The Rose of York: Love & War
Sandra Worth, 2002
Atlasbooks
340 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780975126400
Summary
Adventure, deadly passion and intrigue… History’s most enduring mystery… A love story that may have inspired a beloved fairy tale and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet…
Known as Shakespeare’s villain, Richard III is also the king who gave mankind “Blind Justice” and the legal concepts that flowered into modern Western democracy. Against the sweep of England’s fifteenth century Wars of the Roses, Love and War, the first book in the "Rose of York" series, recreates Richard’s tumultuous early years and his love affair with Anne Neville, the traitor’s daughter he made his queen. (From the publisher.)
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In a tumultuous era marked by peril and intrigue, reversals of fortune and violent death, the passions of a few rule the destiny of England and change the course of history.
A stirring tale of passion, romance, friendship, honor, betrayal and civil strife, and the winner of a remarkable eight awards, including the 2005 Glyph Award for Best General Fiction, this historically accurate novel tells the true love story of two star-crossed lovers—Richard of Gloucester and Lady Anne Neville—before they become King and Queen of England. Set in Malory's England during the Wars of the Roses, The Rose of York: Love & War is a page turner that thrills as it enlightens. (Also from the publisher.)
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Author Bio
• Birth—1954
• Where—Canada
• Education_B.A. University of Toronto
• Awards—Gylph Award-Best General Fiction
Sandra Worth holds an honors B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Toronto and was first published at twenty-three by University of Toronto Press. She is a frequent contributor of articles to The Ricardian Register, the quarterly publication of the U.S. Richard III Society and has been published by Blanc Sanglier, the publication of the Yorkshire, England, branch of the Richard III Society.
Sandra has been invited to teach the Wars of the Roses Course at Suite University, a Canadian internet university, commencing in late 2003. Love and War, her debut novel was nominated for the 2003 Dorothy Parker Award, awarded by the Reviewers International Organization. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Expounding an historical epic of honor and love during the time of the Wars of the Roses, The Rose Of York (Love & War) is both dramatic and evocative in its portrayal of struggling souls making the best choices they can in an unjust world. A deftly written, reader engaging, thoroughly entertaining and enthusiastically recommended historical novel which documents its author as a gifted literary talent.
MidWest Book Review
Worth has done meticulous research… Though conversations and some incidents must of necessity be invented, she makes them seem so real that one agrees this must have been what they said, the way things happened.
Myrna Smith - Ricardian Register (U.S. Richard III Society)
With her debut novel, author Sandra Worth takes readers on an unforgettable journey through the life of Richard Plantagenet III.... Ms. Worth is an extremely gifted writer with the ability to immerse her readers into the lives and world of her characters ... The Rose of York: Love and War isn't historical fiction; it is a time machine.... I know shall be placing this novel on my keeper shelf and anxiously await the remaining books.
Sharon McGinty - Library Reviews
Ms. Worth chronicles brilliantly his (Richard's) all too brief childhood and the events and the people that molded him into the thoughtful and insightful young man he became. It is powerful; it is heartbreaking; and it is a beautifully told love story.... The historical aspects will give you insights that the casual historical fiction reader has probably never thought of, as I can surely attest to.... oh for the lovers of history, and for those looking forward to a most passionate story of love, this for you is a marvelous treat!... Whether intentional or not, I found that the secondary romance between John Neville, Lord Montagu and his wife Isobel to be pure poetry...depicted so beautifully that it simply took my breath away. I am definitely looking forward to the next book in this planned trilogy and if the tone and finesse imbued in this, her debut novel is any indication of what to expect we are all in for a marvelous treat.
Marilyn Rondear - Historical Romance Writers.com
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 The Rose of York: Love & War:
1. One of the overriding themes in this book is loyalty vs. betrayal. You might talk about the costs of loyalty.
2. Sandra Worth presents an honest, detailed and unvarnished view of life in the 15th century. You might discuss how she portrays that life, particularly for women.
3. Worth's portrait of Richard is vastly different from that of Shakespeare's version in Richard III. It would be interesting to compare the two views. You might read the Shakespeare play...well, okay. Here's another idea: rent Al Pacino's Looking for Richard (1996)—an intriguing and entertaining film in which Pacino plummets the character of Shakespeare's Richard.
4. Consider the political atmosphere of the time—then discuss the jurisprudence reforms Richard introduces: innocent till proven guilty, for one.
5. What were the events and people in Richard's young life that helped form and shape his later character— as a thoughtful, insightful adult?
6. You might want to explore the various romances in the story: that between Richard and Anne Neville, between Richard and Katherine Haute, and between John Neville and his wife Isobel.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Raw Shark Texts
Steven Hall, 2007
Canongate
428 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781847671745
Summary
Eric Sanderson wakes up in a house one day with no idea who or where he is. Instructed by a mysterious note to visit a Dr. Randle, Eric learns that the agony of losing the love of his life in a scuba-diving accident three years before has destroyed his memory.
But there may be more to the story, or it may be a different story altogether. As Eric begins to examine letters and papers left in the house by “the first Eric Sanderson,” a staggeringly different explanation for what is happening to Eric emerges, and he and the reader embark on a quest to recover the truth and escape the remorseless predatory forces that threatens to devour him.
The Raw Shark Texts is a kaleidoscopic novel about the magnitude of love and the devastating effect of losing that love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1975
• Where—Derbyshire, England, UK
• Education—Sheffield Hallum University
• Currently—lives in Hull, England
Steven Hall was born in Derbyshire, England, in 1975. After completing a fine arts degree at Sheffield Hallum University, he became one of the founding members of Manchester's WetNana and has produced a number of plays, music videos, conceptual art pieces and short stories. His "Stories for a Phone Book" appeared in New Writing 13 (2005). The Raw Shark Texts is his first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The Raw Shark Texts, the first novel by the British writer Steven Hall, which will be published in the U.S. this month, revolves around "conceptual" sharks who track down humans and devour their memories, a horror-dystopic-philosophical mash-up that has critics drawing comparisons to Borges, The Matrix and Jaws.
Tom Shone - New York Times Magazine
How all this will read in 20 years, or even two, is hard to say, although one suspects that what seemed so vertiginously modern will ultimately seem like so much cyber-age psychedelia — as depthless and woozy as paisley-patterned shirts. Hollywood, needless to say, has taken the bait; the book was a big hit at the most recent London book fair, and the movie rights were fiercely contested and finally sold for a sum in the mid- to high six figures. But I would advise producers to tread cautiously: we could be in for a replay of The Beach, by Alex Garland. Novels so in hock to the movies have a habit of evaporating by the time they get to the screen.
Tom Shone - New York Times Book Review
It's all a lot of fun, yet there is also a surprising emotional resonance in seeing Second Eric, like Beckett's Krapp with his tapes, reading and rereading First Eric's journals as he obsesses over the experiences that the Ludovician has chomped out of his head. And to hear Second Eric's voice take on the snap of his predecessor's is especially satisfying.
Tyler Knox - Washington Post
Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts is a psychological thriller with shades of Memento and The Matrix and the fiction of Mark Danielewski; page-turning, playful and chilling by turns, it explores the construction of identity through the adventures of an amnesiac who is guided by letters from his former self and menaced by a conceptual shark. —Justine Jordan
Guardian
The book justifies the hype.... An innovative, postmodern, metafictional novel.... The most original reading experience of the year.... A literary novel that's more out there than most science fiction.... Genuinely isn't like anything you have ever read before, and could be as big an inspiration to the next generation of writers as Auster and Murakami have been to Hall.—Matt Thorne
Independent
An avant-garde thriller in which these devil-fish of the unconscious somehow escape the symbolic realm, or rather, we join them on their side of the border....Ian is a splendid character: a self-important misanthropist, invariably with 'thundery disgust and disappointment all over his big flat ginger face.' . . . The novel's great virtue is its structure.... Information is released in pieces, like time-release drugs in a capsule, their order derived from the progressive revelation of truths rather than the forward march of events....The Raw Shark Texts unfolds not in sleek cyberspace, but inside the post-Freudian human self, with its layers, its pungent humours, its debris left over from construction, and its monsters of the deep....Jaws meets Alice in Wonderland. —Sarah Bakewell
Times Literary Supplement (London)
Readers who are prepared to tolerate (or be amused by) a few typographical gimmicks and manipulations, as well as an engaging story, are in for a treat.
Booklist
Hall's debut, the darling of last year's London Book Fair, is a cerebral page-turner that pits corporeal man against metaphysical sharks that devour memory and essence, not flesh and blood. When Eric Sanderson wakes from a lengthy unconsciousness, he has no memory. A letter from "The First Eric Sanderson" directs him to psychologist Dr. Randle, who tells Eric he is afflicted with a "dissociative condition." Eric learns about his former life—specifically a glorious romance with girlfriend Clio Aames, who drowned three years earlier—and is soon on the run from the Ludovician, a "species of purely conceptual fish" that "feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self." Once he hooks up with Scout, a young woman on the run from her own metaphysical predator, the two trek through a subterranean labyrinth made of telephone directories (masses of words offer protection, as do Dictaphone recordings), decode encrypted communications and encounter a series of strange characters on the way to the big-bang showdown with the beast. Though Hall's prose is flabby and the plethora of text-based sight gags don't always work (a 50-page flipbook of a swimming shark, for instance), the end result is a fast-moving cyberpunk mashup of Jaws, Memento and sappy romance that's destined for the big screen.
Publishers Weekly
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 The Raw Shark Texts:
1. In an interview Hall claims that Eric's story and the shark's story are "actually very much the same thing." What do you think he means?
2. Hall has also said...
The brains of the book are a little further under the surface, there's a lot which isn't spelled out.... If readers want to see the book as just a fast adventure thriller, then that's fine.... But if they want more than that, then the whole book is riddled with clues, tricks and traps, references and readings—so if you know things about Zen (for example), then the avenues you could spot could be different from those you might spot if you have a grasp of Many Worlds Theory....
Were there "avenues" in the book that you found you could explore? Did you find references that made reading Raw Shark a richer experience for you?
3. What is your understanding of the Un-Space Exploration Committee? What is un-space, how and where does it exist or operate?
4. Is Second Eric and same individual as First Eric? The question has a lot to do with identity, memory, and concsciousness. Without memory of our past lives, how do we determine who we are?
5. Eric is our narrator, telling us what he believes is happening to him. Is he reliable? Is he sane or mentally unstable (as one might gather from the second part of the light bulb fragment)? In other words is the conceptual world real—or is Eric delusional?
6. Do you get the play on words with Mycroft Ward—who wants to take over the world? How is he different than the Ludovician?
7. Discuss the different fragments and how they function in the novel. How do they help further the story?
8. Talk about the killing off of the Ludovician, the conceptual sea and boat, and throwing a laptop hooked up to the Mycroft Ward database into the mouth of the shark. Is there some sort of metaphorical significance (other than being diabolically funny)? What do you make of it?
9. Talk about the book's ending? Why does Eric make the choice he does? Is he dead...or still alive? Are Clio and Scout the same person?
10. Raw Shark has been compared to The Matrix and to Memento, even to Alice in Wonderland. If you know those films and book do you see any parallels? Are there parallels to other works you can think of?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Up Island
Anne Rivers Siddons, 1997
HarperCollins
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061715716
Summary
If there was ever one woman who knew what was important, that woman was Molly Bell Redwine. From childhood, Molly was taught by her charismatic, demanding mother that "family is everything." But in what seems like an instant, Molly discovers that family can change without warning. Her husband of more than twenty years leaves her for a younger woman, her domineering mother dies, and her Atlanta clan scatters to the four winds. In a heartbeat Molly is set adrift.
Devasting by her crumbling world, Molly takes refuge with a friend on Martha's Vineyard where she tries to come to terms with who she really is. After the summer season, Molly decides to stay on in this very different world, renting a small cottage on a remote up-island pond.
As Molly's stay up island widens the distance between her and her old life in Atlanta, she lets go of her outworn notions of family and begins to become part of a strange—and very real—new family. As the long Vineyard winter closes in, she braces herself for the search for renewal, identity, and strength, until the healing spring finally comes. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 9, 1936
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.A., Auburn University; Atlanta School of Art
• Currently—lives in Charleston, South Carolina and Maine
Born in 1936 in a small town near Atlanta, Anne Rivers Siddons was raised to be a dutiful daughter of the South — popular, well-mannered, studious, and observant of all the cultural mores of time and place. She attended Alabama's Auburn University in the mid-1950s, just as the Civil Rights Movement was gathering steam. Siddons worked on the staff of Auburn's student newspaper and wrote an editorial in favor of integration. When the administration asked her to pull the piece, she refused. The column ran with an official disclaimer from the university, attracting national attention and giving young Siddons her first taste of the power of the written word.
After a brief stint in the advertising department of a bank, Siddons took a position with the up and coming regional magazine Atlanta, where she worked her way up to senior editor. Impressed by her writing ability, an editor at Doubleday offered her a two-book contract. She debuted in 1975 with a collection of nonfiction essays; the following year, she published Heartbreak Hotel, a semi-autobiographical novel about a privileged Southern coed who comes of age during the summer of 1956.
With the notable exception of 1978's The House Next Door, a chilling contemporary gothic compared by Stephen King to Shirley Jackson's classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, Siddons has produced a string of well-written, imaginative, and emotionally resonant stories of love and loss —all firmly rooted in the culture of the modern South. Her books are consistent bestsellers, with 1988's Peachtree Road (1988) arguably her biggest commercial success. Described by her friend and peer, Pat Conroy, as "the Southern novel for our generation," the book sheds illuminating light on the changing landscape of mid-20th-century Atlanta society.
Although her status as a "regional" writer accounts partially for Siddons' appeal, ultimately fans love her books because they portray with compassion and truth the real lives of women who transcend the difficulties of love and marriage, family, friendship, and growing up.
Extras
• Although she is often compared with another Atlanta author, Margaret Mitchel, Siddons insists that the South she writes about is not the romanticized version found in Gone With the Wind. Instead, her relationship with the region is loving, but realistic. "It's like an old marriage or a long marriage. The commitment is absolute, but the romance has long since worn off...I want to write about it as it really is: I don't want to romanticize it."
• Siddons' debut novel Heartberak Hotel was turned into the 1989 movie Heart of Dixie, starry Ally Sheedy, Virginia Madsen, and Phoebe Cates. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
[T]he story gets frustrating because the reader wants everything to be right for Molly, and that certainly doesn't always happen. Sure there is some sort of resolution at the end, but it is a disjointed and odd conclusion. However...this novel is sure to find its fans. —Mary Frances Wilkens
Booklist
(YA) For Molly Redwine, maintaining her family is the essence of her existence. When her husband announces he is leaving her for another woman, her world collapses. The "other woman" quickly takes over Molly's social position, her house, and even the affection of her son. With the sudden death of her domineering mother, Molly is truly set adrift. Escaping with friends to Martha's Vineyard, she starts the search for her own identity. When her friends depart, she stays on in a small cottage. As a renter, she must also assume the duties of caretaker of two cantankerous old women who share a haunting secret, a gravely ill and estranged son of one of those women, and two territorial swans. Through the winter, Molly struggles to nurture them as she searches for a future for herself. As with most of Siddons's heroines, Molly is an engaging woman who battles successfully with adversity and remains unsinkable. The author's fans will be delighted with her latest novel and its setting. —Katherine Fitch, Lake Braddock Middle School, Burke, VA
School Library Journal
Siddons has her formula down to a science (Fault Lines, 1995, etc.), as this latest once again demonstrates. Molly Bell Redwine is a woman who's never had a chance to discover herself. As a child, she lived under the shadow of her glamorous mother. As a young adult, she met and married Tee, a Coca-Cola executive who fathered her two children, Teddy and Caroline, and kept her comfortable in the manner to which she'd become accustomed. When Tee announces out of the blue that he's met a younger woman, a Coke attorney, and wants a divorce, and Molly's mother up and dies without any notice, Molly's stable if painfully dull Atlanta existence is thrown into disarray. On the advice of her transplanted northern friend Liv, she heads to Liv's house in Martha's Vineyard for the rest of the summer, and to everyone's surprise decides to stay once Liv heads back south at the end of the season. On the island, Molly finds herself in an unusual position as house-sitter, nurse, and friend to two elderly, ill women, and as part-time caretaker to one of the women's sons, who's suffering from cancer and has recently had his leg amputated. On top of it all, Molly's depressed, mourning father joins her, hoping to find solace in this place where he and his daughter are anonymous. But as is often the case—at least in a good Siddons novel—alone doesn't last for long, and love comes when it's least expected. What has seemed at first an unbearable burden transforms Molly in ways she couldn't have imagined. Far-fetched but oddly compelling, this beaten-down housewife's journey to self-reliance and happiness has surprising quirks, lively characters, and actual feeling.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What role do the swans, Charles and Di, play in the lives of each of their human caretakers? What do they represent for Luzia, Bella, Tim and Molly, respectively? And what do they give back to the humans in return for food? Why do you think Tim and Luzia are able to communicate with the swans better than anyone else? What is the significance of the fact that they are a rare breed of mute swans?
2. When Molly's mother dies, her ghost begins visiting, first Molly, and then Tim, in their dreams. What is Belle's ghost trying to say to them? What does she want? And does she get it? What does Belle's hat mean to Molly when she first arrives on Martha's Vineyard? What does the hat come to mean for Molly?
3. What kind of understanding of "family" did Molly inherit from her Mother? Did it change when Molly had a family of her own? How does her up island experience change her notions of family, and in what ways? How might her new understanding help her cope with loss and her husband's betrayal?
4. Livvy says to Molly, "that's what middle age is, one loss after another . . . Didn't anybody ever tell you?" All of the people in Molly's Vineyard "family," her father, Dennis, Bella, Luzia, and herself, suffer from one or more devastating losses. How do they each cope differently with their losses? What enables each of them to ultimately find renewal and hope?
5. Molly muses that her son Teddy was not losing his father from the divorce, "only I was losing. From the perfect skin of The Family, only I was being ejected. How could that be?" How does her separation and potential divorce from Tee irrevocably alter her relationships with her children, friends, and parents as well? How is it that only she "was losing?" And does that still hold true by the end of the novel?
6. Molly agrees to stay in the small up island cottage on the condition that she is not required to become emotionally involved with the Ponders and their mysterious quarrels and struggles. What is it that draws her into the lives of her wards? When does Dennis Ponder cease being an abstract cancer patient and become "real" in her eyes? What kind of relationship do Dennis and Molly arrive at by the end of the novel? How would you characterize it?
7. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." What is the significance of Thoreau's passage for Tim, Dennis and Molly?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Reader
Bernhard Schlink, 1995
Knopf Doubleday
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375707971
Summary
The Reader is both a literary surprise and a moral challenge: a riveting, provocative, and deeply moving novel about a young boy's erotic awakening in a passionate, clandestine love affair with an older woman, and what happens to them both when the secrets in her past are revealed.
Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg becomes ill on the way home from school. A woman takes care of him. Later, the boy arrives at her home with a bunch of flowers to thank her. And then comes back again.
Hanna is the first woman he has ever desired. But there is something slightly off-key about her. His questions about her family and her life go unanswered. One day Hanna simply disappears.
Michael's life goes on, but he can't forget her. Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realize that the person in the dock is Hanna.
The woman he had loved so passionately is a criminal. Much about her behavior during the trial makes no sense. But then, suddenly and terribly, it does—Hanna is not only obliged to answer for a horrible crime, she is also desperately concealing an even deeper secret.
As the past erupts into the present—both Michael's past with Hanna, and the past of Germany itself—Michael must accept that he will never be free of either of them. (From the publisher.)
The 2008 film version of The Reader stars Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes.
Author Bio
• Birth—July 6, 1944
• Where—Bielefeld, Germany
• Awards—Hans Fallada Prize (Italy); Prix Laure Bataillon
(France); Glauser Prize (Germany)
• Currently—New York, New York
Bernhard Schlink is the author of the internationally best selling novel The Reader and of four crime novels, The Gordian Knot, Self Deception, Self-Administered Justice, and Self Slaughter, which are currently being translated into English. He is a professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, in New York. (From the publisher.)
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Bernhard Schlink is a German writer with a legal background. He became a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988 and is a professor for public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany as of January 2006.
His career as a writer began with several detective novels with a main character named Selb—a play on the German word for "self"— (the first, Self's Punishment, co-written with Walter Popp is available in the UK). One of these, Die gordische Schleife, won the Glauser Prize in 1989.
In 1995 he published The Reader (Der Vorleser), a partly autobiographical novel about a teenager who has an affair with a woman in her thirties who suddenly vanishes but whom he meets again as a law student when visiting a trial about war crimes. The book became a bestseller both in Germany and the United States and was translated into 39 languages.
The Reader, translated by Carol Brown Janeway, was the first German book to reach the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list. In 1997 it won the Hans Fallada Prize, an Italian literary award, and the Prix Laure Bataillon for works translated into French. In 1999 it was awarded the "WELT - Literaturpreis" of the newspaper Die Welt. In 2000, Schlink published a collection of short fiction called Flights of Love.
In 2010, Schlink published The Weekend, about a pardoned German terrorist from the late 1960's, who meets with old friends and comrades in a weekend country house to recall old times. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews;
A counterpointing of two stories, or a story and a history, of victim and victimizer, culpability and disavowal, indictment and extenuation...Bernhard Schlink has taken on a grievously formidable subject.... We praise books that, as we say, make us think. The Reader makes us think...about things we would rather not think about, issues which the book leaves open and we might wish to have closed one way or another.
D. J. Enright - The New York Review of Books
A formally beautiful, disturbing and finally morally devastating novel. From the first page, [The Reader] enshares both heart and mind.
Los Angeles Times
Another in the spate of soul-searching post-Holocaust German novels that have made their way here, this elegant if derivative triptych chronicles the relationship of narrator Michael Berg, a young bourgeois man who becomes a legal historian, with working-class Hanna Schmitz, 20 years his senior and (as it turns out) a former SS officer. They meet in the 1950s, when he is 15: she rescues him when he falls ill in the street from the effects of hepatitis. His thank-you visit results in months of trysts; the lovers develop a routine that involves Michael reading aloud from the German classics. Part Two opens at Hanna's trial 10 years later for war crimes: assigned by chance to observe the trial, Michael continues his strange role as her reader, sending her tapes in prison until, in Part Three, the two finally, and tragically, meet again. Some readers may object to Schlink's insistently withheld moral judgments: he never treats Hanna as just a villain. Yet this well-translated novel indisputably offers a philosophical look at the 'numbness' that settled over German culture during the war and that (Schlink seems to say) infects it to this day.
Publishers Weekly
After falling ill on the street in the German town where he lives, 15-year-old Michael is helped by a woman named Hanna. When he returns to her apartment to thank her several months later, he begins a passionate love affair with her. In time, she demands that he read aloud to her before they make love, and they essay some of Germany's and the world's great literature together. One day, however, Hanna disappears without saying farewell, and Michael grieves and believes it to be his fault. He finds her again years later when, as a law student, he encounters her as the defendant in a court case. To reveal more of the plot would be unfair, but this very readable novel by German author Schlink probes the nature of love, guilt, and responsibility while painting a sympathetic portrait of Michael and an achingly complex picture of Hanna. —Towson State University, MD
Michael T. O'Pecko - Library Journal
A compact portrayal of a teenaged German boy's love affair with an emotionally remote older woman, and the troubled consequence of his discovery of who she really is and why she simultaneously needed him and rejected him. Seven years after their intimacy, university student Michael Berg accidentally learns that (now) 40ish Hannah Schmitz had concealed from him a past that reaches back to Auschwitz and had burdened her with nightmares from which her young lover was powerless to awaken her. Toward its climax, the novel becomes, fitfully, frustratingly abstract, but on balance this is a gripping psychological study that moves skillfully toward its surprising and moving conclusion.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. At what point does the significance of the book's title become clear to you? Who is "The Reader"? Are there others in the story with an equally compelling claim to this role?
2. When does the difference in social class between Hanna and Michael become most clear and painful? Why does Hanna feel uncomfortable staying overnight in Michael's house? Is Hanna angry about her lack of education?
3. Why is the sense of smell so important in this story? What is it about Hanna that so strongly provokes the boy's desire? If Hanna represents "an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body" [p. 16], why is she the only woman Michael seems able to love?
4. One reviewer has pointed out that "learning that the love of your life used to be a concentration camp guard is not part of the American baby-boomer experience." [Suzanna Ruta, New York Times Book Review, July 27, 1997: 8] Is The Reader's central theme—love and betrayal between generations—particular to Germany, given the uniqueness of German history? Is there anything roughly parallel to it in the American experience?
5. In a novel so suffused with guilt, how is Michael guilty? Does his narrative serve as a way of putting himself on trial? What verdict does he reach? Is he asking readers to examine the evidence he presents and to condemn him or exonerate him? Or has he already condemned himself?
6. When Michael consults his father about Hanna's trial, does his father give him good advice? Why does Michael not act upon this advice? Is the father deserving of the son's scorn and disappointment? Is Michael's love for Hanna meant, in part, to be an allegory for his generation'simplication in their parents' guilt?
7. Do you agree with Michael's judgment that Hanna was sympathetic with the prisoners she chose to read to her, and that she wanted their final month of life to be bearable? Or do you see Hanna in a darker light: do the testimonies about her cruelty and sadism ring true?
8. Asked to explain why she didn't let the women out of the burning church, Hanna remembers being urgently concerned with the need to keep order. What is missing in her reasoning process? Are you surprised at her responses to the judge's attempt to prompt her into offering self-defense as an excuse?
9. Why does Hanna twice ask the judge, "what would you have done?" Is the judge sympathetic toward Hanna? What is she trying to communicate in the moment when she turns and looks directly at him?
10. Why does Michael visit the concentration camp at Struthof? What is he seeking? What does he find instead?
11. Michael comments that Enlightenment law (the foundation of the American legal system as well as the German one) was "based on the belief that a good order is intrinsic to the world" [p. 181]. How does his experience with Hanna's trial influence Michael's view of history and of law?
12. What do you think of Michael's decision to send Hanna the tapes? He notices that the books he has chosen to read aloud "testify to a great and fundamental confidence in bourgeois culture" [p. 185]. Does the story of Hanna belie this faith? Would familiarity with the literature she later reads have made any difference in her willingness to collaborate in Hitler's regime?
13. One might argue that Hanna didn't willfully collaborate with Hitler's genocide and that her decisions were driven only by a desire to hide her secret. Does this view exonerate Hanna in any way? Are there any mitigating circumstances in her case? How would you have argued for her, if you were a lawyer working in her defense?
14. Do you agree with the judgment of the concentration camp survivor to whom Michael delivers Hanna's money at the end of the novel? Why does she accept the tea tin, but not the money? Who knew Hanna better--Michael or this woman? Has Michael been deluded by his love? Is he another of Hanna's victims?
15. Why does Hanna do what she does at the end of the novel? Does her admission that the dead "came every night, whether I wanted them or not" [pp. 198-99] imply that she suffered for her crimes? Is complicity in the crimes of the Holocaust an unforgivable sin?
16. How does this novel leave you feeling and thinking? Is it hopeful or ultimately despairing? If you have read other Holocaust literature, how does The Reader compare?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Maggie O'Farrell, 2007
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781443420105
Summary
In the middle of tending to the everyday business at her vintage clothing shop and sidestepping her married boyfriend's attempts at commitment, Iris Lockhart receives a stunning phone call: Her great-aunt Esme, whom she never knew existed, is being released from Cauldstone Hospital—where she has been locked away for over sixty years.
Iris’s grandmother Kitty always claimed to be an only child. But Esme’s papers prove she is Kitty’s sister, and Iris can see the shadow of her dead father in Esme’s face. Esme has been labeled harmless—sane enough to coexist with the rest of the world.
But Esme’s still basically a stranger, a family member never mentioned by the family, and one who is sure to bring life-altering secrets with her when she leaves the ward. If Iris takes her in, what dangerous truths might she inherit?
Maggie O’Farrell’s intricate tale of family secrets, lost lives, and the freedom brought by truth will haunt readers long past its final page. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Where—Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK
• Raised—Wales and Scotland, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Awards—Costa Award; Betty Trask Award; Somerset Maugham Award
• Currently—lives in London, England
Maggie O'Farrell is a British author of contemporary fiction, who was once featured in Waterstones' 25 Authors for the Future. It is possible to identify several common themes in her novels—the relationship between sisters is one, another is loss and the psychological impact of those losses on the lives of her characters.
The Vanishing Act Esme Lennox was published in 2007. In 2010 O'Farrell won the Costa novel award for The Hand That First Held Mine. Her 2013 novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, also received wide acclaim.
Maggie was born in Ireland and grew up in Wales and Scotland. At the age of eight she missed a year of school due to a viral infection, an event that is echoed in The Distance Between Us. Maggie worked as a journalist, both in Hong Kong and as the Deputy Literary Editor of The Independent on Sunday. She has also taught creative writing.
She is married to the novelist William Sutcliffe, whom she met at Cambridge. They live in Hampstead Heath, London, with their two children. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
O'Farrell is a very visual writer, creating dead-on images like the "arched pink rafters" of a dog's mouth and a chandelier's "points of light kaleidoscoping" above a dance floor. This talent serves her well at the novel's startling and darkly rewarding finale.
Julia Scheeres - New York Times
Maggie O'Farrell's three previous novels have been respectfully reviewed, but her new one radiates the kind of energy that marks a classic. Think Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" or Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea: stories that illuminate the suffering quietly endured by women in polite society. To that list of insightful feminist tales add The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. At the heart of this fantastic new novel is a mystery you want to solve until you start to suspect the truth, and then you read on in a panic, horrified that you may be right.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
O'Farrell's fourth novel brilliantly illustrates her talent for gradually revealing her characters'' inner lives by jumping back and forth in time and juxtaposing different narrative points of view.... A gripping read with superbly crafted scenes that will blaze in the reader's memory long after the novel is returned to the shelf.
Booklist
Iris Lockhart leads a solitary if spicy life, managing her clothing shop in Edinburgh and dallying with her married lover. But when Iris learns that she has a great-aunt Esme waiting to be released from Cauldstone Hospital, where she has been locked away for 60 years, it is as if a bomb has dropped. The hospital is closing, and someone must collect Esme, who upon inspection seems frail, quiet, and a little quirky but hardly mentally ill. As far as Iris knew, her grandmother Kitty had no siblings; Kitty is still alive but suffering from Alzheimer's. The secret of Esme's existence is only the first of many family secrets revealed in a tale told through shifting viewpoints, among them Kitty's fragmented recollections. A sudden ending to this finely wrought family expose may leave some readers in the lurch, but the psychological suspense along the way should satisfy those looking for both strong plot and characterization. Recommended for literary fiction collections
Keddy Ann Outlaw - Library Journal
When the willfully unattached Iris Lockhart receives a call about a great aunt she never met, her loner lifestyle gets woven into a much larger family drama. Iris may harbor a secret forbidden passion, but in her real-life affairs she prefers a detached approach. Therefore, when a call comes from the soon-to-close Cauldstone Hospital, asking what she would like to do with an elderly relative she didn't know existed, she is faced with more intimacy than she's comfortable with. Her great-aunt Esme, mistakenly called "Euphemia" by the staff, has been hospitalized for more than 60 years for various vague psychiatric disorders, at one point it seems for simply not wanting her hair to be cut. After Iris tries to place her, and recoils from the horrors of the recommended halfway house, she takes her into her own flat, carved out of the Scottish family's original grand home, on a trial basis. Over the course of one long weekend, that trial reveals truths about why Esme was hospitalized and why Iris never heard of her, and also delves into Iris's fear of intimacy as her married lover, Luke, teeters on the edge of leaving his wife. Relying on a complex structure that recalls O'Farrell's earlier work, most of the book's present action is focused on Iris's day-to-day functioning. But this contemporary action is merely the finale of a drama that's been going on since Esme's youth in India. That story unfolds primarily through a series of inner monologues. Esme enjoys rediscovering some memories but avoids others, while her sister Kitty, now institutionalized with Alzheimer's, runs through old mistakes and excuses that still haunt her in her dementia. At times, these competing voices, each with a different take on exactly what happened, can be confusing, but by the novel's surprising ending, each has become clear. Despite occasional opacity, this slow-building, impressionistic work amply rewards dedicated readers with a moving human drama.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Some of the earliest scenes Esme shares with the reader are those from her childhood in India. What do they reveal about Esme, her family, and their place in time and society?
2. Alex and Luke are both married men in love with Iris. Do you think Iris really loves either one of them? Why or why not?
3. O'Farrell's novel is steeped in secrets. As the story of Esme and Kitty unfolds simultaneously with the story of Iris and Alex, O'Farrell offers clues about the true nature of these relationships. How do these two stories relate to each other? How does it affect your feelings about the characters?
4. Why do you think Esme was sent to Cauldstone, and never released to go home? Do you think she is mentally unbalanced? Give examples from the book to support your opinion.
5. Esme is both taken aback and fascinated by many things that Iris shows and tells her. What does Esme find so remarkable about Iris? How are Iris and Esme similar? How are they different?
6. As Iris discovers more about Cauldstone, she discovers some of the more outrageous reasons that women were sent to "mad houses" like it. According to the novel's descriptions of that time period, what do you think drove this trend? Do you think changes have occurred in our view and treatment of women who don't "behave"? Why or why not?
7. O'Farrell creates distinct voices for the three main characters and shifts between their points of view to tell the story. Why do you think the author made this choice? What do the characteristics of these different voices reveal about Iris, Esme, and Kitty? How does this technique affect your reading experience?
8. How will the revelation of Esme and Kitty's secret change Iris's life? Do you think it will alter her relationships with Luke and Alex?
9. What do you make of the ending? What do you imagine will happen to these characters after the last page is turned? Has the author satisfied your interest in these characters?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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