Summary
Little Bee, a young Nigerian refugee, has just been released from the British immigration detention center where she has been held under horrific conditions for the past two years, after narrowly escaping a traumatic fate in her homeland of Nigeria.
Alone in a foreign country, without a family member, friend, or pound to call her own, she seeks out the only English person she knows. Sarah is a posh young mother and magazine editor with whom Little Bee shares a dark and tumultuous past.
They first met on a beach in Nigeria, where Sarah was vacationing with her husband, Andrew, in an effort to save their marriage after an affair, and their brief encounter has haunted each woman for two years.
Now together, they face a disturbing past and an uncertain future with the help of Sarah's four-year-old son, Charlie, who refuses to take off his Batman costume. A sense of humor and an unflinching moral compass allow each woman, and the reader, to believe that even in the face of unspeakable odds, humanity can prevail. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—London, England, UK
• Where—raised in both Buckinghamsire (UK) and Cameroon
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Somerset Maughm Award; Prix des Lecteurs
• Currently—lives in London
Chris Cleave is a British author of four novels and has been a journalist for London's Guardian newspaper, where from 2008 until 2010 he wrote the column "Down With the Kids."
Novels
His first novel, Incendiary, was published in 2005 and released in 20 countries. It won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Special du Jury at the 2007 French Prix des Lecteurs. In 2008, the novel was adapted to film starring Ewan McGregor and Michelle Williams.
His second novel, Little Bee, was inspired by his childhood in West Africa. It was shortlisted for the prestigious Costa Award for Best Novel. Gold, his third novel, came out in 2012, and his fourth, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, was published in 2016. That novel is based on his grandparents' experience during the London Blitz of World War II.
Cleave lives in London with his French wife and three mischievous Anglo-French children. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/24/2016.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
Immensely readable and moving.... While the pretext of Little Bee initially seems contrived—two strangers, a British woman and a Nigerian girl, meet on a lonely African beach and become inextricably bound through the horror imprinted on their encounter—its impact is hardly shallow. Rather than focusing on postcolonial guilt or African angst, Cleave uses his emotionally charged narrative to challenge his readers' conceptions of civility, of ethical choice.
Caroline Elkins - New York Times
Little Bee will blow you away.... [Cleave] has carved two indelible characters whose choices in even the most straitened circumstances permit them dignity—if they are willing to sacrifice for it. Little Bee is the best kind of political novel: You're almost entirely unaware of its politics because the book doesn't deal in abstractions but in human beings.
Sarah L. Courteau - Washington Post
Utterly enthralling page-turner...... Novelist Cleave does a brilliant job of making both characters not only believable but memorable.... These compelling voices grip the reader's heart and do not let go even after the book's hyper-tense final page. Little Bee is a harrowing and heartening marvel of a novel
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Every now and then, you come across a character in a book whose personality is so salient and whose story carries such devastating emotional force it's as if she becomes a fixed part of your consciousness. So it is with the charmingly named title character in Chris Cleave's brilliant and unforgettable Little Bee.
Oregonian
The voice that speaks from the first page of Chris Cleave's Little Bee is one you might never have heard—the voice of a smart, wary, heartsick immigrant scarred by the terrors of her past.... Read this urgent and wryly funny novel for its insights into simple humanity, the force that can disarm fear
O Magazine
A violent incident on a Nigerian beach has tragic echoes in posh London in Cleave's beautifully staged if haphazardly plotted second novel. British couple Andrew O'Rourke and his wife, Sarah, are on vacation when they come across two sisters, Little Bee and Nkiruka, on the run from the killers who have massacred everyone else in their village—and what happens there with this unlikely encounter, is the mystery that propels the novel. Two years later, Little Bee, in possession of Andrew's license, shows up at Sarah's house to learn that it is the day of Andrew's funeral. He's committed suicide. Sarah is determined to help Little Bee get refugee status despite Little Bee's later revelation concerning Andrew's death. Cleave (Incendiary) has a sharp cinematic eye, and humanizes disturbing issues around refugees and the situation in Africa, but the story is undermined by weak motivations and coincidences.
Publishers Weekly
Book clubs in search of the next Kite Runner need look no further than this astonishing, flawless novel about what happens when ordinary, mundane Western lives are thrown into stark contrast against the terrifying realities of war-torn Africa. Their marriage in crisis, Andrew and Sarah O'Rourke impulsively accept a junket to a Nigerian beach resort as a last-ditch attempt to reconcile. When machete-wielding soldiers appear out of the jungle and force them to determine the fate of two African girls, everyone's lives are irrevocably shattered. Two years later in a London suburb, one of the girls, now a refugee, reconnects with Sarah. Together they face wrenching tests of a friendship forged under extreme duress. Best-selling author Cleave (Incendiary) effortlessly moves between alternating viewpoints with lucid, poignant prose and the occasional lighter note. A tension-filled dramatic ending and plenty of moral dilemmas add up to a satisfying, emotional read. Highly recommended for all libraries and book clubs.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Little Bee, smart and stoic, knows two people in England, Andrew and Sarah, journalists she chanced upon on a Nigerian beach after fleeing a massacre in her village.... After sneaking into England...she arrives at Andrew and Sarah’s London suburb home only to find that the violence that haunts her has also poisoned them. Cleave is a nerves-of-steel storyteller of stealthy power, and this is a novel as resplendent and menacing as life itself. — Donna Seaman
Booklist
Cleave follows up his outstanding debut (Incendiary, 2005) with a psychologically charged story of grief, globalization and an unlikely friendship. The story opens in a refugee detention center outside of London. As the Nigerian narrator-who got her nickname "Little Bee" as a child-prepares to leave the center, she thinks of her homeland and recalls a horrific memory. "In the immigration detention center, they told us we must be disciplined," she says. "This is the discipline I learned: whenever I go into a new place, I work out how I would kill myself there. In case the men come suddenly, I make sure I am ready." After Little Bee's release, the first-person narration switches to Sarah, a magazine editor in London struggling to come to terms with her husband Andrew's recent suicide, as well as the stubborn behavior of her four-year-old son, Charlie, who refuses to take off his Batman costume. While negotiating her family troubles, Sarah reflects on "the long summer when Little Bee came to live with us." Cleave alternates the viewpoints of the two women, patiently revealing the connection between them. A few years prior, Sarah and Andrew took a vacation to the Nigerian coast, not realizing the full extent to which the oil craze had torn the country apart. One night they stumble upon Little Bee and her sister, who are fleeing a group of rapacious soldiers prowling the beach. The frightening confrontation proves life-changing for everyone involved, though in ways they couldn't have imagined. A few years later Sarah and Little Bee come together again in the suburbs of London, and their friendship—in addition to that between Little Bee and Charlie—provides some salvation for each woman. Thoughless piercing and urgent than his debut, Cleave's narrative pulses with portentous, nearly spectral energy, and the author maintains a well-modulated balance between the two narrators. A solid sophomore effort, and hopefully a sign of even better things to come.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. "Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive" (p. 9). For Little Bee and other asylum seekers, the story of their life thus far is often all they have. What happens to the characters that carrytheir stories with them, both physically and mentally? What happens when we try to forget our past? How much control over their own stories do the characters in the book seem to have?
2. Little Bee tells the reader, "We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived" (p. 9). Which characters in the story are left with physical scars? Emotional scars? Do they embrace them as beautiful? Do you have any scars you've come to embrace? Did you feel more connected to Little Bee as a narrator after this pact?
3. Little Bee strives to learn the Queen's English in order to survive in the detention center. How does her grasp of the language compare with Charlie's? How does the way each of these two characters handle the English language help to characterize them?
4. How did it affect your reading experience to have two narrators? Did you trust one woman more than the other? Did you prefer the voice of one above the other?
5. Little Bee credits a small bottle of nail polish for "saving her life" while she was in the detention center (p. 7). Is there any object or act that helps you feel alive and beautiful, even when everything else seems to be falling apart?
6. Of the English language Little Bee says, "Every word can defend itself. Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate meanings so the understanding closes on empty air" (p. 12). What do you think she means by this? Can you think of any examples of English words that defend themselves? Why is language so important to Little Bee?
7. Little Bee says of horror films, "Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it" (p. 45). Do you agree? Was reading this novel in any way a dose of horror for you? How did it help you reflect on the presence or lack of horror in your own life?
8. Little Bee figures out the best way to kill herself in any given situation, just in case "the men come suddenly." How do these plans help Little Bee reclaim some power? Were you disturbed by this, or were you able to find the humor in some of the scenarios she imagines?
9. What does Udo changing her name to Little Bee symbolize for you? How does her new name offer her protection? Do you think the name suits her?
10. "To have an affair, I began to realize, was a relatively minor transgression. But to really escape from Andrew, to really become myself, I had to go the whole way and fall in love" (p. 161-162). Do you agree with Sarah that an affair is a minor transgression? How did falling in love with someone else help Sarah become herself? What role did Andrew play in perpetuating Sarah's extramarital affair?
11. When Little Bee finds that Andrew has hanged himself she thinks, "Of course I must save him, whatever it costs me, because he is a human being." And then she thinks, "Of course I must save myself, because I am a human being too" (p. 194). How do the characters in the story decide when to put themselves first and when to offer charity? Is one human life ever more valuable than another? What if one of the lives in question is your own?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Little Bird of Heaven
Joyce Carol Oates, 2009
HarperCollins
442 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061829840
Summary
Joyce Carol Oates returns with a dark, romantic, and captivating tale, set in the Great Lakes region of upstate New York.
Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late-twentieth-century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates's previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter.
When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers' son, Aaron, and Eddy Diehl's daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other's father is guilty.
Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is a classic Oates novel in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel's end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 16, 1938
• Where—Lockport, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Syracuse Univ.; M.A., Univ. of Wisconsin
• Awards—National Book Award for Them, 1970; 14 O. Henry
Awards; six Pushcart Prizes
• Currently—lives in Princeton, New Jersey
Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most influential and important storytellers in the literary world. She has often used her supreme narrative skills to examine the dark side of middle-class Americana, and her oeuvre includes some of the finest examples of modern essays, plays, criticism, and fiction from a vast array of genres. She is still publishing with a speed and consistency of quality nearly unheard of in contemporary literature.
A born storyteller, Oates has been spinning yarns since she was a little girl too young to even write. Instead, she would communicate her stories through drawings and paintings. When she received her very first typewriter at the age of 14, her creative floodgates opened with a torrent. She says she wrote "novel after novel" throughout high school and college—a prolificacy that has continued unabated throughout a professional career that began in 1963 with her first short story collection, By the North Gate.
Oates's breakthrough occurred in 1969 with the publication of them, a National Book Award winner that established her as a force to be reckoned with. Since that auspicious beginning, she has been nominated for nearly every major literary honor—from the PEN/Faulkner Award to the Pulitzer Prize—and her fiction turns up with regularity on the New York Times annual list of Notable Books.
On average Oates publishes at least one novel, essay anthology, or story collection a year (during the 1970s, she produced at the astonishing rate of two or three books a year!). And although her fiction often exposes the darker side of America's brightest facades—familial unrest, sexual violence, the death of innocence—she has also made successful forays into Gothic novels, suspense, fantasy, and children's literature. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."
Where she finds the time for it no one knows, but Oates manages to combine her ambitious, prolific writing career with teaching: first at the University of Windsor in Canada, then (from 1978 on), at Princeton University in New Jersey. For all her success and fame, her daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast.
Extras
• When not writing, Oates likes to take in a fight. "Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost," she says in highbrow fashion of the lowbrow sport.
• Oates's Black Water, which is a thinly veiled account of Ted Kennedy's car crash in Chappaquiddick, was produced as an opera in the 1990s.
• In 2001, Oprah Winfrey selected Oates's novel We Were the Mulvaneys for her Book Club. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Praise for Oates from the UK
• One of the female frontrunners for the title of Great American Novelist.— Maggie Gee, Sunday Times
•A writer of extraordinary strengths...she has dealt consistently with what is probably the great American theme— the quest for the creation of self...Her great subject, naturally, is love.—Ian Sansom, Guardian
• Her prose is peerless and her ability to make you think as she re-invents genres is unique. Few writers move so effortlessly from the gothic tale to the psychological thriller to the epic family saga to the lyrical novella. Even fewer authors can so compellingly and entertainingly tell a story.—Jackie McGlone, Scotland on Sunday
• Novelists such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer slug it out for the title of the Great American Novelist. But maybe they're wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the Great American Novelist is a woman. —The Herald
Book Reviews
Little Bird of Heaven starts with the urgency of a thriller, then turns into something more existential as the years (and pages) go by with no developments in the case. This is a tragedy on a classical scale. Oates more than winks at the Greeks by naming the town Sparta, the murdered woman Zoe (which means "life"). Like the original Spartans, these people are stuck in a world where physicality dominates and runs violent... Oates has been chided for a tendency toward melodrama, and the emotions in Little Bird of Heaven are definitely intense. Krista often sounds florid. But melodrama is a valid tool, one the Greeks used as well to dramatize the height of passion. In real melodrama, there's a stark line between villains and innocents. In this novel, it's not that straightforward. Oates has written a feminist novel with empathy for men, especially men without power, with no voice besides violenc.
Malena Watrous - New York Times
This is a powerful novel. Oates's feel for the rhythms of hardscrabble life and its sour mix of alcoholism, suicide, drug abuse, adultery and murder is as keen as ever. In Sparta she has created a fictional universe to stand beside Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Cheever's Shady Hill. Her descriptions of the geography of urban decay—the rusted bridges, tangled back alleys and trash-strewn lots—are as vivid as any naturalist's portrayal of more felicitous scenes. Her unsentimental language makes a high-lonesome kind of poetry out of otherwise sordid and unremarkable circumstance.
Michael Lindgren - Washington Post
[This novel]...has an unnerving clarity about the power of sexual desire...it cleaves to the mind like a strong memory, and after you've read it, you may find yourself dreaming about the imaginary town of Sparta, and wondering what the people are doing now.
Chicago Sun Times
Beneath the Sturm und Drang of Oates's third book of 2009 is the archetypal fairy tale: beauty and the beast. The beauties are the narrator, Krista Diehl, and Zoe Kruller, a waitress and singer who was murdered in Sparta, N.Y., in 1983. The beasts are the men, most notably Krista's father, Eddy, who, as Zoe's lover, is suspected in her murder, and Aaron Kruller, who discovers his mother's body and grows up repressing the thought that his father might have killed her. While the women are torn between attraction to the men and the need to escape them, the men must eventually be blooded, psychically and, in Eddy's case, physically. Eddy starts out a predator, with “tufts of animal-hair” sticking out of his undershirt, and ends up at the wrong end of a barrage of police bullets. While Zoe's murder and Eddy's suicide-by-cop five years later are the story's anchors, the heart of this novel is how Krista and Aaron are drawn together, however briefly. Oates unfolds the central gothic intuition—that beauty and the beast are complements—in a way that Charlotte Bronte would highly approve.
Publishers Weekly
Oates once again takes us to deteriorating upstate New York, this time the city of Sparta, where, as in We Were the Mulvanys, a tragic incident has devastating effects on two families. When Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, suspicion falls on husband Delray and on lover Eddy Diehl. Neither man is arrested, but each is forced to live under a veil of continued suspicion. In this story, it's the children who suffer the most, and they also narrate: first Eddy's daughter Krista and then Delray's son Aaron. Eddy separates from his wife and family and leaves Sparta, but Krista believes in her father's innocence, recounting life before and after the crime and offering her recollections of Zoe. Aaron recounts finding his mother's body and the bitterness of living with such notoriety. In typical Oates irony, Krista develops a crush on Aaron, climaxing in a deeply emotional scene; 15 years later they find out who killed Zoe. VERDICT Not Oates's best work, but her readers will find the psychological suspense combined with tragedy and redemption a good read. Josh Cohen Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY
Library Journal
Typically overstuffed chronicle of sexual violence and family implosion, closest in kinship within the author's family of novels to We Were the Mulvaneys (1996) and You Must Remember This (1987). En route to challenging Balzac's lifetime stats, Oates is now somewhere in Trollope territory with her 36th novel and third book-length fiction published in 2009. She divides this one between the narrative of Krista Diehl, passionately adoring daughter of Eddie, a known adulterer and suspected murderer, and the story of Aaron Kruller, the part-Native American son of the murdered woman. Zoe Kruller, Eddie's mistress before he was accused of killing her, was a seductive, reputedly round-heeled waitress and aspiring band singer; the title alludes to a gritty country-and-western ballad. Oates succeeds best when depicting downbeat real life and sentimental dreams of something better in the fictional upstate hamlet of Sparta, N.Y. But boastful, hair-trigger-tempered Eddie, his spiteful, betrayed wife Lucille and Krista's sullen older brother Ben are all recycled from earlier books, and Krista's emotional defense of her doting daddy is as devoid of conviction or resonance as it is creepy. When Oates shifts to Aaron's story, however, the book starts to fly. The misshapen product of unconscionable parenting and a racist environment, Aaron seethes with an I'll-get-those-bastards fury that all but burns holes in the pages. This small-town Caliban, a hound of hell powered by unquenchable rage and vindictiveness, is one of Oates's most unforgettable characters. If only Krista's bloated narrative had had one-tenth the concentrated heat of Aaron's seemingly foreordained decline and fall. One-half of a masterpiece.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Little Bird of Heaven:
1. With whose narrative voice in the novel, Krista's or Aaron's, do you most sympathasize? Is one more trustworthy than the other?
2. Why is Krista so supported of, enamored with her father—and so certain he is not the killer of Zoe?
3. Did you at one time suspect one of the fathers over the other, say, Eddie over Delray, or vice versa? When the murder is finally found, were you suprised?
4. But the story is not really about the murder, or even solving it. The point of the story is the stain of sin and violence that befalls the children of Eddie and Zoe. In a sense, Krista and Aaron are almost as much victims as Zoe was. In what ways are the two shaped by the murder; how does the tragedy come to define their lives? How might Aaron's life, for instance, have been different had his mother lived?
5. What underlies the passion, or compulsion, that propels the two young people together, even if only briefly?
6. What finally makes Krista realize, at the end, that even though their attraction is as powerful as ever, she realizes she cannot be with him?
7. In this, as in many of her works, Oates is concerned with the relationship of passion and violence. How does that play out in Little Bird of Heaven?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Quartet, #1)
John Updike, 1960
Random House
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449911655
Summary
Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more elusive than a medal, and Harry must continue to run—from his wife, his life, and from himself, until he reaches the end of the road and has to turn back. (From the publishers.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 18, 1932
• Where—Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
• Death—January 27, 2009
• Where—Danvers, Massachusetts
• Education—A.B., Harvard University; also studied at the
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England
• Awards—National Book Award for The Centaur, 1964;
Pulitzer Prizer, National Book Critics Circle Award, and
National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich, 1982; Pulitzer Prize
and National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit at Rest,
1990
With an uncommonly varied oeuvre that includes poetry, criticism, essays, short stories, and novels, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike has helped to change the face of late-20th-century American literature.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. Following a year of study in England, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, establishing a relationship with the magazine that continues to this day. Since 1957, he has lived in two small towns in Massachusetts that have inspired the settings for several of his stories.
In 1958, Updike's first collection of poetry was published. A year later, he made his fiction debut with The Poorhouse Fair. But it was his second novel, 1960's Rabbit, Run, that forged his reputation and introduced one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. Former small-town basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom struck a responsive chord with readers and critics alike and catapulted Updike into the literary stratosphere.
Updike would revisit Angstrom in 1971, 1981, and 1990, chronicling his hapless protagonist's jittery journey into undistinguished middle age in three melancholy bestsellers: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. A concluding novella, "Rabbit Remembered," appears in the 2001 story collection Licks of Love.
Although autobiographical elements appear in the "Rabbit" books, Updike's true literary alter ego is not Harry Angstrom but Harry Bech, a famously unproductive Jewish-American writer who stars in his own story cycle. In between—indeed, far beyond—his successful series, Updike has gone on to produce an astonishingly diverse string of novels. In addition, his criticism and short fiction remain popular staples of distinguished literary publications.
Extras
• Updike first became entranced by reading when he was a young boy growing up on an isolated farm in Pennsylvania. Afflicted with psoriasis and a stammer, he escaped from his into mystery novels.
• He decided to attend Harvard University because he was a big fan of the school's humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon.
• Updike has basically won every major literary prize in America, including the Guggenheim Fellow, the Rosenthal Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the O. Henry Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the National Medal of the Arts. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Taken together, this quartet of novels has given readers a wonderfully vivid portrait of one Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom.... The books have also created a Kodachrome-sharp picture of American life...from the somnolent 50s...into the uncertainties of the 80s. (Refers to all four Rabbit Angstrom novels.)
New York Times
The being that most illuminates the Rabbit quartet is not finally Harry Angstrom himself but the world through which he moves in his slow downward slide, meticulously recorded by one of the most gifted American realists.... The Rabbit novels, for all their grittiness, constitute John Updike's surpassingly eloquent valentine to his country. (Refers to all four Rabbit Angstrom novels.)
Joyce Carol Oates - New York Times Book Review
Brilliant and poignant...By his compassion, clarity of insight and crystal-bright prose, he makes Rabbit's sorrow his and our own.
Washington Post
Precise, graceful, stunning, he is an athlete of words and images. He is also an impeccable observer of thoughts and feelings.
Village Voice
Updike is one of the most exquisite masters of prose style produced by 20th century America. Yet, his novels have been faulted for lacking any sense of action or character development. It appears at times that his ability to spin lovely phrases of delicate beauty and nuance overwhelm his desire to tell a simple, important story in the lives of his characters. Updike's novels raise the question of whether beauty of expression, the lyrical telling of a captured moment of human time is, itself, enough to justify a great work of art. In contrast, his short stories are seen by many as masterful in every respect, both for their prose style that approaches poetic expression and for the stories they convey. Some critics believe that had Updike produced only short stories and poems, his role in American letters would be even more celebrated. But it is Updike's novels that have brought him the greatest fame and attention and which resulted in his appearance on the covers of TIME magazine two times during his career.
Wikipedia
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)
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Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1985
Knopf Doubleday
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307389732
Summary
In the late 1800s, in a Caribbean port city, a young telegraph operator named Florentino Ariza falls deliriously in love with Fermina Daza, a beautiful student. She is so sheltered that they carry on their romance secretly, through letters and telegrams. When Fermina Daza's father finds out about her suitor, he sends her on a trip intended to make her forget the affair. Lorenza Daza has much higher ambitions for his daughter than the humble Florentino. Her grief at being torn away from her lover is profound, but when she returns she breaks off the relationship, calling everything that has happened between them an illusion.
Instead, she marries the elegant, cultured, and successful Dr. Juvenal Urbino. As his wife, she will think of herself as "the happiest woman in the world." Though devastated by her rejection, Florentino Ariza is not one to be deterred. He has declared his eternal love for Fermina, and determines to gain the fame and fortune he needs to win her back. When Fermina's husband at last dies, 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days later, Florentino Ariza approaches Fermina again at her husband's funeral. There have been hundreds of other affairs, but none of these women have captured his heart as Fermina did. "He is ugly and sad," says one of his lovers, "but he is all love."
In this magnificent story of a romance, García Márquez beautifully and unflinchingly explores the nature of love in all its guises, small and large, passionate and serene. Love can emerge like a disease in these characters, but it can also outlast bleak decades of war and cholera, and the effects of time itself. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 06, 1928
• Where—Aracataca, Colombia
• Education—Universidad Nacional de Colombia; Universidad
de Cartagena
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1982
• Currently—lives in Mexico City, Mexico
Gabriel García Márquez is the product of his family and his nation. Born in the small coastal town of Aracataca in northern Colombia, he was raised by his maternal grandparents. As a child, he was mesmerized by stories spun by his grandmother and her sisters — a rich gumbo of superstitions, folk tales, and ghost stories that fired his youthful imagination. And from his grandfather, a colonel in Colombia's devastating Civil War, he learned about his country's political struggles. This potent mix of Liberal politics, family lore, and regional mythology formed the framework for his magical realist novels.
When his grandfather died, García Márquez was sent to Sucre to live (for the first time) with his parents. He attended university in Bogotá, where he studied law in accordance with his parents' wishes. It was here that he first read The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka and discovered a literature he understood intuitively — one with nontraditional plots and structures, just like the stories he had known all his life. His studies were interrupted when the university was closed, and he moved back north, intending to pursue both writing and law; but before long, he quit school to pursue a career in journalism.
In 1954 his newspaper sent García Márquez on assignment to Italy, marking the start of a lifelong self-imposed exile from the horrors of Colombian politics that took him to Barcelona, Paris, New York, and Mexico. Influenced by American novelist William Faulkner, creator of the fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County, and by the powerful intergenerational tragedies of the Greek dramatist Sophocles, García Márquez began writing fiction, honing a signature blend of fantasy and reality that culminated in the 1967 masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. This sweeping epic became an instant classic and set the stage for more bestselling novels, including Love in the Time of Cholera, Love and Other Demons, and Memories of My Melancholy Whores. In addition, he has completed the first volume of a shelf-bending memoir, and his journalism and nonfiction essays have been collected into several anthologies.
In 1982, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his acceptance speech, he called for a "sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth." Few writers have pursued that utopia with more passion and vigor than this towering 20th-century novelist.
Extras
• Gabriel José García Márquez' affectionate nickname is Gabo.
• García Márquez' first two novellas were completed long before their actual release dates, but might not have been published if it weren't for his friends, who found the manuscripts in a desk drawer and a suitcase, and sent them in for publication. (Bio from Barnes and Noble.)
Book Reviews
Suppose...it were possible, not only to swear love ''forever,'' but actually to follow through on it — to live a long, full and authentic life based on such a vow, to put one's alloted stake of precious time where one's heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, one on which he delivers, and triumphantly.... He writes with impassioned control, out of a maniacal serenity: the Garcimarquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources.
Thomas Pinchon - New York Times
Like many great novels, Gabriel Garc ía Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera portrays the tension between illusions and material reality, especially in the context of love. In the novel's final pages, when Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza are finally together in their old age, we are told that love "was more solid the closer it came to death" (p. 345). This statement exemplifies the novel's method—instead of saying what love is, and in this way judging the strength of its characters' grasp of reality, it articulates the relationship between love and something else, giving different perspectives but no definitions. This circling around love gives Love in the Time of Cholera the quality of capturing the ineffable.
Different ways of understanding, experiencing, and representing love are embodied by the novel's three central characters—Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino. For Florentino, love has the properties of a dream; its fullest expression occurs in art (especially in writing), and it stands in opposition to everyday reality, entirely resistant to rational understanding. Like Emma in Madame Bovary, Florentino is filled with notions of love derived from popular literature; he also becomes a comic figure when reality unexpectedly intrudes into the world of his imagination. The bird droppings that fall on Fermina's embroidery when they meet as teenagers in the park and the intestinal disruption that betrays him when they meet following Dr. Urbino's death both testify to the unavoidable fact of the material world. But Florentino's fate suggests neither acquiescence to reality nor the continuation of his belief in a wholly illusory kind of love.
As the relationship between Florentino and Fermina unfolds following Dr. Urbino's death, it seems enabled by Florentino's emergence from the imaginary world in which he has lived for so long—the very existence of his imaginary world is made possible by Fermina's absence from it. The letters Florentino writes to her after Dr. Urbino's death possess, in Fermina's words, "a foundation in reality" (p. 330), as opposed to the letters of his youth, inspired by "half-baked endearments taken whole from the Spanish romantics" (p. 75). But other aspects of the novel's conclusion complicate this interpretation. Before making love, Florentino tells Fermina, "I've remained a virgin for you" (p. 339). In light of his many trysts and affairs, in what sense could this be true other than an imaginary one? When asked how long their ship will sail, keeping up its deception by flying the yellow cholera flag, Florentino answers, "Forever" (p. 348), as if to specifically deny the reality of death.
Because of his belief in the power of the rational mind, Dr. Urbino often appears more grounded in reality than Florentino. He considers marriage "an absurd invention" (p. 209), and his marriage to Fermina represents a lifelong effort to defeat the absurd and replace it with something that can withstand logical analysis. After his death, Fermina recalls his belief that "the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability" (p. 300). On the night they consummate their marriage, Dr. Urbino readily admits to himself that he does not love Fermina, but "he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love" (p. 159). He thinks of love not as an unruly passion, but as if it can be brought into existence merely by an act of will. But his determination to avoid the chaos of emotion can make Dr. Urbino seem just as divorced from reality as Florentino. In his dissertation, Dr. Urbino asserts that, given the human organism's "many useless or duplicated functions...it could be more simple and by the same token less vulnerable" (p. 158-59). Is this idea any less illusory than the most extravagant of Florentino's ecstatic proclamations of his love for Fermina?
Between the extremes of Florentino and Dr. Urbino is Fermina. When Dr. Urbino first tells her about the importance of stability, she hears in it a "miserable threat," but when she remembers his words after he dies, she thinks of them as "the lodestone that had given them both so many happy hours" (p. 300). She ends her first affair with Florentino by telling him in a letter that "what is between us is nothing more than an illusion" (p. 102). As coldly precise as this declaration is, Fermina is nevertheless open to the emotional upheavals that attend her marriage to Dr. Urbino. When he confirms her suspicion of his adulterous affair with Barbara Lynch, she wishes he had denied it, preferring the illusion of his fidelity to the feeling that "her rage would never end" (p. 251). Sharing memories of Dr. Urbino with Florentino, Fermina "could not conceive of a husband better than hers had been, and yet when she recalled their life she found more difficulties than pleasures," admitting to Florentino that she does not "really know if it was love or not" (p. 329).
It is tempting to see Fermina as encompassing both the illusory and the real, but such symmetry would reduce her to a thematic device, as opposed to a fully alive character, capable of expecting nothing more from life after her husband dies and then falling in love with Florentino. The fact that neither she nor the novel ever arrive at a fixed definition of love suggests that its elusiveness is part of its very nature.
(Copyright 2007 by the Random House Publishing Group. Permission for use granted by Random House Inc.)
Discussion Questions
1. Why does García Márquez use similar terms to describe the effects of love and cholera?
2. Plagues figure prominently in many of García Márquez's novels. What literal and metaphoric functions does the cholera plague serve in this novel? What light does it shed on Latin American society of the nineteenth century? How does it change its characters' attitudes toward life? How are the symptoms of love equated in the novel with the symptoms of cholera?
3. What does the conflict between Dr. Juvenal Urbino and Florentino Ariza reveal about the customs of Europe and the ways of Caribbean life? How is Fermina Daza torn between the two?
4. Dr. Urbino reads only what is considered fine literature, while Fermina Daza immerses herself in contemporary romances or soap operas. What does this reveal about the author's attitude toward the distinction between "high" and "low" literature. Does his story line and style remind you more of a soap opera or a classical drama?
5. After rejecting Florentino's declaration of love following her husband's funeral, why is Fermina eventually won over by him?
6. Why does a change in Florentino's writing style make Fermina more receptive to him?
7. What does Florentino mean when he tells Fermina, before they make love for the first time, "I've remained a virgin for you" (p. 339)?
8. Why does Florentino tell each of his lovers that she is the only one he has had?
9. What does Florentino's uncle mean when he says, "without river navigation there is no love" (p. 168)?
10. Do Fermina and Dr. Urbino succeed at "inventing true love" (p. 159)?
11. Set against the backdrop of recurring civil wars and cholera epidemics, the novel explores death and decay, as well as love. How does Dr. Urbino's refusal to grow old gracefully affect the other two characters? What does it say about fulfillment and beauty in their society? Does the fear of aging or death change Florentino Ariza's feelings toward Fermina Daza?
12. Compare the suicide of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour at the beginning of the book with that of Florentino's former lover, América Vicuña at the end. How do their motives differ? Why does the author frame the book with these two events?
13. Why is Leona Cassiani "the true woman in [Florentino's] life although neither of them ever knew it and they never made love" (p. 182)?
14. When Tránsito Ariza tells Florentino he looks as if he were going to a funeral when he is going to visit Fermina, why does he respond by saying, "It's almost the same thing" (p. 65)? (Questions issued by publisher.)
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Rabbit Is Rich (Rabbit Quartet, #3)
John Updike, 1981
Random House
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449911822
In Brief
Winner, 1982 Pulitizer Prize
Ten years after Rabbit Redux, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry's doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit. (From the publishers.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 18, 1932
• Where—Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
• Death—January 27, 2009
• Where—Danvers, Massachusetts
• Education—A.B., Harvard University; also studied at the
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England
• Awards—National Book Award for The Centaur, 1964;
Pulitzer Prizer, National Book Critics Circle Award, and
National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich, 1982; Pulitzer Prize
and National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit at Rest,
1990
With an uncommonly varied oeuvre that includes poetry, criticism, essays, short stories, and novels, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike has helped to change the face of late-20th-century American literature.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. Following a year of study in England, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, establishing a relationship with the magazine that continues to this day. Since 1957, he has lived in two small towns in Massachusetts that have inspired the settings for several of his stories.
In 1958, Updike's first collection of poetry was published. A year later, he made his fiction debut with The Poorhouse Fair. But it was his second novel, 1960's Rabbit, Run, that forged his reputation and introduced one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. Former small-town basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom struck a responsive chord with readers and critics alike and catapulted Updike into the literary stratosphere.
Updike would revisit Angstrom in 1971, 1981, and 1990, chronicling his hapless protagonist's jittery journey into undistinguished middle age in three melancholy bestsellers: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. A concluding novella, "Rabbit Remembered," appears in the 2001 story collection Licks of Love.
Although autobiographical elements appear in the Rabbit books, Updike's true literary alter ego is not Harry Angstrom but Harry Bech, a famously unproductive Jewish-American writer who stars in his own story cycle. In between—indeed, far beyond—his successful series, Updike has gone on to produce an astonishingly diverse string of novels. In addition, his criticism and short fiction remain popular staples of distinguished literary publications.
Extras
• Updike first became entranced by reading when he was a young boy growing up on an isolated farm in Pennsylvania. Afflicted with psoriasis and a stammer, he escaped from his into mystery novels.
• He decided to attend Harvard University because he was a big fan of the school's humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon.
• Updike has basically won every major literary prize in America, including the Guggenheim Fellow, the Rosenthal Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the O. Henry Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the National Medal of the Arts. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Taken together, this quartet of novels has given readers a wonderfully vivid portrait of one Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom.... The books have also created a Kodachrome-sharp picture of American life...from the somnolent 50s...into the uncertainties of the 80s. (Refers to all four Rabbit Angstrom novels.)
New York Times
The being that most illuminates the Rabbit quartet is not finally Harry Angstrom himself but the world through which he moves in his slow downward slide, meticulously recorded by one of the most gifted American realists.... The Rabbit novels, for all their grittiness, constitute John Updike's surpassingly eloquent valentine to his country. (Refers to all four Rabbit Angstrom novels.)
Joyce Carol Oates - New York Times Book Review
Someone once said that reading a John O'Hara novel is like reading the Sears catalogue. Updike can be like that too, since once he starts on...the way it was, he usually goes until exhausted. So the book is too long.... But...the sentence-by-sentence writing here is, at least by Updike's lush standards, not excessive at all...For me Rabbit Is Rich is the first book in which Updike has fulfilled the fabulous promise he offered with Rabbit Run and The Centaur.
John Sears - New York Times Book Review
The power of the novel comes from a sense, not absolutely unworthy of Thomas Hardy, that the universe hangs over our fates like a great sullen hopeless sky. There is real pain in the book, and a touch of awe.
Noman Mailer - Esquire
Updike is one of the most exquisite masters of prose style produced by 20th century America. Yet, his novels have been faulted for lacking any sense of action or character development. It appears at times that his ability to spin lovely phrases of delicate beauty and nuance overwhelm his desire to tell a simple, important story in the lives of his characters. Updike's novels raise the question of whether beauty of expression, the lyrical telling of a captured moment of human time is, itself, enough to justify a great work of art. In contrast, his short stories are seen by many as masterful in every respect, both for their prose style that approaches poetic expression and for the stories they convey. Some critics believe that had Updike produced only short stories and poems, his role in American letters would be even more celebrated. But it is Updike's novels that have brought him the greatest fame and attention and which resulted in his appearance on the covers of Time magazine two times during his career.
Wikipedia.
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)
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