for her loyalty to her employers. At times, Umrigar's writing achieves clarity, but a narrative that unfolds in retrospect saps the book's momentum.
Publishers Weekly
Journalist Umrigar (Bombay Time) evocatively describes daily life in two very different households in modern-day Bombay, where the traditions that separate the classes and the sexes still persist. The relationship between Sera Dubash, an upper-class Parsi housewife, and Bhima, her servant, is full of contradictions. They talk over cups of tea like girlfriends, but Bhima must squat on the floor using her own cup, while Sera sits on a chair. Bhima is loyal to Sera, but sometimes has to talk herself through minor humiliations and slights from her employer by reminding herself how generous this woman has always been to her. While money and class keep these two from fully bridging the gap between them, they remain closer than either of them can fully see, for as women, they suffer equally the abuse of men, the loss of love, and the joys and sorrows of motherhood. Umrigar beautifully and movingly wends her way through the complexities and subtleties of these unequal but caring relationships. Recommended for all fiction collections. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal
Set in contemporary Bombay, Umrigar's second novel (Bombay Time, 2001) is an affecting portrait of a woman and her maid, whose lives, despite class disparity, are equally heartbreaking. Though Bhima has worked for the Dubash family for decades and is coyly referred to as "one of the family," she nonetheless is forbidden from sitting on the furniture and must use her own utensils while eating. For years, Sera blamed these humiliating boundaries on her husband Feroz, but now that he's dead and she's lady of the house, the two women still share afternoon tea and sympathy with Sera perched on a chair and Bhima squatting before her. Bhima is grateful for Sera, for the steady employment, for what she deems friendship and, mostly, for the patronage Sera shows Bhima's granddaughter Maya. Orphaned as a child when her parents died of AIDS, Bhima raised Maya and Sera saw to her education. Now in college, Maya's future is like a miracle to the illiterate Bhima—her degree will take them out of the oppressive Bombay slums, guaranteeing Maya a life away from servitude. But in a cruel mirror of Sera's happiness—her only child Dinaz is expecting her first baby—Bhima finds that Maya is pregnant, has quit school and won't name the child's father. As the situation builds to a crisis point, both women reflect on the sorrows of their lives. While Bhima was born into a life of poverty and insurmountable obstacles, Sera's privileged upbringing didn't save her from a husband who beat her and a mother-in-law who tormented her. And while Bhima's marriage begins blissfully, an industrial accident leaves her husband maimed and an alcoholic. He finally deserts her, but not before he bankrupts the family and kidnaps their son. Though Bhima and Sera believe they are mutually devoted, soon decades of confidences are thrown up against the far older rules of the class game. A subtle, elegant analysis of class and power. Umrigar transcends the specifics of two Bombay women and creates a novel that quietly roars against tyranny.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. At the end of The Space Between Us, Sera has a tough choice to make. Can you envision a scenario where she could've made a different choice? What would it have taken for her to have made a different choice? And what would be the consequences of that choice?
2. The novel deals with a relationship that, despite all the good will in the world, is ultimately based on the exploitation of one human being by another. Has this novel caused you to look at any situations in your own life where you may be benefiting from the labor or poverty of another?
3. Remarking on the fact that Bhima is not allowed to sit on the furniture in Sera Dubash's home, or drink from the same glass, it could be said that the novel is about a kind of "Indian Apartheid." Do you think that's putting it too strongly? If not, can you identify any parallels in contemporary America?
4. The novel tracks the lives of two women. Trace some of the ways in which their lives resemble each other's. What are the points of departure?
5. Neither Sera nor Bhima end up with happy, successful marriages. Why? Trace the factors that cause each marriage to fail. And for all its failings, which woman has the better marriage?
6. Sera's mother-in-law, Banu, makes life miserable for the young Sera. Is Banu the kind of mother-in-law that many American women can identify with? Examine the ways in which she is or isn't the typical in-law.
7. The Afghani balloonwalla is a minor but pivotal character in the novel. What is his role? What does he symbolize or represent?
The novel is told from the points of view of the two women, Bhima and Sera. Should it have included more points of view? For instance, should Viraf have had his own "voice"?
8. How do you read the ending of the book? Is it a hopeful ending? Do you think the ending is justified, given what awaits Bhima the next day?
9. What is your opinion about Sera, especially given the choice she makes in the end. Is she a sympathetic character? Or is she part of the problem?
10. This is a novel about the intersection of class and gender. Can you think of ways in which gender bonds the two women and ways in which class divides them?
11. Is Gopal justified in being furious at Bhima for having signed the contract that the accountant puts before her during the cab ride to the hospital? Would the family's fate have been different if she hadn't signed that paper?
12. Two characters who help Bhima—Hyder, the boy in the hospital and the Afghani balloon seller, both happen to be Muslims. Why? What does the novel say about the issues of religious and communal divisions in India?
13. What does this novel say about the importance of education? Think of some examples where the lack of education hurts a character and conversely, instances of where having an education benefits someone.
14. In some ways, the city of Bombay is a character in the novel. What are your impressions of Bombay after having read this novel? Does the author portray the city with affection or disdain?
15. What societal changes and/or personal choices would need to be different in order for us to envision the possibility of someone like Bhima having a better life?
16. The author has said that although the plot of The Space Between Us is a work of fiction, the character of Bhima is based on a woman who used to work in her home when the writer was a teenager. Is there any person in your own life who has inspired you enough to want to write a book about them? What is it about that person that had a deep impact on you?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)
Solar
Ian McEwan, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307739537
Summary
Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and compulsive overeater) whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and halfheartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. Meanwhile, Michael’s fifth marriage is floundering due to his incessant womanizing.
When his professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Michael to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and save the world from environmental disaster. But can a man who has made a mess of his life clean up the messes of humanity?
A complex novel that brilliantly traces the arc of one man’s ambitions and self-deception, Solar is a startling, witty, and stylish new work—Ian McEwan at his finest. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 21, 1948
• Where—Aldershot, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Sussex; M.A. University of East Anglia
• Awards—(see blow)
• Currently—lives in Oxford, England
Ian Russell McEwan is an English novelist. He was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, the son of David McEwan and Rose Lilian Violet (nee Moore). His father was a working class Scotsman who had worked his way up through the army to the rank of major. As a result, McEwan spent much of his childhood in East Asia (including Singapore), Germany and North Africa (including Libya), where his father was posted. His family returned to England when he was twelve.
McEwan was educated at Woolverstone Hall School; the University of Sussex, receiving his degree in English literature in 1970; and the University of East Anglia, where he was one of the first graduates of Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson's pioneering creative writing course.
Career
McEwan's first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976. He achieved notoriety in 1979 when the BBC suspended production of his play Solid Geometry because of its alleged obscenity. His second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets, was published in 1978.
The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his two earliest novels, both of which were adapted into films. The nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed "Ian Macabre." These were followed by The Child in Time (1987), winner of the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award; The Innocent (1990); and Black Dogs (1992). McEwan has also written two children's books, Rose Blanche (1985) and The Daydreamer (1994). His 1997 novel, Enduring Love, about the relationship between a science writer and a stalker, was popular with critics and adapted into a film in 2004.
In 1998, he won the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam. His next novel, Atonement (2001), received considerable acclaim; Time magazine named it the best novel of 2002, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2007, the critically acclaimed movie Atonement, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, was released in cinemas worldwide. His next work, Saturday (2005), follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon. Saturday won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2005, and his novel On Chesil Beach (2007) was shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize.
McEwan has also written a number of produced screenplays, a stage play, children's fiction, an oratorio and a libretto titled For You with music composed by Michael Berkeley.
In 2008 at the Hay Festival, McEwan gave a surprise reading of his then novel-in-progress, eventually published as Solar (2010). The novel includes a scientist hoping to save the planet from the threat of climate change and got its inspiration from a 2005 Cape Farewell expedition. McEwan along with fellow artists and scientists spent several weeks aboard a ship near the north pole.
McEwan's twelfth novel, Sweet Tooth (2012), is historical in nature and set in the 1970. In an interview with the Scotsman newspaper, McEwan revealed that the impetus for writing the novel was a way for him to write a "disguised autobiography." McEwan's 13th novel, The Children Act (2014), is about a high court judge.
Controversy
In 2006 McEwan was accused of plagiarism, specifically a passage in Atonement that closely echoed one from a 2012 memoir, No Time for Romance, by Lucilla Andrews. McEwan acknowledged using the book as a source for his work; in fact, he had included a brief note at the end of the book referring to Andrews's autobiography, among several other works. Writing in the Guardian in November 2006, a month after Andrews' death, McEwan professed innocence of plagiarism while acknowledging his debt to the author.
The incident recalled critical controversy over his debut novel The Cement Garden, key plot elements that closely mirrored some of those in Our Mother's House, a 1963 novel by Julian Gloag, which had also been made into a film. McEwan denied charges of plagiarism, claiming he was unaware of the earlier work.
In 2011 McEwan caused controversy when he accepted the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. In the face of pressure from groups and individuals opposed to the Israeli government, specifically British Writers in Support of Palestine (BWISP), McEwan wrote a letter to the Guardian in which he said...
There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics, and for me the emblem in this respect is Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra—surely a beam of hope in a dark landscape, though denigrated by the Israeli religious right and Hamas. If BWISP is against this particular project, then clearly we have nothing more to say to each other.
He announced that he would donate the ten thousand dollar prize money to Combatants for Peace, an organization that brings together Israeli ex-soldiers and Palestinian ex-fighters.
Recognition
McEwan has been nominated for the Man Booker prize six times to date, winning the Prize for Amsterdam in 1998. His other nominations were for The Comfort of Strangers (1981, Shortlisted), Black Dogs (1992, Shortlisted), Atonement (2001, Shortlisted), Saturday (2005, Longlisted), and On Chesil Beach (2007, Shortlisted). McEwan also received nominations for the Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and 2007.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He is also a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association. He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2005, he was the first recipient of Dickinson College's Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholar and Writers Program Award, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, U.S. In 2008, McEwan received an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College, London, where he used to teach English literature. In 2008, The Times (of London) featured him on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Personal
McEwan has been married twice. His 13-year marriage to spiritual healer and therapist Penny Allen ended in 1995 and was followed by a bitter custody battle over their two sons. His second wife, Annalena McAfee, was formerly the editor of the Guardian's Review section.
In 2002, McEwan discovered that he had a brother who had been given up for adoption during World War II when his mother was married to a different man. After her first husband was killed in combat, McEwan's mother married her lover, and Ian was born a few years later. The brothers are in regular contact, and McEwan has written a foreword to Sharp's memoir. (Excerpted and adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/4/2014.)
Book Reviews
Vivacious and sprawling, a beautifully and compellingly written novel.... [His] achievement is the brilliant creation of a flawed, larger than life character who all but walks off the page to shake your hand.
Times (London)
Despite the book's somber, scientific backdrop (and global warming here is little but that), Solar is Mr. McEwan's funniest novel yet—a novel that in tone and affect often reads more like something by Zoe Heller or David Lodge.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
McEwan writes sentences of such witty elegance that the loss of John Updike seems a little easier to bear.... [He] comes to this [climate change] debate with considerable sophistication.
Washington Post
Artistically ambitious [and] seriously entertaining... In Solar [McEwan has] elegantly discovered a terrible truth: that comedy is the only possible way to deal with the searing specter stalking the planet.
Wall Street Journal
Deft... McEwan’s background research is so seamlessly displayed that scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technoloy might wonder if he’s nicked their notes. But where Solar really succeeds—beyond the dark comedy—is the author’s ability to reveal the nature of the climate conundrum in the very human life of his protagonist.
Time
Beard is a fascinatingly repulsive protagonist, but he can't sustain a novel broken.... The scientific material is absorbing, but the interpersonal portions are much less so—troublesome, since McEwan seems to prefer the latter—making for an inconsistent novel that one finishes feeling unpleasantly glacial.
Publishers Weekly
[The] writing is beautiful and precise but [the] plot is encumbered by the details of Beard's self-absorbed, narcissistic life. Recommended only for inclusive collections, to satisfy demand for British fiction, and where McEwan does well. —Sandy Glover, Camas P.L., WA
Library Journal
While most critics on either side of the pond praised the author's intelligent plot (especially his command of science) and ample storytelling gifts, the majority agreed that Solar is not his best novel to date.
Bookmarks Magazine
Customarily, McEwan’s novels spring from a catastrophic incident in someone’s life, either a calamity that causes physical distress or a psychological trespass that causes emotional instability.... In his new novel, McEwan outdoes himself in terms of catastrophic occurrences.... [R]readers are taxed to even care about these crises. This draggy novel stands in stark contrast to its many beautiful predecessors.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Beard loves physics in part because he believes that it is “free of human taint” (p. 10). In what ways does the novel complicate this belief? In what sense is Beard’s own work “tainted” by human entanglements?
2. The narrative structure of Solar is mostly chronological. What effects does McEwan achieve by occasionally departing from a straightforward chronological progression?
3. Beard claims he does not believe in the possibility of “profound inner change” (p. 77). Does he remain unchanged over the course of the novel?
4. How does McEwan manage to make Beard such a sympathetic character despite his many foibles? What are his most salient character flaws?
5. Why is Beard so attached to preserving what he calls his “unshareable core”? (p. 307). Why does he find it impossible to tell Melissa that he loves her? Why do his marriages keep falling apart?
6. In what ways is Solar a satirical novel? What are its main satirical targets? How, for example, do postmodernists come off in the book?
7. What are some of the funniest moments in Solar? How does McEwan create such brilliant comedic effects?
8. Look at the encounters between art and science in the novel, those occasions when Beard squares off with people from the humanities—novelists, folklorists, postmodern feminists, etc. Who gets the better of these confrontations? Is the book as a whole making a point through its depiction of these encounters?
9. What is the significance of the entropy in the boot room on board the ship that is holding the conference on climate change? What does this chaos and carelessness suggest about humanity’s ability to stop global warming?
10. Beard has a remarkably clear conscience; he is largely untroubled by his affairs and deceits, his theft of Aldous’s ideas, his framing of Tarpin, etc. Why is he so free of the guilt that might afflict most other men?
11. Several times during the course of the novel it appears that public infamy—born of journalists’ insatiable desire for controversy and Beard’s own willingness to step into it—will doom Beard’s career. What enables him to emerge from these disasters relatively unscathed? Will he be as lucky getting out of the mess he’s created at the very end of the book? 12. How surprising is the ending of the novel, particularly the final sentence? What is the swelling sensation that Beard feels in his heart as his daughter approaches him? What is likely to happen to Beard next?
13. How does the appendix containing the presentation speech for Beard’s Nobel Prize alter the way Beard is finally viewed? Why would McEwan choose to attach this appendix to the body of the novel?
14. Solar is in many ways a picaresque and at times farcical novel, and yet it also engages a theme of major importance—global warming. What is the connection between personal and planetary catastrophe in the novel, between the meltdown of Beard’s personal and professional life and the kind of greed, dishonesty, rationalization, and failure to face facts that has resulted in the climate crisis? What is the significance, in this context, of Beard’s inability to moderate his eating habits and his sexual pursuits?
15. What does Solar contribute to our understanding of climate change?
(Questions issued by publisher.)