Towelhead
Alicia Erian, 2005
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743285124
Summary
It is August, 1990. Saddam Hussein has just invaded Kuwait, and Jasira's mother has bought her daughter a one-way ticket to Texas to live with her strict Lebanese father. Living in a neat model home in Charming Gates, just outside Houston, Jasira struggles with her father's rigid lifestyle and the racism of her classmates, who call her "towelhead."
For the first time, the painful truth hits her: she's an Arab. Her aching loneliness and growing frustration with her parents' conflicting rules drive her to rebel in very dangerous ways. Most disturbingly, she becomes sexually obsessed with the bigoted army reservist next door, who alternately cares for, excites, and exploits her. (From the publisher.)
Towelhead became a 2007 film titled Nothing is Private.
Author Bio
• Birth—1967
• Where—Syracuse, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York, Binghamton;
M.F.A., Vermont College
• Currently—lives in Massachusetts
Alicia Erian is an American author born in Syracuse, New York, to an Egyptian father and American mother. She received a B.A. in English from SUNY Binghamton and a M.F.A. in writing from Vermont College.
A writer of short stories, some of her work has appeared in Zoetrope, Playboy, and the Iowa Review. She has published one collection of short stories; Towelhead is her first novel.
Erian lived in Brooklyn, New York, for a time with ex-husband David Franklin, but now lives in Massachusetts, where she taught creative writing at Wellesley College (2004–2008). She has worked as a film director and screenwriter, and has also attracted interest from Julia Roberts' production company, American Girl Films, as well as Francis Ford Coppola.
Erian's first published work was a collection of short stories titled, The Brutal Language of Love, published in 2001. Each story features a female protagonist and are heartbreaking tales of love and sex, and dilemmas caused by the intertwining of the two.
Alicia Erian's 2005 novel, Towelhead is a coming of age story about a thirteen-year-old girl named Jasira, who is sent from her Euro-American mother's home in Syracuse, New York to live with her Lebanese father in Houston, Texas. The novel has been adapted into a film written and directed by Alan Ball, starring Summer Bishil, Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette, Maria Bello, and Peter Macdissi.
In 2008, Alicia Erian wrote the screenplay for the short film "Hammer and Anvil," which was developed at the Sundance Institute's 2008 January Screenwriters Lab. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Towelhead is the kind of book that attaches unusual reflectiveness to that particular echo of war. Jasira is old enough to know that women sometimes have sex with departing soldiers because these men may never return. But she's too young to know whether, since Mr. Vuoso will not have a combat assignment, he ought to qualify. Ms. Erian gives this gutsy book its full share of such unthinkable questions.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Erain's gift for conjuring characters is so strong; she has a sophisticated take on people and charts with real precision how and why the human comedy becomes seriously unfunny.
Jeff Giles - New York Times Book Review
War, statutory rape, child abuse, and racism are hardly the stuff of comedy, but in Towelhead, Alicia Erain succeeds in blending this weird and sometimes shocking mix of elements in a funny, poignant, and utterly readable first novel.
Susan Coil - Washington Post
Erian takes a dogged, unflinching look at what happens as a young woman's sexuality blooms when only a predatory neighbor is paying attention. After 13-year-old Jasira is sent to live with her father in Houston ("I didn't want to live with Daddy. He had a weird accent and came from Lebanon"), she finds herself coming of age in the shadow of his old world, authoritarian ideas, which include a ban on tampons (they're for married women, he insists) and a friendship with a boy who's black. Trapped between her father's rigidity and a wider culture that seems without rules, Jasira is left to handle puberty on her own, as well as her budding sexual desire and an ongoing longing for love and acceptance. Her creepy neighbor, Mr. Vuoso, senses her desires, and she responds eagerly to his sexual overtures. His willingness to eroticize her is heightened by how exotic—as well as distasteful—he finds her, a half–Middle Eastern child living in America on the eve of the first Gulf War. He hires Jasira to baby-sit for his son, and it's clear that their relationship will destroy them. The writing is not subtle—indeed, it can be quite clunky—but as a meditation on race, adolescence and alienation, the novel has moments of power.
Publishers Weekly
Sent to the United States by her mother when Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, Jasira must cope with her strict father and the realization that she is an Arab. This full-length debut from a gifted story writer is an in-house favorite.
Library Journal
Jasira's narration is so relentlessly focused on her sexuality and the horrifying abuse she suffers that it becomes hard to read. The historical context—the novel is set before and during the first Gulf War—may be intended as parable, but Jasira's pain consumes the novel so fully that it overwhelms political symbolism. Instead, it is Jasira's straightforward, understated voice that gives power to this.
Booklist
A tedious, fairly moronic take on the pubescent hormone surge, told by a 13-year-old girl. Jasira, prosaically named after Jasir Arafat by her now-divorced Lebanese father and Irish mother, can't help attracting men, with her 34-inch "boobs," so-called by her sexually jealous mother, who sends her to live with her "cheap and bossy" father. But it's even worse in Houston, where Daddy works for NASA and lives in a housing complex with a pool she won't use because of the abundant pubic hair she's embarrassed about, and where Mr. Vuoso, the father of the neighbor boy she baby-sits, gives her a Playboy magazine (she practices masturbation) and comes on to her. Her own father, Rifat, being an old-style Arab, "doesn't like bodies," is horrified by Jasira's incipient womanhood, and forbids her to use tampons or to befriend a black boy from school, Thomas, who genuinely wants to have sex with her. Added tension simmers between Mr. Vuoso, who's a rabidly patriotic military reservist ("towelheads" is his epithet), and Rifat, who bitterly resents the American war machine aimed at the Arabs. The story consists largely of unedited and utterly uninteresting dialogue that goes on and on to demonstrate how Jasira, who seems to have no will of her own, thinks (slowly). Given the meanness around her—from her petty but envious mother; her irascible father, who's prone to strike her; and the manipulative and insulting Mr. Vuoso, her seething crush across the street—she receives little guidance as a sexual creature. Not even the cool and pregnant neighbor Melina, who senses the crisis and gives Jasira the progressive primer Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, is able to protect Jasira from herself—that is, from the explosive sexuality that's entangling her and everyone around her in a kind of gruesome physicality. Storyteller Erian creates a hypnotic effect through her characters' repetitive dumbness—in a first novel that's annoying and memorable.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why does Jasira's mother send her to live with her father? Does her mother feel threatened by Jasira's budding sexuality? Do you think this is common between mothers and daughters? Why does her mother stay with her boyfriend after she finds out about his inappropriate behavior with Jasira?
2. Discuss the ways Jasira's life with her father changes from living with her mother. Is Jasira's father's corporeal punishment appropriate for a 13-year-old? Is corporeal punishment appropriate for children of any age? How much of Jasira's father's punishment style is due to cultural differences? At what point does her father's physical punishment cross over into abuse?
4. As Towelhead unfolds, the Gulf War begins. The characters hold a wide range of opinions about the war. Compare Jasira's father, Mr. Vuoso, and Melina's views about U.S. involvement in the Gulf War. Are the children's opinions (Jasira, Thomas, Zack, and Denise) about the war revealed? How did the people around you react to U.S. involvement in the Gulf War? Was it different from their opinions about the more recent U.S. involvement in war in the Mideast? If yes, how?
5. How does Jasira handle the racism she experiences at school, from her neighbor Zack, and her father and mother when she dates an African-American? Should she have handled it any differently? Compare how she and her boyfriend Thomas react to racism. Why or why not are you surprised by Jasira's father's racism toward Thomas, given that he has experienced racism too? What are the best ways to handle overt (i.e., name-calling) and covert (i.e., nasty looks or aversive behavior)racism? Do you think racism against Arab-Americans will continue to increase?
6. Jasira allows her mother's boyfriend Barry and her neighbor Mr. Vuoso to touch her sexually. She does not seem to think that these grown men's sexual advances are inappropriate. Why do you think this is? What do we know about Jasira's emotional health before and after she moves to Texas?
7. Jasira and Thomas are both 13 years old. Do you think their level of sexual knowledge and activity is "normal" in the United States? How should parents or authority figures handle the subject of teenage sex?
8. Even in the best of circumstances, every parent makes mistakes with their children. Are Jasira's parents "good" parents? Why or why not?
9. Mr. Vuoso gives Jasira a Playboy magazine when he discovers her looking at it. What does this gift reveal about him? Mr. Vuoso has a large collection of Playboy magazines. Do you think his taste for pornography made him prone to rationalizing his behavior with Jasira? Or did he understand what he was doing? Was Mr. Vuoso a child molester, a rapist, or neither? Was his punishment appropriate for what he did?
10. Jasira becomes aroused while looking at the naked women in Playboy. Does this indicate that she may be a lesbian or bisexual? Why or why not?
11. How does Jasira's father's discovery of the Playboy in her room change Jasira's life? What would her life have been like had he not discovered the Playboy?
12. What role does Melina play in Jasira's life? Jasira doesn't feel happy about Melina's pregnancy, and in fact, resents the forthcoming new baby. Why does she feel this way? How does she feel about the baby at the end of the book?
13. Toward the end of Towelhead, Jasira's father and Melina become friends, albeit wary ones. What causes them to bond? Will their friendship last?
14. Though Towelhead primarily focuses on the personal lives of its characters, it also reveals the political climate of 1991. Discuss some of the specific behaviors (i.e., the proliferation of American flags) and feelings about the Mideast that have changed in the United States since then.
(Questions issued by publsher.)
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Life Is Short But Wide
J. California Cooper, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400075690
Summary
Beloved writer J. California Cooper has won a legion of loyal fans and much critical acclaim for her powerful storytelling gifts. In language both spare and direct yet wondrously lyrical, Life Is Short But Wide is an irresistible story of family that proves no matter who you are or what you do, you are never too old to chase your dreams.
Like the small towns J. California Cooper has so vividly portrayed in her previous novels and story collections, Wideland, Oklahoma, is home to ordinary Americans struggling to raise families, eke out a living, and fulfill their dreams. In the early twentieth century, Irene and Val fall in love in Wideland. While carving out a home for themselves, they also allow neighbors Bertha and Joseph to build a house and live on their land. The next generation brings two girls for Irene and Val, and a daughter for Bertha and Joseph. As the families cope with the hardships that come with changing times and fortunes, and people are born and pass away, the characters learn the importance of living one’s life boldly and squeezing out every possible moment of joy.
Cooper brilliantly captures the cadences of the South and draws a picture of American life at once down-to-earth and heartwarming in this—as her wise narrator will tell you— "strange, sad, kind’a beautiful, life story." It is a story about love that leads to the ultimate realization that whoever you are, and whatever you do, life is short, but it is also wide. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
J. California Cooper is the author of four novels, including, most recently, Some People, Some Other Place, and six collections of stories. She was honored as Black Playwright of the Year, and has received the American Book Award, the James Baldwin Writing Award, and the Literary Lion Award from the American Library Association. She lives in Portland, Oregon (From the publisher.)
More
J. California Cooper first found acclaim as a playwright. The author of seventeen plays, she was named Black Playwright of the Year in 1978.
It was through her work in the theater that she caught the attention of acclaimed poet and novelist Alice Walker. Encouraged by Walker to turn her popular storytelling skills to fiction, Cooper wrote her first collection of short stories, A Piece of Mine, in 1984. Called "rich in wisdom and insight" and "a book that's worth reading," A Piece of Mine introduced Cooper's trademark style: her intimate and energetic narration, sympathetic yet sometimes troubled characters, and the profound moral messages that underlie seemingly simple stories.
Two more story collections followed on the heels of A Piece of Mine. In 1986 came Homemade Love, winner of an American Book Award, and, in 1987, Some Soul to Keep. (Author bio from thhe African American Literature Book Club.)
Book Reviews
Gutsy and familiar.... [Cooper’s] power comes from sticking to her instinct, which is to tell a story, plain and simple.
Washington Post
Exuberant.... Cooper’s stories reveal a meticulous attention to the nuances of African-American life.
San Francisco Chronicle
What a voice.... Cooper celebrates family, freedom, perseverance, life, and…powerful voices finally heard.
Atlanta Journal Constitution
Cooper brilliantly captures the cadences of the South and draws a picture of American life at once down-to-earth and heartwarming in this—as her wise narrator will tell you—“strange, sad, kind’a beautiful, life story.” It is a story about love that leads to the ultimate realization that whoever you are, and whatever you do, life is short, but it is also wide.
African American Literature Book Club (aalbc.com)
With another multigenerational, wonderfully crafted Midwest ensemble cast, Cooper (Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns) presents the town of Wideland, Okla., through the eyes of folksy nonagenarian Hattie B. Brown. This community sentinel, though sometimes short on memory, acts as tour guide and historian, introducing the town at the beginning of the 20th century, when the railroad first arrived and, with it, a growing population. Among the new residents, Hattie introduces the industrious, loving African-American cowboy Val Strong and his Cherokee "brother-friend" Wings; Val's hardened but beautiful wife, Irene Lowell; and their two strong-willed daughters, Rose and Tante. Following the Strong family and their associates through the better part of the 1900s, Hattie finds history running roughshod through their lives, crushing some and strengthening others, introducing new generations and obstacles to love, home and happiness. Cooper's characteristic motherly wit carries an appealing raft of characters through a world tougher than it is tender, but touched with beauty and wisdom.
Publishers Weekly
Reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston's groundbreaking 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, this story chronicles the lives of impoverished blacks in the town of Wideland, OK, from the early 20th to the 21st century, as told by the town gossip, Hattie Brown. Narrated with gentle wit and humor, the book explores the importance of love, religion, redemption, and family. Cooper allows the characters to speak in the African American Southern dialect, a technique that lends veracity and texture to their personalities. The pace of the plot is like a slow-burning fire: there's time for rumination, but readers won't be bored. Some, however, may be irritated by frequent references to the Bible and the Christian overtones throughout.
Orville Lloyd Douglas - Library Journal
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 Life Is Short But Wide:
1. Talk about the hardships encountered by the two couples: Val and Irene, and Bertha and Joseph.
2. How do the the two sisters, Tante and Rose, differ? Which sister do you most admire?
3. Why does Cooper choose 91-year-old Hattie to narrate the story? What does she bring to the narrative?
4. How does Herman Tenderman's return complicate the events of the story?
5. Which characters in this multi-generational saga do you sympathize with most...and least?
6. What is the significance of the novel's title?
7. Ultimately, what lessons in life do characters learn? What are the messages that Cooper works to convey in her novel?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Life of Pi
Yann Martel, 2002
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
348 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780156030205
Summary
Winner of the 2002 Man Booker Award
Life of Pi is a masterful and utterly original novel that is at once the story of a young castaway who faces immeasurable hardships on the high seas, and a meditation on religion, faith, art and life that is as witty as it is profound. Using the threads of all of our best stories, Yann Martel has woven a glorious spiritual adventure that makes us question what it means to be alive, and to believe.
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Growing up in Pondicherry, India, Piscine Molitor Patel—known as Pi—has a rich life. Bookish by nature, young Pi acquires a broad knowledge of not only the great religious texts but of all literature, and has a great curiosity about how the world works. His family runs the local zoo, and he spends many of his days among goats, hippos, swans, and bears, developing his own theories about the nature of animals and how human nature conforms to it. Pi’s family life is quite happy, even though his brother picks on him and his parents aren’t quite sure how to accept his decision to simultaneously embrace and practise three religions—Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam.
But despite the lush and nurturing variety of Pi’s world, there are broad political changes afoot in India, and when Pi is sixteen his parents decide that the family needs to escape to a better life. Choosing to move to Canada, they close the zoo, pack their belongings, and board a Japanese cargo ship called the Tsimtsum. Travelling with them are many of their animals, bound for zoos in North America. However, they have only just begun their journey when the ship sinks, taking the dreams of the Patel family down with it. Only Pi survives, cast adrift in a lifeboat with the unlikeliest oftravelling companions: a zebra, an orang-utan, a hyena, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
Thus begins Pi Patel’s epic, 227-day voyage across the Pacific, and the powerful story of faith and survival at the heart of Life of Pi. Worn and scared, oscillating between hope and despair, Pi is witness to the playing out of the food chain, quite aware of his new position within it. When only the tiger is left of the seafaring menagerie, Pi realizes that his survival depends on his ability to assert his own will, and sets upon a grand and ordered scheme to keep from being Richard Parker’s next meal.
As the days pass, Pi fights both boredom and terror by throwing himself into the practical details of surviving on the open sea—catching fish, collecting rain water, protecting himself from the sun—all the while ensuring that the tiger is also kept alive, and knows that Pi is the key to his survival. The castaways face gruelling pain in their brushes with starvation, illness, and the storms that lash the small boat, but there is also the solace of beauty: the rainbow hues of a dorado’s death-throes, the peaceful eye of a looming whale, the shimmering blues of the ocean’s swells. Hope is fleeting, however, and despite adapting his religious practices to his daily routine, Pi feels the constant, pressing weight of despair. It is during the most hopeless and gruelling days of his voyage that Pi whittles to the core of his beliefs, casts off his own assumptions, and faces his underlying terrors head-on.
As Yann Martel has said in one interview, “The theme of this novel can be summarized in three lines. Life is a story. You can choose your story. And a story with an imaginative overlay is the better story.” And for Martel, the greatest imaginative overlay is religion. “God is a shorthand for anything that is beyond the material—any greater pattern of meaning.” In Life of Pi, the question of stories, and of what stories to believe, is front and centre from the beginning, when the author tells us how he was led to Pi Patel and to this novel: in an Indian coffee house, a gentleman told him, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” And as this novel comes to its brilliant conclusion, Pi shows us that the story with the imaginative overlay is also the story that contains the most truth. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 25, 1963
• Where—Salamanca, Spain
• Education—B.A., Trent University, Ontario
• Awards—Booker Prize, 2002; Hugh MacLennan Prize,
Quebec Writers’ Federation
• Currently—Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963 of peripatetic Canadian parents. He grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario and Mexico, and has continued travelling as an adult, spending time in Iran, Turkey and India. Martel refers to his travels as, “seeing the same play on a whole lot of different stages.”
After studying philosophy at Trent University and while doing various odd jobs—tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard—he began to write. In addition to Life of Pi, Martel is the prize-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a collection of short stories, and of Self, a novel, both published internationally. Yann has been living from his writing since the age of 27. He divides his time between yoga, writing and volunteering in a palliative care unit. Yann Martel lives in Montreal.
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Sometime in the early 1990s, Yann Martel stumbled across a critique in the New York Times Review of Books by John Updike that captured his curiosity. Although Updike's response to Moacyr Scliar's Max and the Cats was fairly icy and indifferent, the premise immediately intrigued Martel. According to Martel, Max and the Cats was, "as far as I can remember...about a zoo in Berlin run by a Jewish family. The year is 1933 and, not surprisingly, business is bad. The family decides to emigrate to Brazil. Alas, the ship sinks and one lone Jew ends up in a lifeboat with a black panther." Whether or not the story was as uninspiring as Updike had indicated in his review, Martel was both fascinated by this premise and frustrated that he had not come up with it himself.
Ironically, Martel's account of the plot of Max and the Cats wasn't completely accurate. In fact, in Scliar's novel, Max Schmidt did not belong to a family of zookeepers—he was the son of furrier. Furthermore, he did not emigrate from Berlin to Brazil with his family as the result of a failing zoo, but was forced to flee Hamburg after his lover's husband sells him out to the Nazi secret police. So, this plot that so enthralled Martel—which he did not pursue for several years because he assumed Moacyr Scliar had already tackled it—was more his own than he had thought.
Meanwhile, Martel managed to write and publish two books: a collection of short stories titled The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios in 1993 and a novel about gender confusion called Self in 1996. Both books sold only moderately well, further frustrating the writer. In an effort to collect his thoughts and refresh his creativity, he took a trip to India, first spending time in bustling Bombay. However, the overcrowded city only furthered Martel's feelings of alienation and dissolution. He then decided to move on to Matheran, a section near Bombay but without that city's dense population. In this peaceful hill station overlooking the city, Martel began revisiting an idea he had not considered in some time, the premise he had unwittingly created when reading Updike's review in the New York Times Review of Books. He developed the idea even further away from Max and the Cats. While Scliar's novel was an extended holocaust allegory, Martel envisioned his story as a witty, whimsical, and mysterious meditation on zoology and theology. Unlike Max Schmidt, Pi Patel would, indeed, be the son of a zookeeper. Martel would, however, retain the shipwrecked-with-beasts theme from Max and the Cats. During an ocean exodus from India to Canada, the ship sinks and Pi finds himself stranded on a lifeboat with such unlikely shipmates as a zebra, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
The resulting novel, Life of Pi, became the smash-hit for which Martel had been longing. Selling well over a million copies and receiving the accolades of Book Magazine, Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal, and, yes, the New York Times Review of Books, Life of Pi has been published in over 40 countries and territories, in over 30 languages. It is currently in production by Fox Studios with a script by master-of-whimsy Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children; Amélie) and directorial duties to be handled by Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban).
Martel is now working on his third novel, a bizarrely allegorical adventure about a donkey and a monkey that travel through a fantastical world...on a shirt. Well, at least no one will ever accuse him of borrowing that premise from any other writer.
Extras
From a 2002 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Life of Pi is not Yann Martel's first work to be adapted for the screen. His short story "Manners of Dying" was made into a motion picture by fellow Canadian resident Jeremy Peter Allen in 2004.
• When he isn't penning modern masterpieces, Martel spends much of his time volunteering in a palliative care unit.
• When asked what book was most influential to his career as a writer, here's what he said:
I would say Le Petit Chose, by the French writer Alphonse Daudet. It was the first book to make me cry. I was around ten years old. It made me see how powerful words could be, how much we could see and feel through mere black jottings on a page. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Yann Martel is a superb storyteller, and he has fashioned a fable: a metaphysical exploration into our relationship with the cosmos and the divine.
A LitLovers LitPick (May '07)
Pi is Martel's triumph. He is understated and ironic, utterly believable and pure. The whole fantastic voyage carries hints of The Old Man and The Sea. The playfulness adds another layer to an already strong story.
Globe and Mail
If Canadian writer Yann Martel were a preacher, he'd be charismatic, funny and convert all the non-believers. He baits his readers with serious themes and trawls them through a sea of questions and confusion, but he makes one laugh so much, and at times feel so awed and chilled, that even thrashing around in bewilderment or disagreement one can't help but be captured by his prose.
Charlotte Innes - The Nation
An impassioned defense of zoos, a death-defying trans-Pacific sea adventure à la "Kon-Tiki," and a hilarious shaggy-dog story starring a four-hundred-and-fifty-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker: this audacious novel manages to be all of these as it tells the improbable survivor's tale of Pi Patel, a young Indian fellow named for a swimming pool (his full first name is Piscine) who endures seven months in a lifeboat with only a hungry, outsized feline for company. This breezily aphoristic, unapologetically twee saga of man and cat is a convincing hands-on, how-to guide for dealing with what Pi calls, with typically understated brio, "major lifeboat pests."
The New Yorker
There are echoes in his work of Latin American magic realism (reminiscent of García Márquez and Borges) and touches of absurdist mind games. A cross-cultural feast, the book ranges from India to North America; it's also packed with curious disquisitions on philosophy, zoology, linguistics and God. But in the end, it's the story you'll remember, the kind of twist-and-turns spellbinder that's almost impossible to forget.
Book Magazine
A fabulous romp through an imagination by turns ecstatic, cunning, despairing and resilient, this novel is an impressive achievement "a story that will make you believe in God," as one character says. The peripatetic Pi (n the much-taunted Piscine) Patel spends a beguiling boyhood in Pondicherry, India, as the son of a zookeeper. Growing up beside the wild beasts, Pi gathers an encyclopedic knowledge of the animal world. His curious mind also makes the leap from his native Hinduism to Christianity and Islam, all three of which he practices with joyous abandon. In his 16th year, Pi sets sail with his family and some of their menagerie to start a new life in Canada. Halfway to Midway Island, the ship sinks into the Pacific, leaving Pi stranded on a life raft with a hyena, an orangutan, an injured zebra and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After the beast dispatches the others, Pi is left to survive for 227 days with his large feline companion on the 26-foot-long raft, using all his knowledge, wits and faith to keep himself alive. The scenes flow together effortlessly, and the sharp observations of the young narrator keep the tale brisk and engaging. Martel's potentially unbelievable plot line soon demolishes the reader's defenses, cleverly set up by events of young Pi's life that almost naturally lead to his biggest ordeal. This richly patterned work, Martel's second novel, won Canada's 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. In it, Martel displays the clever voice and tremendous storytelling skills of an emerging master.
Publishers Weekly
Named for a swimming pool in Paris the Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel begins this extraordinary tale as a teenager in India, where his father is a zoo keeper. Deciding to immigrate to Canada, his father sells off most of the zoo animals, electing to bring a few along with the family on their voyage to their new home. But after only a few days out at sea, their rickety vessel encounters a storm. After crew members toss Pi overboard into one of the lifeboats, the ship capsizes. Not long after, to his horror, Pi is joined by Richard Parker, an acquaintance who manages to hoist himself onto the lifeboat from the roiling sea. You would think anyone in Pi's dire straits would welcome the company, but Richard Parker happens to be a 450-pound Bengal tiger. It is hard to imagine a fate more desperate than Pi's: "I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging about me." At first Pi plots to kill Richard Parker. Then he becomes convinced that the tiger's survival is absolutely essential to his own. In this harrowing yet inspiring tale, Martel demonstrates skills so well honed that the story appears to tell itself without drawing attention to the writing. This second novel by the Spanish-born, award-winning author of Self, who now lives in Canada, is highly recommended for all fiction as well as animal and adventure collections. — Edward Cone, New York
Library Journal
A fable about the consolatory and strengthening powers of religion flounders about somewhere inside this unconventional coming-of-age tale, which was shortlisted for Canada's Governor General's Award. The story is told in retrospect by Piscine Molitor Patel (named for a swimming pool, thereafter fortuitously nicknamed "Pi"), years after he was shipwrecked when his parents, who owned a zoo in India, were attempting to emigrate, with their menagerie, to Canada. During 227 days at sea spent in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger (mostly with the latter, which had efficiently slaughtered its fellow beasts), Pi found serenity and courage in his faith: a frequently reiterated amalgam of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian beliefs. The story of his later life, education, and mission rounds out, but does not improve upon, the alternately suspenseful and whimsical account of Pi's ordeal at sea—which offers the best reason for reading this otherwise preachy and somewhat redundant story of his Life.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In his introductory note Yann Martel says, "This book was born as I was hungry." What sort of emotional nourishment might Life of Pi have fed to its author?
2. Pondicherry is described as an anomaly, the former capital of what was once French India. Do you think the town made a significant difference in Pi's upbringing?
3. In the Author's Note, Mr. Adirubasamy boldly claims that this story "will make you belive in God," and the author, after researching and writing the story, agrees. Did Pi's tale alter your beliefs about God?
4. Chapters 21 and 22 are very short, yet the author has said that they are at the core of the novel. Can you see how?
5. Early in the novel, we discover that Pi majored in religious studies and zoology, with particular interests in a sixteenth-century Kabbalist and the admirable three-toed sloth. In subsequent chapters, he explains the ways in which religions and zoos are both steeped in illusion. Discuss some of the other ways in which these two fields find unlikely compatibility.
6. In the Author's Note, Martel wonders whether fiction is "the selective transforming of reality, the twisting of it to bring out its essence." If this is so, what is the essence of Pi and of his story?
7. There is a lot of storytelling in this religious novel. Is there a relationship between religion and storytelling?Is religion a form of storytelling? Is there a theological dimension to storytelling?
8. Pi's full name, Piscine Molitor Patel, was inspired by a Parisian swimming pool that "the gods would have delighted to swim in." The shortened form refers to the ratio of a circle's circumference divided by its diameter, the number 3.1415926..., a number that goes on forever without discernable pattern, what in mathematics is called an irrational number. Explore the significance of Pi's unusual name.
9. One reviewer said the novel contains hints of The Old Man and the Sea, and Pi himself measures his experience in relation to history's most famous castaways. How does Life of Pi compare to other maritime novels and films?
10. How might the novel's flavor have been changed if the sole surviving animal had been the zebra with the broken leg? Or Orange Juice? Or the hyena? Would Pi have survived with a harmless animal or an ugly animal, say a sheep or a turkey? Which animal would you like to find yourself with on a lifeboat?
11. In chapter 23, Pi sparks a lively debate when all three of his spiritual advisors try to claim him. At the heart of this confrontation is Pi's insistence that he cannot accept an exclusively Hindu, Christian, or Muslim faith; he can only be content with all three. What is Pi seeking that can solely be attained by this apparent contradiction? Is there something commmon to all religions? Are they "all the same"? If not, how are they different? Is there a difference between faith and belief?
12. What do you make of Pi's assertion at the beginning of chapter 16 that we are all "in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God"? Do you believe that Pi's faith is a response to his father's agnosticism?
13. Among Yann Martel's gifts is a rich descriptive palette. Regarding religion, he observes the green elements that represent Islam and the orange tones of Hinduism. What color would Christianity be, according to Pi's perspective?
14. How do the human beings in your world reflect the animal behavior observed by Pi? What do Pi's strategies for dealing with Richard Parker teach us about confronting the fearsome creatures in our lives?
15. Besides the loss of his family and possessions, what else did Pi lose when the Tsimtsum sank? What did he gain?
16. Nearly everyone experiences a turning point that represents the transition from youth to adulthood, albeit seldom as traumatic as Pi's. What event marked your coming of age?
17. How do Mr. Patel's zookeeping abilities compare to his parenting skills? Discuss the scene in which his tries to teach his children a lesson in survival by arranging for them to watch a tiger devour a goat. Did this in any way prepare Pi for the most dangerous experience of his life?
18. If shock hadn't deluded him, do you think Pi would have whistled and waved at Richard Parker? What would you have done?
19. Pi imagines that his brother would have teasingly called him Noah. How does Pi's voyage compare to the biblical story of Noah, who was spared from the flood while God washed away the sinners?
20. Is Life of Pi a tragedy, romance, or comedy?
21. Pi defends zoos. Are you convinced? Is a zoo a good place for a wild animal?
22. What did you think of Pi's interview with the investigators from the Japanese Ministry of Transport? Do you think Pi's mother, along with a sailor and a cannibalistic cook, were in the lifeboat with him instead of the animals? Which story do you believe, the one with animals or the one without animals? When the investigators state that they think the story with animals is the better story, Pi answers "Thank you. And so it goes with God." What do you think Pi meant by that? How does it relate to the claim that this is a story "that will make you believe in God"?
23. The first part of the novel starts twenty years after Pi's ordeal at sea and ends with the words "This story has a happy ending." Do you agree?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Possession: A Romance
A.S. Byatt, 1990
Knopf Doubleday
576 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679735908
Summary
Winner, 1991 Booker Prize
Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. As a pair of young scholars research the lives of two Victorian poets, they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist seances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany. What emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passion and ideas. (From the publisher.)
More
Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, two rather unfulfilled young literary scholars, unexpectedly become figures of romance as they discover a surprising link between the two poets on whom they are authorities.
Byatt deftly plays with literary genres—Romantic quest, campus satire, detective story, myth, fairy tale—as Maud and Roland become deeply involved in the unfolding story of a secret relationship between the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte.
The young people's quest inevitably attracts the jealous attention of the competitive academic world, and all too soon the quest becomes a chase. Byatt's staggering technical ambition and her powerful romantic vision are tributes to the great Victorian age, which the novel brings to life. (From the publisher.)
The 2002 film stars Gwyenth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle. (Turgid, a good description.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Antonia Susan Drabble Byatt
• Birth—August 24, 1936
• Where—Sheffield, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Cambridge University; undergraduate
work, Bryn Mawr College (USA) and Oxford University
• Awards—Booker Prize
• Currently—lives in London, England, and France
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE, known as A. S. Byatt is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on their list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Byatt was born as Antonia Susan Drabble, the daughter of John Drabble and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning. Byatt was educated at Sheffield High School and the Quaker Mount School, and noted in an interview in 2009 "I am not a Quaker, of course, because I'm anti-Christian and the Quakers are a form of Christianity but their religion is wonderful—you simply sat in silence and listened to the nature of things." She went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr in the United States, and Somerville College, Oxford. Sister to novelist Margaret Drabble and art historian Helen Langdon, Byatt lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of London University (1962–71), the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.
Writing
The story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, Byatt's first novel, The Shadow of the Sun was published in 1964. Her novel The Game (1967), charts the dynamics between two sisters and the family theme is continued in her quartet: The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002). Still Life won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1989.
Her quartet of novels is inspired by D. H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love. Describing mid-20th-century Britain, the books follow the life of Frederica Potter, a young female intellectual studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that university, and then tracing her journey as a divorcee with a young son making a new life in London. Byatt says some of the characters in her fiction represent her "greatest terror which is simple domesticity [...] I had this image of coming out from under and seeing the light for a bit and then being shut in a kitchen, which I think happened to women of my generation." Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman touches on the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the 1960s. She describes herself as "a naturally pessimistic animal": "I don't believe that human beings are basically good, so I think all utopian movements are doomed to fail, but I am interested in them."
She has written critical studies of Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and a significant influence on her own writing. In those books and other works, Byatt alludes to, and builds upon, themes from Romantic and Victorian literature. She conceives of fantasy as an alternative to, rather than an escape from, everyday life, and it is often difficult to tell when the fantastic in her work actually represents the eruption of psychosis. "In my work", she notes "writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers." Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the past of two (fictional) nineteenth century poets whom they are researching. It won the Man Booker Prize in 1990 and was made into a film in 2002. Her novel Angels & Insects also became a successful film, nominated for an Academy Award (1995). The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
On the role of writing in her life, she says: "I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes these things. I, who I am, is the person that has the project of making a thing. Well, that's putting it pompously—but constructing. I do see it in sort of three-dimensional structures. And because that person does that all the time, that person is able to love all these people."
Personal life
A. S. Byatt married Ian Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959 and had a daughter, as well as a son who was killed in a car accident at the age of 11. The marriage was dissolved in 1969. She has two daughters with her second husband Peter John Duffy.
Byatt has famously been long engaged in a feud with her novelist sister Margaret Drabble over the writerly appropriation of a family tea-set. The pair seldom see each other and don't read each other's books.
Prizes and awards
1986 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, for Still Life
1987 Hon. Dlitt, Bradford
1990 Booker Prize for Fiction, Possession: A Romance
1990 CBE
1990 Irish Times International Fiction Prize Possession: A Romance
1991 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) Possession
1991 Honorary Doctorate from the University of York
1991 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Durham
1992 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Nottingham
1993 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liverpool
1994 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Portsmouth
1995 Honorary Doctorate from the University of London
1995 Premio Malaparte (Italy)
1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
1998 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
1999 DBE
1999 Hon. DLitt from the University of Cambridge
2000 Hon. Fellow, London Institute
2000 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Sheffield
2004 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Kent
2004 Fellow, University College London
2002 Shakespeare Prize (Germany)
2007 Honorary degree from the University of Winchester.
2009 Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix[6] (Canada)
2009 Man Booker Prize, The Children's Book (shortlist)
2010 Honorary Doctorate from the Leiden University
2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Children's Book
Book Reviews
This cerebral extravaganza of a story zigzags with unembarrassed zest across an imaginative terrain bristling with symbolism and symmetries, shimmering with myth and legend, and haunted everywhere by presences of the past.... Possession is eloquent about the intense pleasures of reading. And, with sumptuous artistry, it provides a feast of them.
Sunday Times (London)
Byatt is the most formidably equipped of contemporary novelists.... The great merit of [her] writing...is that it continually engages the reader's mind.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
...A.S. Byatt's wonderfully extravagant novel...accomplishes its essential purpose. It makes one read and reflect on language and consider what it meant to another age. As Maud says to Roland, "we have to make a real effort of imagination to know hwat it felt like to be them, here, believeing in these things".... In Possession, Ms. Byatt has made that effort. And to a remarkable degree succeeded.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times
A masterpiece of wordplay and adventure, a novel that compares with Stendhal and Joyce.
Los Angeles Times
Two contemporary scholars, each studying one of two Victorian poets, reconstruct their subjects' secret extramarital affair through poems, journal entries, letters and modern scholarly analysis of the period.... [A]n ambitious and wholly satisfying work, a nearly perfect novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Audio version.) This Booker Prize-winning novel is a good candidate for an oral reading, and Virginia Leishman performs beautifully. A wonderful mix of poetry and posturing literary criticism, part mystery, part romance, this tale is an entertaining juxtaposition of the 19th and 20th centuries. Leishman's reading emphasizes this contrast as she elegantly modulates poetry and then clips her words in a businesslike manner when reading the 20th-century analyses of 19th-century poetry. Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell, scholars of Christabel Lamotte and Randolph Henry Ash, are brought together and to life through the letters, diaries, and poetry of the two poets. Uncertain of their own identities, Bailey and Mitchell can easily lose themselves in the study of literature. We become as involved as the scholars through a judicious sampling of belles lettres and literary criticism, until finally Lamotte and Ash materialize and speak for themselves. The supporting characters are humorous stereotypes that Leishman portrays with various accents and annoying drawls to match their idiosyncrasies. Highly recommended. —Juleigh Muirhead Clark, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Lib., Williamsburg, VA
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. What is the significance of the novel's title? Do you think it has more than one meaning? What does the concept of "possession" mean to the novel's various characters, both modern and Victorian? How can possession be seen as the theme of the book?
2. Ash is nicknamed "the Great Ventriloquist" but this sobriquet could as easily be applied to Byatt herself. Why does Byatt use poetry to give away so many clues to the story? Are the poems a necessary and integral part of the novel or would it have worked just as well without them? Do you find that the poems in the novel succeed in their own right as poetry?
3. All the characters' names are carefully chosen and layered with meaning. What is the significance behind the following names: Roland Michell, Beatrice Nest, Sir George Bailey, Randolph Ash, Maud Bailey, Christabel LaMotte, Fergus Wolff? (Clues to the last three may be found in the poetry by Tennyson, Yeats, and Coleridge cited below.) Do any other names in the novel seem to you to have special meanings? How do the names help define, or confuse, the relationships between the characters?
4. The scholars in the novel see R. H. Ash as a specifically masculine, Christabel LaMotte as a specifically feminine, type of poet, just as Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti, the poets on whose work Ash's and LaMotte's are loosely based, were considered to be extreme examples of the masculine and feminine in literature. Do you feel that such a classification is valid? What is there about Ash's and LaMotte's diction and subject matter that fulfills our ideas of "masculine" and "feminine"? Do the poets themselves consciously enact masculine and feminine roles? Do you find that Christabel's poetry is presented as being secondary to Ash's? Or that the work of the two poets is complementary?
5. Ellen Ash wrote her journal as a "defence against, and a bait for, the gathering of ghouls and vultures" [p. 501]. Mortimer Cropper is literally presented as a ghoul, robbing the poet's grave. Beatrice Nest, on the other hand, wishes to preserve Christabel's final letter to Randolph unread. What is the fine line, if any, between a ghoulish intrusion upon the privacy of the dead, and the legitimate claims of scholarship and history? As much as the scholars have discovered, one secret is kept from them at the end and revealed only to the reader. What is that secret and what difference does it make to Roland's future?
6. Freedom and autonomy are highly valued both by Christabel and Maud. What does autonomy mean to each of these characters? In Christabel's day, it was difficult for women to attain such autonomy; is it still difficult, in Maud's? What does autonomy mean to Roland? Why does mutual solitude and even celibacy assume a special importance in his relationship with Maud?
7. The moment of crisis in the poets' lives, 1859, was a significant year, as it saw the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. The theory of natural selection delivered a terrible blow to the Victorians' religious faith and created a climate of uncertainty: "Doubt," says Christabel, "doubt is endemic to our life in this world at this time" [p. 182]. How does Byatt compare this spiritual crisis with that which has befallen Roland and Maud's generation, who are taught to believe that the "self" is illusory [p. 459]?
8. The fluffy Beatrice Nest is scorned by the feminist scholars who crave access to Ellen Ash's journal. Yet in her way Beatrice is as much a victim of "patriarchy" as any of the Victorian women they study. What is the double standard at work among these politically minded young people? Can Beatrice be seen as a "superfluous woman," like Blanche and Val? What, if anything, do these three women have in common?
9. Ash writes "Swammerdam" with a particular reader, Christabel LaMotte, in mind. Is Christabel's influence on Ash evident in the poem, and if so, how and where? How, in the poem, does Ash address his society's preoccupation with science and religion? How does he address his and Christabel's conflicting religious ideas? How does Christabel herself present these ideas in Melusine?
10. Why is Christabel so affected by Gode's tale of the miller's daughter? What are its parallels with her own life?
11. The fairy Melusine has, as Christabel points out, "two aspects—an Unnatural Monster—and a most proud and loving and handy woman" [p. 191]. How does Christabel make Melusine's situation a metaphor for that of the woman poet? Does Christabel herself successfully defy society's strictures against women artists, or does her awareness of the problem cripple her, either professionally or emotionally? At the end of her life she wonders whether she might have been a great poet, as she believes Ash was, if she had kept to her "closed castle" [p. 545]. What do you think?
12. Roland and Maud believe they are taking part in a quest. This is a classic element of medieval and nineteenth-century Romance, of which they are well aware. Aside from the quest, what other elements of Romance can be found in Maud and Roland's story? In Christabel and Randolph's? What other genres are exploited in the novel?
13. When he returns to his flat at the end of the novel, Roland decides there is "no reason why he should not go out into the garden" [p. 514]. What is the emotional significance of his finally entering the garden?
Poems that will enrich your understanding of Possession: Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "My Last Duchess," "Porphyria's Lover," "Caliban Upon Setebos," "Bishop Blougram's Apology," "Mr. Sludge, the 'Medium'," "Andrea del Sarto," and "Fra Lippo Lippi"; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Christabel"; Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress," "The Garden"; Petrarch, Rime Sparse; Christina Rossetti, Poetical Works; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Merlin and Vivien" from Idylls of the King, In Memoriam, "Maud," "Mariana," "The Lady of Shallott"; W.B. Yeats, The Rose.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Trans-Sister Radio
Chris Bohjalian, 2000
Knopf Doubleday
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375705175
Summary
Set in the village of Bartlett, Vermont, Trans-Sister Radio tells the story of four people who are drawn into a complicated tangle of relationships—relationships that will profoundly change each of them.
When Allison, grade-school teacher and divorced mother of a teenage daughter, meets Dana, she feels she's at the beginning of an intense, ideal romance.
But Dana reveals that he's always felt himself to be a woman and plans to have the surgery that will make that feeling a reality, and soon Allison's love for Dana and her perception of herself is severely tested. She grapples with the fact that she might not be able to love Dana in a woman's body.
She worries whether her teaching career will survive the scandal that living with a transsexual in a small New England town is sure to cause. She wonders what effect the situation will have on her relationship with her daughter, Carly, and how her ex-husband, Will, is going to view the situation.
Allison stands by Dana through the surgery and recovery period, enduring the opprobrium of the local community and a growing unease about her own sexual identity. Threatening notes left in her school mailbox, obscene graffiti scrawled on her front door, pressure from the school board to take a leave of absence, and a local petition about teacher morality all contribute to making Allison and Dana's relationship both a public issue and a private ordeal.
Even Will and Carly become increasingly involved in Allison and Dana's predicament, and when they decide to air a program on transsexualism for Vermont Public Radio, they bring both clarity to the issue and a new set of changes for everyone involved.
Written with empathy and extraordinary insight, Trans-Sister Radio explores the uncertain terrain of gender identity, sexual preference, and the entire range of pleasures, confusions, and sacrifices that love demands. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—White Plains, New York, USA
• Education—Amherst College
• Awards—Anahid Literary Award, 2000; New England Book Award, 2002
• Currently—lives in Lincoln, Vermont
Christopher Aram Bohjalian, who goes by the pen name Chris Bohjalian, is an American novelist. Bohjalian is the author of 15 novels, including New York Times bestsellers Midwives, Secrets of Eden, The Law of Similars, Before You Know Kindness, The Double Bind, Skeletons at the Feast, and The Night Strangers.
Bohjalian is the son of Aram Bohjalian, who was a senior vice president of the New York advertising agency Romann & Tannenholz. Chris Bohjalian graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In the mid-1980s, he worked as an account representative for J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York.
He and his wife lived in a co-op in Brooklyn until March 1986, when the two were riding in a taxicab in which the driver refused to let them out of the car for 45 minutes, ignoring all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight, the driver dropped them off at a near-deserted street in front of a crack house, where the police were conducting a raid and Bohjalian and his wife were forced to drop to the ground for their protection. The incident prompted the couple to move from Brooklyn; Bohjalian said, "After it was all over, we just thought, "Why do we live here?" A few days later, the couple read an ad in The New York Times referencing the "People's Republic of Vermont," and in 1987 the couple moved to Lincoln, Vermont.
Early career
After buying their house, Bohjalian began writing weekly columns for local newspaper and magazine about living in the small town, which had a population of about 975 residents. The Concord Monitor said of Bohjalian during this period, "his immersion in community life and family, Vermont-style, has allowed him to develop into a novelist with an ear and empathy for the common man." Bohjalian continued the column for about 12 years, writing about such topics as his own daily life, fatherhood and the transformation of America. The column has run in the Burlington Free Press since 1992. Bohjalian has also written for such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.
Bohjalian's first novel, A Killing in the Real World, was released in 1988. Almost two decades after it was released, Bohjalian said of the book, "It was a train wreck. I hadn't figured things out yet." His third novel, Past the Bleachers, was released in 1992 and adapted as a Hallmark Channel television movie in 1995.
In 1998, Bohjalian wrote his fifth book, Midwives, a novel focusing on rural Vermont midwife Sibyl Danforth, who becomes embroiled in a legal battle after one of her patients died following an emergency Caesarean section. The novel was critically acclaimed and was selected by Oprah Winfrey as the October 1998 selection of her Oprah's Book Club, which helped push the book to great financial success. It became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Victoria Blewer has often described her husband as having "a crush" on the Sybil Danforth character. In 2001, the novel was adapted into a Lifetime Movie Network television film starring Sissy Spacek in the lead role. Spacek said the Danforth character appealed to her because "the heart of the story is my character's inner struggle with self-doubt, the solo road you travel when you have a secret."
Later career
Bohjalian followed Midwives with the 1999 novel The Law of Similars, about a widower attorney suffering from nameless anxieties who starts dating a woman who practices alternative medicine. The novel was inspired by Bohjalian's real-life visit to a homeopath in an attempt to cure frequent colds he was catching from his daughter's day care center. Bohjalian said of the visit, "I don't think I imagined there was a novel in homeopathy, however, until I met the homeopath and she explained to me the protocols of healing. There was a poetry to the language that a patient doesn't hear when visiting a conventional doctor." The protagonist, a father, is based in part on Bohjalian himself, and his four-year-old daughter is based largely on Bohjalian's daughter, who was three when he was writing the book., Liz Rosenberg of The New York Times said the novel shared many similarities with Midwives but that it paled in comparison; Rosenberg said, "Unlike its predecessor, it fails to take advantage of Bohjalian's great gift for creating thoughtful fiction featuring characters in whom the reader sustains a lively interest." Megan Harlan of The Boston Phoenix described it as "formulaic fiction" and said Bohjalian focused too much on creating a complex plot and not enough of complex characterizations. The Law of Similars, like Midwives, made the New York Times bestsellers list.
He won the New England Book Award in 2002, and in 2007 released "The Double Bind," a novel based on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
In 2008, Bohjalian released Skeletons at the Feast, a love story set in the last six months of World War II in Poland and Germany. The novel was inspired by an unpublished diary written by German citizen Eva Henatsch from 1920 to 1945. The diary was given to Bohjalian in 1998 by Henatsch's grandson Gerd Krahn, a friend of Bohjalian, who had a daughter in the same kindergarten class as Bohjalian's daughter. Bohjalian was particularly fascinated by Henatsch's account of her family's trek west ahead of the Soviet Army, but he was not inspired to write a novel from it until 2006, when he read Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, Max Hastings' history of the final years of World War II. Bohjalian was struck not only by how often Henatsch's story mirrored real-life experiences, but also the common "moments of idiosyncratic human connection" found in both. Skeletons of the Feast was considered a departure for Bohjalian because it was not only set outside of Vermont, but set in a particular historical moment.
His 2010 novel, Secrets of Eden, was also a critical success, receiving starred reviews from three of the four trade journals (Booklist, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly), as well as many newspapers and magazines. It debuted at # 6 on The New York Times bestseller list.
His next novel, The Night Strangers, published in 2011, represents yet another departure for Bohjalian. The is both a gothic ghost story and a taut psychological thriller.
He has written a weekly column for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since February 1992 called "Idyll Banter." His 1,000th column appeared in May 2011.
Personal comments
In a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview, Bohjalian offered up these personal comments:
I was the heaviest child, by far, in my second-grade class. My mother had to buy my pants for me at a store called the "Husky Boys Shop," and still she had to hem the cuffs up around my knees. I hope this experience, traumatizing as it was, made me at least marginally more sensitive to people around me.
I have a friend with Down syndrome, a teenage boy who is capable of remembering the librettos from entire musicals the first or second time he hears them. The two of us belt them out together whenever we're driving anywhere in a car.I am a pretty avid bicyclist. The other day I was biking alone on a thin path in the woods near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, and suddenly before me I saw three bears. At first I saw only two, and initially I thought they were cats. Then I thought they were dogs. Finally, just as I was approaching them and they started to scurry off the path and into the thick brush, I understood they were bears. Bear cubs, to be precise. Which is exactly when their mother, no more than five or six feet to my left, reared up on her hind legs, her very furry paws and very sharp claws raised above her head in a gesture that an optimist might consider a wave and guy on a bike might consider something a tad more threatening. Because she was standing on a slight incline, I was eye level with her stomach—an eventual destination that seemed frighteningly plausible. I have never biked so fast in my life in the woods. I may never have biked so fast in my life on a paved road.
I do have hobbies—I garden and bike, for example—but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter.
He lives with his wife and daughter in Lincoln, Vermont, where he is active in the local church and the Vermont theater community—always off-stage, never on.
Writing style
Bohjalian novels often focus on a specific issue, such as homelessness, animal rights and environmentalism, and tend to be character-driven, revolving around complex and flawed protagonists and secondary characters. Bohjalian uses characteristics from his real life in his writings; in particular, many of his novels take place in fictional Vermont towns, and the names of real New Hampshire towns are often used throughout his stories. Bohjalian said, "Writers can talk with agonizing hubris about finding their voices, but for me, it was in Vermont that I discovered issues, things that matter to me." His novels also tend to center around ordinary people facing extraordinarily difficult situations resulting from unforeseen circumstances, often triggered by other parties. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
In the convolutions of human frailties and the confounding enigma of love, [Bohjalian's] tale brings to bear issues that transcend the bounds of gender: image, loneliness, yearning, and, most of all, the human capacity for change.... It bears his hallmark: ordinary people in heartbreaking circumstances behaving with grace and dignity. He accomplishes this in plaintive prose that speaks directly to the heart.
San Francisco Chronicle
Trans-Sister Radio is a controversial, highly original novel about a lot more than gender issues and sexual orientation. It is about the precarious dance on the checkerboard of sex. It is about life choices, lifestyle, tolerance and intolerance, and, above all, a commitment to love. Some might consider the resolution an equivocation, but this book is impossible to put down.
Carol Memmott - USA Today
Set your dial to Trans-Sister Radio for a thoughtful and provocative read, and when you want more after you finish, tune into Bohjalian's earlier books, which are as wel written.
BUST Magazine - Nancy E. Young
The bestselling author of Midwives continues his tradition of incorporating social issues into his moving narratives. Transsexuality goes mainstream in this Scarlet Letter for a softer, gentler but more complicated age. Allison Banks—42 years old, heterosexual, long divorced, mother of a college student and a grade school teacher in a picturesque Vermont village—meets single, attractive, attentive, 35-year-old Dana Stevens when she takes his film class at a nearby college. Early on in the relationship, Dana confesses that he has always believed he was female, though he desires women, too—and he is soon to undergo a long-planned sex change operation. Despite this revelation, and despite her reservations, Allison invites Dana to move in with her, and they have great sex right up until the night before the operation in Colorado, where Allison has loyally accompanied Dana for post-op and moral support. On their return to Vermont, he—now physically and emphatically "she"—continues to share Allison's bed and her house, though nothing can be the same as it was. Allison's ex-husband, Vermont Public Radio president Will, now her good friend, and their daughter, Carly, cope well with the situation, but the close-knit community is less understanding. Questions of what constitutes community tolerance are explored here, but the novel's central focus is on the definition of sex and gender in the characters' personal lives. Allison, Dana, Carly and Will express their views in alternating first person chapters, and transcripts from a fictional NPR All Things Considered series on Dana and her operation provide additional narrative background. Gender is central to who we are, Bohjalian concludes, but not perhaps to who we love. Sex, on the other hand, expresses who we are. Bohjalian's sometimes simplistic characterizations diminish the emotional impact of the novel, and his abundant research on gender dysfunction often gives the book a curiously flat, documentary quality. Nevertheless, Bohjalian humanizes the transsexual community and explains the complexities of sex and gender in an accessible, evenhanded fashion, making a valuable contribution to a dialogue of social and political import.
Publishers Weekly
In Bohjalian's latest novel, the best-selling author of Midwives and The Law of Similars uses his extraordinary gifts for storytelling and character development to delve into further controversial areas--the acceptance (or not) of transsexuals in today's society and the endless complexities that gender adds to our lives. Alison Banks meets and falls in love with Dana Stevens just a few months shy of his appointment with a surgeon to transform himself into a female. As Alison struggles with her own feelings about their relationship, the two must also deal with increasingly hostile reactions in the small Vermont town where she teaches sixth grade. As in his earlier novels, Bohjalian is a master at exposing the emotions of a highly charged situation and carefully dissecting controversy. Trans-Sister Radio goes a long way toward normalizing a situation nowhere near normal for many people today. Recommended for all adult fiction collections. —Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland, OR
Library Journal
(Audio version.) A compelling and often disturbing novel, Trans-Sister Radio challenges all of our assumptions about gender, relationships, and sexuality. A powerful secret literally transforms four lives: Allison Banks, a sixth grade teacher; Will, her ex-husband and president of a local Vermont Public Radio station; their teenage daughter Carly; and Dana Stevens, a college instructor who falls in love with Allison. The structure of the book is essential for understanding the (r)evolution of emotions that occur with the complex issues Bohjalian explores through private lives made very public. The four voices, performed by Kymberli Colbourne, alternate to reveal their own separate struggles and to create a metamorphosis that is central to the story. A demanding work that is often graphic, always gentle, and full of wisdom and surprising humor. Recommended for adult audiences. —Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. What stereotypes or common misconceptions about transsexuals does Trans-Sister Radio challenge? How is it able to reveal the reality beneath the stereotypes?
2. Trans-Sister Radio is alternately narrated by Carly, Will, Allison, and Dana. What effect does Bohjalian achieve by telling the story through four narrators rather than one? How do these differing perspectives shape and control our reactions to the story?
3. As he contemplates Dana's surgery, Will asserts, "You simply couldn't, it seemed to me, change a biological imperative" [p. 143], while Dana says that being born in a man's body was a "howling chromosomal error" [p. 48]. Does the novel seem to favor either of these points of view? Is it possible for chromosomes to make an "error"? Is there a "biological imperative" that determines gender? What ethical and social dilemmas arise with our increasing scientific ability to manipulate nature?
4. Why do Dana's parents oppose his sex-change surgery? What aspects of Dana's becoming a woman concern them most? What prevents them from understanding Dana's deeper need to become a woman?
5. After Dana's reassignment surgery, she visits a young woman who is about to undergo the same procedure and is racked with worry about how her father, a football coach and mountain climber, will react. Dana tells her: "He hasn't climbed a mountain anywhere near as tall as the one you have to get here. Never in his life has he done anything as difficult as you have. Never" [p. 209]. What are the difficulties—emotional, practical, social—Dana and other transsexuals must confront? In what ways does the novel take readers inside those struggles?
6. Why does a large part of the Bartlett community object to Allison living with a transsexual? Why do even liberal parents, who at least theoretically have no objection to gay marriage, draw the line at transsexualism? Are their fears understandable and justifiable? What are they based on?
7. Sally Warwick, Allison's eleven-year-old student who masterminds the class's cross-dressing curtain call, explains that she got one of the boys to go along with her plan because he had a crush on her. "You see, when you think someone's cute, you do really weird stuff" [p. 297]. In what ways is this statement a commentary on the novel as a whole? What does it suggest about the nature of love? Why is Sally's innocent perspective on cross-dressing especially disarming?
8. In discussing transsexualism with her mother, Carly says, "we all want to cross over a lot more than we realize. We all want to be...other" [p. 272]. Is she right? Why would we want to be something "other" than what we are?
9. How does Will go from being a person who regards Dana as "not normal" and sex-change surgery as a mutilation, to someone who not only accepts Dana but falls in love with her? What are the stages in this process? What moments draw him closer to Dana?
10. Looking back on their relationship, Allison feels she has been used by Dana: "She'd needed someone to take care of her during transition, she'd needed a woman to tutor her in the finer points of my gender. She'd seen the way I'd fallen in love with her when she was my male professor, and taken advantage of me" [p. 312]. Is Allison right about Dana's motives? Has Dana deliberately deceived and manipulated her? Why doesn't he tell her of his plans at the beginning of their relationship?
11. The airing of the VPR interviews with Dana, Allison, and their opponents is a turning point for everyone in the novel. What effect does this program have on Dana and Allison's relationship? On Will? On those who consider Dana a "pervert"? What is the novel suggesting about the role of information in changing public opinion about sexual and gender issues?
12. Near the end of the novel, Carly seems to endorse a complete sexual relativism, where gender and sexual preference don't matter at all: "Let's face it: In reality, it's all just about muscle spasms that feel really good" [p. 341]. Is this an accurate view of human sexuality? To what extent does socialization determine sexual preference and gender behavior? Is Carly's thinking liberating or does it open the door to a confusing sexual free-for-all?
13. Dana undergoes a sex-change operation, but in fact all of the main characters in Trans-Sister Radio experience important changes. In what ways are Will, Allison, and Carly different at the end of the novel than they were at the beginning?
14. When Glenn Frazier confronts Allison with the parents' concerns, Allison says, "Who lives with me is none of Richard Lessard's business." Glenn replies, "That's not true. You teach his daughter. He pays your salary" [p. 115]. To what extent do these opposing positions mask larger anxieties—about privacy, sexuality, education, morality—in America today?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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