The Red Scarf
Kate Furnivall, 2008
Penguin Group USA
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425221648
Summary
Davinsky Labor Camp, Siberia, 1933: Only two things in this wretched place keep Sofia from giving up hope: the prospect of freedom, and the stories told by her friend and fellow prisoner Anna, of a charmed childhood in Petrograd, and her fervent girlhood love for a passionate revolutionary named Vasily.
After a perilous escape, Sofia endures months of desolation and hardship. But, clinging to a promise she made to Anna, she subsists on the belief that someday she will track down Vasily. In a remote village, she's nursed back to health by a Gypsy family, and there she finds more than refuge-she also finds Mikhail Pashin, who, her heart tells her, is Vasily in disguise. He's everything she has ever wanted—but he belongs to Anna.
After coming this far, Sofia is tantalizingly close to freedom, family—even a future. All that stands in her way is the secret past that could endanger everything she has come to hold dear. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Penarth, Wales, UK
• Education—London University
• Currently—lives in Devon, England
Kate Furnivall was raised in Penarth, a small seaside town in Wales. Her mother, whose own childhood was spent in Russia, China and India, discovered at an early age that the world around us is so volatile, that the only things of true value are those inside your head and your heart. These values Kate explores in The Russian Concubine.
Kate went to London University where she studied English and from there she went into publishing, writing material for a series of books on the canals of Britain. Then into advertising where she met her future husband, Norman. She travelled widely, giving her an insight into how different cultures function which was to prove invaluable when writing The Russian Concubine.
By now Kate had two sons and so moved out of London to a 300-year old thatched cottage in the countryside where Norman became a full-time crime writer. He won the John Creasey Award in 1987, writing as Neville Steed. Kate and Norman now live by the sea in the beautiful county of Devon, only 5 minutes from the home of Agatha Christie!
It was when her mother died in 2000 that Kate decided to write a book inspired by her mother's story. The Russian Concubine contains fictional characters and events, but Kate made use of the extraordinary situation that was her mother's childhood experience — that of two White Russian refugees, a mother and daughter, stuck without money or papers in an International Settlement in China. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Sophia Morozova's relationship with fragile Anna Fedorina begins through a small act of kindness at a 1930s Siberian labor camp. As the two inmates struggle daily to survive, they increasingly rely on each other for hope and comfort; when Anna falls ill, Sophia escapes, intending to find Anna's lifelong love, Vasily, and rescue Anna. Beautiful and charismatic, Sophia quickly becomes a force to reckon with in the town of Tivil, where she hopes to find Vasily, and her connections with powerful gypsy Rafik, the handsome factory director Mikhail Pashin and the stern but unreadable Aleksei Fomenko become satisfying sources of danger and desire. Furnivall (The Russian Concubine) paints a stark picture of rampant scarcity, grim regimentation and blaring propaganda in pre-WWII Soviet Russia. In pushing the limits of Sophia and Anna's love and friendship, she nicely pits small lives against a monolithic state, paradoxically composed of watchful villages.
Publishers Weekly
Can a Russian Gypsy with mystical powers protect a wretched village from marauding soldiers and commissars? Does the daughter of a murdered priest succeed in springing her best friend from a Siberian labor camp? Will an innocent victim of the Gulag find her true love? Furnivall, whose previous novel, The Russian Concubine, was set in 1920s China, now moves to Siberia in 1933, when Stalin's agricultural collectivization policies sent millions to their deaths. Following the path of Dr. Zhivago and the more recent The People's Act of Love, this romantic confection can make a reader shiver with dread for the horrors visited on the two heroines imprisoned in a labor camp and quiver with anticipation for their happy endings. Furnivall shows she has the narrative skills to deliver a sweeping historical epic, but we get too much of a good thing with a too-convoluted plot and repetitive sufferings. Still, the novel arrives in time for great beach reading and will fit well into the popular fiction collections of most large public libraries.
Barbara Conaty - Library Journal
Beautifully detailed descriptions of the land and the compelling characters who move through a surprisingly upbeat plot make this one of the year’s best reads. —Jen Baker
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Red Scarf:
1. Talk about the conditions of the labor camp and how they foreshadow the Nazi concentration camps 10 years later. What is the camp's purpose, and how realistic do you think the novel's descriptions are?
2. Sofia and Anna form a deep friendship in the camp. Do you think bonds of friendship become more intense under the harsh conditions of a labor camp?
3. Sofia escapes to find Vasily in hopes that he can rescue Anna. After hearing stories about him, has Sofia fallen in love with him before she has even met him? Talk about Sofia's belief that Mikahil is Vasily—and how her growing attraction to him strains or tests the bonds of loyalty to Anna.
4. Discuss the mystical side of the novel. Are the gypsy Rafik's powers believable? Do you think they enhance or detract from what is otherwise a realistic story line?
5. When the Soviets banned the practice of religion, villagers took their faith underground. Why would the regime find religion a threat to the political order? And why will people go to such dangerous lengths to uphold their beliefs?
6. What about the title? What thematic significance does Sofia's red scarf carry in the novel?
7. Do you find the characters believable? Does Furnivall develop them into rich, psychologically complex individuals? Or do you find them flat, stereotypical figures—pure good vs. pure evil? Or something in between?
8. Were you surprised by the novel's reversal of events, the twists and turns of the plot? Did you feel manipulated...or is that how real life sometimes unfolds?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them online or off with attribution. Thanks.)
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Villette
Charlotte Bronte, 1853
~250 pp. (Varies by publisher.)
Summary
With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Bronte reached the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853, Villette is Bronte's most accomplished and deeply felt work, eclipsing even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim.
Bronte's narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There, she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquetter.
This first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life's journey—a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman's consciousness in English literature. (From Knopf Doubleday.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 21, 1816
• Where—Thornton, Yorkshire, England
• Death—March 31, 1855
• Where—Haworth, West Yorkshire, England
• Education—Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in
Lancashire; Miss Wooler's School at Roe Head; Pensionnat
Heger (Belgium, to study French and German)
Bronte was born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England, the third child of the Reverend Patrick Bronte and Maria Branwell Bronte. In 1820 the family moved to neighboring Haworth, where Reverend Brontë was offered a lifetime curacy. The following year Mrs. Brontë died of cancer, and her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, moved in to help raise the six children.
The four eldest sisters—Charlotte, Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth—attended Cowan Bridge School, until Maria and Elizabeth contracted what was probably tuberculosis and died within months of each other, at which point Charlotte and Emily returned home. The four remaining siblings—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—played on the Yorkshire moors and dreamed up fanciful, fabled worlds, creating a constant stream of tales, such as the Young Men plays (1826) and Our Fellows (1827).
Reverend Bronte kept his children abreast of current events; among these were the 1829 parliamentary debates centering on the Catholic Question, in which the Duke of Wellington was a leading voice. Charlotte's awareness of politics filtered into her fictional creations, as in the siblings' saga The Islanders (1827), about an imaginary world peopled with the Brontë children's real-life heroes, in which Wellington plays a central role as Charlotte's chosen character.
Throughout her childhood, Charlotte had access to the circulating library at the nearby town of Keighley. She knew the Bible and read the works of Shakespeare, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott, and she particularly admired William Wordsworth and Robert Southey. In 1831 and 1832, Charlotte attended Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head, and she returned there as a teacher from 1835 to 1838. After working for a couple of years as a governess, Charlotte, with her sister Emily, traveled to Brussels to study, with the goal of opening their own school, but this dream did not materialize once she returned to Haworth in 1844.
Midlife
In 1846 the sisters published their collected poems under the pen names Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell. That same year Charlotte finished her first novel, The Professor, but it was not accepted for publication.
However, she began work on Jane Eyre, which was published in 1847 and met with instant success. Though some critics saw impropriety in the core of the story—the relationship between a middle-aged man and the young, naive governess who works for him—most reviewers praised the novel, helping to ensure its popularity. One of Charlotte's literary heroes, William Makepeace Thackeray, wrote her a letter to express his enjoyment of the novel and to praise her writing style, as did the influential literary critic G. H. Lewes.
Following the deaths of Branwell and Emily Bronte in 1848 and Anne in 1849, Charlotte made trips to London, where she began to move in literary circles that included such luminaries as Thackeray, whom she met for the first time in 1849; his daughter described Bronte as "a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady." In 1850 she met the noted British writer Elizabeth Gaskell, with whom she formed a lasting friendship and who, at the request of Reverend Bronte, later became her biographer. Charlotte's novel Villette was published in 1853.
In 1854 Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, a curate at Haworth who worked with her father. Sadly, less than a year later, Bronte died during her first pregnancy. While her death certificate lists the cause of death as "phthisis" (tuberculosis), there is a school of thought that believes she may have died from excessive vomiting caused by morning sickness. At the time of her death, Charlotte Brontë was a celebrated author. The 1857 publication of her first novel, The Professor, and of Gaskell's biography of her life only heightened her renown. (Bio from Barnes and Noble Classic Edition.)
Book Reviews
(Classic books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Bronte's finest novel
Virginia Woolfe
It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.
George Eliot
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the character of Lucy Snowe. Do you find her to be an admirable heroine? What qualities do you like in her, or dislike? How do you think you would behave in her circumstances?
2. Writing to her publisher, Charlotte Bronte had this to say about Vilette's protagonist: "I consider that [Lucy Snowe] is both morbid and weak at times; her character sets up no pretensions to unmixed strength, and anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid." What do you think of this appraisal? Do her 'unheroic' qualities make her more sympathetic or less?
3. Virginia Woolf felt that Villette was Bronte's "finest novel," and speaking about Bronte, wrote that "All her force, and it is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, 'I love, I hate, I suffer.'" What do you think Woolf means? Do you find this observation interesting, appealing, or moving?
4. Why do you think Bronte sets the narrative of Villette in a foreign country?
5. Explore the theme of education in Villette: What is the role of education in Lucy Snowe's own life?
6. The conclusion of Villette is famously ambiguous (it was made purposefully so by Bronte). Do you find it a happy ending? A sad one? Discuss.
________________
Additional questions by LitLovers.
7. In what way does Lucy Snowe live up to her name? Why is she so withholding of her emotions? What is she afraid of? Can you pin point the first moment she reveals tenderness?
8. Lucy has a revealing conversation with little Polly, the night Polly learns she is returning to her father. When Polly asks Lucy if she likes Graham, Lucy twice tells her "a little." Then Lucy goes on, "Where is the use of caring for him so very much: he is full of faults." .... "All boys are." Care to comment on that exchange? What does Lucy's attitude toward men reveal about her, and how does it serve her when she goes to Villette? At the end of the chapter, when Polly crawls into Lucy's bed for warmth, what is Lucy's response to her? What does Lucy ponder?
9. In fact, what are we to make of the entire episode about Polly? Why is it in the novel at all? Is Polly to serve as a parallel or a contrast to Lucy?
10. Why isn't Lucy's past spelled out more precisely? Can you speculate about what happened to her family? Any theories as to how she came be to alone and isolated in the world?
11. Were you disappointed that the romance between Dr. John and Lucy failed? Would he have made an appropriate mate for Lucy; in fact, is he good enough for Lucy? And why does she never reveal to him how they are connected?
12. How does M. Paul compare to Dr. John? In what way is Lucy and M. Paul's love "far better than common?"
13. From this novel, what can you ascertain about the lives of single women in the mid-19th century? What kind of security was available to them? What kinds of work? How was a woman to live if she was without family or husband?
14. Discuss the religious differences—between catholicism and protestantism—as expressed in Villette. Are those differences in evidence today?
(Questions 1-6 by Knopf Doubleday; 7-15 by LitLovers. Please feel free to use both sets, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Await Your Reply
Dan Chaon, 2009
Random House
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345476036
Summary
The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways—and with unexpected consequences—in acclaimed author Dan Chaon’s gripping, brilliantly written novel.
Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.
A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.
My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself—through unconventional and precarious means.
Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Raised—Sidney, Nebraska, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Syracuse University
• Awards—Pushcart Prize; O'Henry Award; Academy Award in
Literature-The American Academy of Arts & Letters
• Currently—lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, USA
Dan Chaon (pronounced "Shawn") is the acclaimed author of Fitting Ends and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award, which was also listed as one of the ten best books of the year by the American Library Association, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and Entertainment Weekly, as well as being cited as a New York Times Notable Book.
Chaon’s fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and won both Pushcart and O. Henry awards. Chaon teaches at Oberlin College and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with his wife and two sons. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Stunning…. Mr. Chaon succeeds in both creating suspense and making it pay off, but ‘Await Your Reply’ also does something even better. Like the finest of his storytelling heroes, Mr. Chaon manages to bridge the gap between literary and pulp fiction with a clever, insinuating book equally satisfying to fans of either genre. He does travel two roads, even though that guy David Frost said it wasn’t possible.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Readers be warned: Before sitting down with Dan Chaon's ambitious, gripping and unrelentingly bleak new novel, you might want to catch a "Seinfeld" rerun or two. Jerry and the gang's quips will be the last laugh-lines you'll get for a while…Chaon is a dark, provocative writer, and Await Your Reply is a dark, provocative book; in bringing its three strands together, Chaon has fashioned a braid out of barbed wire.
Lucinda Rosenfeld - New York Times Book Review
Here's what can be safely revealed about Await Your Reply: It contains three separate stories about people driving away from their homes, abandoning their lives and remaking themselves…Any one of these arresting plots could have sustained the entire book, but Chaon rotates through them chapter by chapter. Not only that, but the chronology of each story is jumbled so that the novel isn't so much cubed as Rubik's Cubed. I know that sounds like a literary headache, but these are engrossing, nerve-racking storylines that continually hand off to one another without breaking stride, leaving us as fascinated as we are disoriented…The result is a novel that succeeds as brilliantly as the short stories that have won him a National Book Award nomination, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
(4 stars.) A deliciously disturbing literary thriller. In the end, Await Your Reply is a story that unfolds with chilling precision. You'll be spellbound from start to finish.
People
(Starred review.) Three disparate characters and their oddly interlocking lives propel this intricate novel about lost souls and hidden identities from National Book Award–finalist Chaon (You Remind Me of Me). Eighteen-year-old Lucy Lattimore, her parents dead, flees her stifling hometown with charismatic high school teacher George Orson, soon to find herself enmeshed in a dangerous embezzling scheme. Meanwhile, Miles Chesire is searching for his unstable twin brother, Hayden, a man with many personas who's been missing for 10 years and is possibly responsible for the house fire that killed their mother. Ryan Schuyler is running identity-theft scams for his birth father, Jay Kozelek, after dropping out of college to reconnect with him, dazed and confused after learning he was raised thinking his father was his uncle. Chaon deftly intertwines a trio of story lines, showcasing his characters' individuality by threading subtle connections between and among them with effortless finesse, all the while invoking the complexities of what's real and what's fake with mesmerizing brilliance. This novel's structure echoes that of his well-received debut—also a book of threes—even as it bests that book's elegant prose, haunting plot and knockout literary excellence.
Publishers Weekly
Miles Cheshire is driving from Cleveland to Alaska in search of his disturbed twin brother, Hayden, another leg of a crusade that has consumed him for more than a decade. Ryan Schuyler is 19 when he discovers that he is adopted and his real father, a con man who deals in fraud and identity theft, now wants Ryan to live with him. Orphaned Lucy Lattimore leaves town with her former high school history teacher when his dreams of riches and travel fill the hole in her life. This chillingly harsh work by Chaon (You Remind Me of Me) will make you question your own identity and sense of time. His characters live on the outskirts of society, even of their own lives. Yet we are compelled to read about them, driven to see it through. Verdict: This novel is unrelenting, like the scene of an accident: we are repulsed by the blood, but we cannot look away. For fans of pulse-pounding drama, Chaon never fails to impress. —Bette-Lee Fox
Library Journal
Dan Chaon, whose two collections established him as one of America's most promising short story writers, returns this fall with a second novel, Await Your Reply, easily his most ambitious work to date. As in his stories and previous novel (You Remind Me of Me, 2004), this book focuses on family dynamics, the quest for identity and the essence of the Heartland—in some ways, Chaon is to the Midwest what Richard Russo is to the Northeast—but the structure has an innovative audacity missing from his earlier, more straightforward work. The novel initially seems to be three separate narratives, presented in round-robin fashion, connected only by some plot similarities (characters on a quest or on the lam, a tragic loss of parents) and thematic underpinnings (the chimera of identity). One narrative concerns a college dropout who learns that the man he thought was his uncle is really his father, who recruits him for some criminal activity involving identity theft. The second involves an orphan who runs away with her high-school history teacher. The third features a twin in his 30s in search of his brother, likely a paranoid schizophrenic who occasionally sends messages yet refuses to be found. It's a tribute to Chaon's narrative command that each of these parallel narratives sustains the reader's interest, even though there's little indication through two-thirds of the novel that these stories will ever intersect. And when they do, the results are so breathtaking in their inevitability that the reader practically feels compelled to start the novel anew, just to discover the cues that he's missed along the way.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. “Hayden used to be obsessed with orphans,” Miles remembers in Chapter 16, and
it seems that Await Your Reply is full of characters who have lost one or both parents.
Why is the loss of a parent—being an orphan—of such interest to Hayden? How does it
fit in with the themes of the book?
2. Ch 16 Lydia Barrie “reinvent themselves speech.” Is identity truly more fluid than it
used to be? If so, why? What makes up a person’s identity? What holds us to a single
sense of self?
3. Is Miles’ loyalty to Hayden an admirable trait? How do issues of loyalty and betrayal
play out in the stories of the various main characters?
(Questions from author's website.)
Additional Questions from the publisher:
1. The structure of this novel is unconventional and complex, and each storyline echoes, intertwines, and plays off the others. How did the novel’s non-linear and fragmentary nature affect your understanding of the plot? How does the complicated, pixelated nature of the novel reflect the themes of identity in the novel?
2. Before they go looking for Hayden and Rachel, Lydia Barrie says to Miles, “What kind of person decides that they can throw everything away and—reinvent themselves? As if you could discard the parts of your life that you didn’t want anymore” (197). What do you think is the appeal of reinvention for Ryan, Lucy, and Hayden? What motivates each character to shed their original selves? Do you think it’s possible for people to “discard” unwanted aspects of themselves?
3. The novel continually circles around the notion of a soul, from Lucy’s assuming that George Orson has one, “though she didn’t know the soul’s real name” (223), to the Vladimir Nabokov epigraph at the beginning of part two: “…the soul is but a manner of being…any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations” (93). What do you make of these two conflicting ideas? In the world of the novel, where identities are constantly shifting and dissolving, do souls remain unscathed and whole? Why do we rely on this concept of “the soul”? How does it allow us to understand ourselves and others around us?
4. During Ryan’s tenure with Jay, he muses on how the identities he inhabits are like “shells…hollow skins that you stepped into and that began to solidify over time…They began to take on a life of their own, developed substance” (103). How do we see this come true in the novel? What makes the characters in the novel real or unreal? Is it true that “You could be anyone” (297), as Ryan later tells himself?
5. In chapter 10, the narrative addresses the reader: “…you are aware of your life as a continuous thread, a dependable unfolding story that you tell yourself…You are still you, after all, through all of these hours and days; you are still whole” (88-89). Is this how you conceive or yourself? Has this book affected how you perceive yourself and your identity? How did you interpret this second-person chapter?
6. While Miles never changes his identity, he does attempt to reinvent himself to some degree when he moves back to Cleveland. Why do you think Miles is unable to continue with this new, stable life? What propels his obsession with Hayden? Do you think at the end of the novel Miles is truly finished with his journey—has he accepted the “ending” (289) Hayden has offered him?
7. Do you think anyone in the novel is able to connect with another person? Is there a real connection between Lucy and George Orson, for instance, despite the unreality of his identity? What about between Hayden and Miles? Ryan and Jay? Is authenticity and honesty a requirement for human intimacy?
8. Dan Chaon once said, “I have always thought of myself as a kind of ghost-story/horror writer, though most of the time the supernatural never actually appears on stage.” Does this ring true for Await Your Reply? The novel is billed as literary fiction with the suspense of a thriller, and echoes of horror and gothic fiction. Where did you notice this playfulness with genre? Did it remind you of anything you’ve read in the past?
9. Eadem mutate resurgo: “Although changed, I shall arise the same. This is the Latin phrase that Hayden includes in his memorial at Banks Island, and which he reflects on in the last chapter. What do you think this phrase ultimately says about Hayden and his actions?
10. At what point where you able to put these storylines together, to understand what had happened? How did your understanding of the events shift as you read further? Did you believe something early on that did or didn’t come to fruition?
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Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
Knopf Doubleday
317 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679723165
Summary
Nabokov's Lolita was originally published in 1955 and immediately became embroiled in its own censorship battles.
The story is admittedly, purposefully, a shocking one: Humbert Humbert, an emigré academic, has a thing for young girls. Nymphets, he calls them, prepubescent girls who betray some precocious awareness of their own sensuality. Upon accepting a position at a new college, Humbert rents a room in town and falls madly, passionately, horrifyingly in love with his landlady's 12-year-old daughter, Dolores Haze, the Lolita of the novel's title. He marries Dolores's mother in order to maintain proximity to Dolores herself, and his relationship with her very quickly exceeds the bounds of stepfatherly affection.
There are several upsetting things about this story, not the least of which is that, it appears, Lolita herself is the seducer, and Humbert the seducee. Hence the ubiquitous comparisons of any precociously sexual, slightly dangerous girl to this character (for example, the "Long Island Lolita"). These comparisons—and the moral censorship to which the novel has been subject—are, however, based on a most superficial reading of the book, one that overlooks a basic literary concept: the unreliable narrator.
Humbert Humbert is the one who tells us the story. From an insane asylum. He's a child molester and, ultimately, a murderer. Why on earth should we take his word for how it happened?
This, in fact, is the real story of Lolita. The novel is about the ways in which a reader can be manipulated to feel sympathy for—even to identify with—the most horrifying person imaginable. That early readers of the novel were so shocked by Dolores's behavior—so shocked, in fact, that governments moved to ban the book—is precisely Nabokov's point: Rather than acknowledge the ultimate evil that lies under the otherwise charming persona, we as a culture are more inclined to turn him into a tragic hero, a victim. (From the editors at Barnes and Noble.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 23, 1899
• Where—St. Petersburg, Russia
• Death—July 02, 1977
• Where—Montreux, Switzerland
• Education—Trinity College, Cambridge
The eldest son of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and his wife Elena, née Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova, he was born to a prominent and aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, where he also spent his childhood and youth. Nabokov's childhood, which he called "perfect", was remarkable in several ways. The family spoke Russian, English and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. In fact, much to his father's patriotic chagrin, Nabokov could read and write English before he could Russian. In Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls numerous details of his privileged childhood, and his ability to recall in vivid detail memories of his past was a boon to him during his permanent exile, as well as providing a theme which echoes from his first book Mary all the way to later works such as Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
The Nabokov family left Russia in the wake of the 1917 February Revolution for a friend's estate in Crimea, where they remained for 18 months. At this point the family did not expect to be out of Russia for very long, when in fact they would never return. Following the defeat of the White Army in Crimea in 1919, the Nabokovs left Russia for exile in western Europe. The family settled briefly in England, where Vladimir enrolled in Trinity College, Cambridge and studied Slavic and Romance languages where his experiences would later help him to write the novel Glory.
In 1923, Nabokov graduated from Cambridge and relocated to Berlin, where he gained a reputation within the colony of Russian émigrés as a novelist and poet, writing under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin. He married Véra Slonim in Berlin in 1925. Their son, Dmitri, was born in 1934.
In 1922, Nabokov's father was assassinated in Berlin by Russian monarchists as he tried to shelter their real target, Pavel Milyukov, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. This episode of mistaken, violent death would echo again and again in the author's fiction, where characters would meet their violent deaths under mistaken terms. In Pale Fire, for example, the poet Shade is mistaken for a judge who resembles him and is murdered.
Nabokov was a synesthete* and described aspects of synesthesia in several of his works. In his memoir Speak, Memory, he notes that his wife also exhibited synesthesia; like her husband, her mind's eye associated colors with particular letters. They discovered that Dmitri shared the trait, and moreover that the colors he associated with some letters were in some cases blends of his parents' hues—"which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle".
Nabokov left Germany with his family in 1937 for Paris and in 1940 fled from the advancing German troops to the United States. It was here that he met Edmund Wilson, who introduced Nabokov's work to American editors, eventually leading to his international recognition.
Nabokov came to Wellesley College in 1941 as resident lecturer in comparative literature. The position, created specifically for him, provided an income and free time to write creatively and pursue his lepidoptery. Nabokov is remembered as the founder of Wellesley's Russian Department. His lecture series on major nineteenth-century Russian writers was hailed as "funny," "learned," and "brilliantly satirical." During this time, the Nabokovs resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Following a lecture tour through the United States, Nabokov returned to Wellesley for the 1944-45 academic year as a lecturer in Russian. He served through the 1947–48 term as Wellesley's one-man Russian Department, offering courses in Russian language and literature. His classes were popular, due as much to his unique teaching style as to the wartime interest in all things Russian. At the same time he was curator of lepidoptery at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Biology. After being encouraged by Morris Bishop, Nabokov left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European literature at Cornell University. In 1945, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Also in 1945, Vladimir Nabokov was told by a relative that his homosexual brother, Sergei, who had lived most of his adult life in Paris and Austria, had died in a Nazi concentration camp at Neuengamme, Germany.
Nabokov wrote his novel Lolita while traveling in the Western United States. In June, 1953 he and his family came to Ashland, Oregon, renting a house on Meade Street from Professor Taylor, head of the Southern Oregon College Department of Social Science. There he finished Lolita and began writing the novel Pnin. He roamed the nearby mountains looking for butterflies, and wrote a poem "Lines Written in Oregon". On October 1, 1953, he and his family left for Ithaca, New York.
After the success of Lolita, Nabokov was able to move to Europe and devote himself to writing. From 1960 to the end of his life he lived in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland. (From Wikipedia)
*Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled. In one common form, known as color synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Lolita has achieved iconic status as a literary masterpiece. But it's disturbing, highly disturbing, because of its subject matter, pedophilia. Even worse, you find yourself taking the side of...rooting for... identifying with...ohgod-ohgod...a pedophile. And you find yourself laughing. The pedophile is a wickedly funny narrator. How does Nabokov do it?
A LitLovers LitPick (Sept. '08)
[Lolita's] illicit nature will both shock the reader into paying attention and prevent sentimentally false sympathy from distorting his judgment. Contrariwise, I believe, Mr. Nabokov is slyly exploiting the American emphasis on the attraction of youth and the importance devoted to the “teen-ager” in order to promote an unconscious identification with Humbert’s agonies. Both techniques are entirely valid. But neither, I hope, will obscure the purpose of the device: namely, to underline the essential, inefficient, painstaking and pain-giving selfishness of all passion, all greed—of all urges, whatever they may be, that insist on being satisfied without regard to the effect their satisfaction has upon the outside world. Humbert is all of us.
Elizabeth Janeway - The New York Times, 1958
Discussion Questions
1. Lolita begins with an earnest foreword, purportedly written by one John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., author of Do the Senses Make Sense? (whose initials—"J.R., Jr."— echo as suspiciously as "Humbert Humbert"). Why might Nabokov have chosen to frame his novel in this fashion? What is the effect of knowing that the narrative's three main characters are already dead—and, in a sense, nonexistent, since their names have been changed?
2. Why might Nabokov have chosen to name his protagonist "Humbert Humbert"? Does the name's parodic double rumble end up distancing us from its owner's depravity? Is it harder to take evil seriously when it goes under an outlandish name? What uses, comic and poetic, does Nabokov make of this name in the course of Lolita?
3. Humbert's confession is written in an extraordinary language. It is by turns colloquial and archaic, erudite and stilted, florid and sardonic. It is studded with French expressions, puns in several other languages, and allusions to authors from Petrarch to Joyce. Is this language merely an extension of Nabokov's own—which the critic Michael Wood describes as "a fabulous, freaky, singing, acrobatic, unheard-of English" (Michael Wood, The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 5.) — or is Humbert's language appropriate to his circumstances and motives? In what way does it obfuscate as much as it reveals? And if Humbert's prose is indeed a veil, at what points is this veil lifted and what do we glimpse behind it?
4. Humbert attributes his pedophilia (or "nympholepsy") to his tragically aborted childhood romance with Annabel Leigh. How far can we trust this explanation? How do we reconcile Humbert's reliance on the Freudian theory of psychic trauma with his corrosive disdain for psychiatrists?
5. In the early stages of his obsession Humbert sees Lolita merely as a new incarnation of Annabel, even making love to her on different beaches as he tries to symbolically consummate his earlier passion. In what other ways does Humbert remain a prisoner of the past? Does he ever succeed in escaping it? Why is Lolita singularly impervious to the past, to the extent that she can even shrug off the abuse inflicted on her by both Humbert and Quilty?
6. How does Humbert's marriage to Valeria foreshadow his relationships with both Charlotte and Lolita? How does the revelation of Valeria's infidelity prepare us for Lolita's elopement with Quilty? Why does Humbert respond so differently to these betrayals?
7. On page 31 we encounter the first of the "dazzling coincidences" that illuminate Lolita like flashes of lightning (or perhaps stage lightning), when Humbert flips through a copy of Who's Who in the Limelight in the prison library. What is the significance of each of the entries for "Roland Pym," "Clare Quilty," and "Dolores Quine." In what ways do their names, biographies, and credits prefigure the novel's subsequent developments? Who is the mysterious "Vivian Darkbloom," whose name is an anagram for "Vladimir Nabokov"? Where else in Lolita does Nabokov provide us with imaginary texts that seem to lend verisimilitude to Humbert's narrative and at the same time make us question the factuality of the world in which it is set?
8. Humbert Humbert is an émigré. Not only has he left Europe for America, but in the course of Lolita he becomes an erotic refugee, fleeing the stability of Ramsdale and Beardsley for a life in motel rooms and highway rest stops. How does this fact shape his responses to the book's other characters and their responses to him? To what extent is the America of Lolita an exile's America? In what ways is Humbert's foreignness a corollary of his perversion? Is it possible to see Lolita as Nabokov's veiled meditation on his own exile?
9. We also learn that Humbert is mad—mad enough, at least, to have been committed to several mental institutions, where he took great pleasure in misleading his psychiatrists. Is Humbert's madness an aspect of his sexual deviance or is it something more fundamental? Can we trust a story told by an insane narrator? What is Humbert's kinship with the "mad" narrators of such works as Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Gogol's Diary of a Madman?
10. What makes Charlotte Haze so repugnant to Humbert? Does the author appear to share Humbert's antagonism? Does he ever seem to criticize it? In what ways does Charlotte embody the Russian word poshlust which Nabokov translated as "not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive?" (Cited by Alfred Appel, Jr., in The Annotated Lolita. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970, pp. xlix-1.)
11. To describe Lolita and other alluring young girls, Humbert coins the word "nymphet." The word has two derivations: the first from the Greek and Roman nature spirits, who were usually pictured as beautiful maidens dwelling in mountains, waters, and forests; the second from the entomologist's term for the young of an insect undergoing incomplete metamorphosis. Note the book's numerous allusions to fairy tales and spells; the proliferation of names like "Elphinstone," "Pisky," and "The Enchanted Hunters," as well as Humbert's repeated sightings of moths and butterflies. Also note that Nabokov was a passionate lepidopterist, who identified and named at least one new species of butterfly. How does the character of Lolita combine mythology and entomology? In what ways does Lolita resemble both an elf and an insect? What are some of this novel's themes of enchantment and metamorphosis as they apply both to Lolita and Humbert, and perhaps to the reader as well?
12. Before Humbert actually beds his nymphet, there is an extraordinary scene, at once rhapsodic, repulsive, and hilarious, in which Humbert excites himself to sexual climax while a (presumably) unaware Lolita wriggles in his lap. How is this scene representative of their ensuing relationship? What is the meaning of the sentence "Lolita had been safely solipsized" [p. 60], "solipsism" being the epistemological theory that the self is the sole arbiter of "reality"? Is all of Lolita the monologue of a pathological solipsist who is incapable of imagining any reality but his own or of granting other people any existence outside his own desires?
13. Can Humbert ever be said to "love" Lolita? Does he ever perceive her as a separate being? Is the reader ever permitted to see her in ways that Humbert cannot?
14. Humbert meets Lolita while she resides at 342 Lawn Street, seduces her in room 342 of The Enchanted Hunters, and in one year on the road the two of them check into 342 motels. Before Lolita begins her affair with Clare Quilty, her mother mentions his uncle Ivor, the town dentist, and sends Lolita to summer at Camp Q (near the propitiously named Lake Climax). These are just a few of the coincidences that make Lolita so profoundly unsettling. Why might Nabokov deploy coincidence so liberally in this book? Does he use it as a convenient way of advancing plot or in order to call the entire notion of a "realistic" narrative into question? How do Nabokov's games of coincidence tie in with his use of literary allusion (see Questions 4, 15, and 16) and self-reference (see Question 7)?
15. Having plotted Charlotte's murder and failed to carry it out, Humbert is rid of her by means of a bizarre, and bizarrely fortuitous, accident. Is this the only time that fate makes a spectacular intrusion on Humbert's behalf? Are there occasions when fate conspires to thwart him? Is the fate that operates in this novel—a fate so preposterously hyperactive that Humbert gives it a name— actually an extension of Humbert's will, perhaps of his unconscious will? Is Humbert in a sense guilty of Charlotte's death? Discuss the broader question of culpability as it resonates throughout this book.
16. Quilty makes his first onstage appearance at The Enchanted Hunters, just before Humbert beds Lolita for the first time. Yet rumors and allusions precede him. Does the revelation of Quilty's identity come as a surprise? Is it the true climax of Lolita? How does Nabokov prepare us for this revelation? Since the mystery of Quilty's identity turns this novel into a kind of detective story (in which the protagonist is both detective and criminal), it may be useful to compare Lolita to other examples of the genre, such as Poe's The Purloined Letter, Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" stories, or Agatha Christie's A Murder Is Announced, all of which are alluded to in the text.
17. Among our early clues about Quilty is his resemblance to Humbert (or Humbert's resemblance to him). This resemblance is one of the reasons that Lolita finds her mother's boarder attractive, and we are reminded of it later on when Humbert believes for a brief time that Quilty may be his uncle Trapp. How does Quilty conform to the archetype of the double or Doppelgänger? In its literary incarnations, a double may represent the protagonist's evil underself or his higher nature. What sort of double is Quilty? Are we ever given the impression that Humbert may be Quilty's double?
18. If we accept Humbert at his word, Lolita initiates their first sexual encounter, seducing him after he has balked at violating her in her sleep. Yet later Humbert admits that Lolita sobbed in the night—"every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep" [p. 176]. Should we read this reversal psychologically: that what began as a game for Lolita has now become a terrible and inescapable reality? Or has Humbert been lying to us from the first? What is the true nature of the crimes committed against Lolita? Does Humbert ever genuinely repent them, or is even his remorse a sham? Does Lolita forgive Humbert or only forget him?
19. Humbert is not only Lolita's debaucher but her stepfather and, after Charlotte's death, the closest thing she has to a parent. What kind of parent is he? How does his behavior toward the girl increasingly come to resemble Charlotte's? Why, during their last meeting, does Lolita dismiss the erotic aspect of their relationship and "grant" only that Humbert was a good father?
20. As previously mentioned, Lolita abounds with games: the games Humbert plays with his psychiatrists, his games of chess with Gaston Godin, the transcontinental games of tag and hide-and-go-seek that Quilty plays with Humbert, and the slapstick game of Quilty's murder. There is Humbert's poignant outburst, "I have only words to play with!" [p. 32]. In what way does this novel itself resemble a vast and intricate game, a game played with words? Is Nabokov playing with his readers or against them? How does such an interpretation alter your experience of Lolita? Do its game-like qualities detract from its emotional seriousness or actually heighten it?
21. The last lines of Lolita are: "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita" [p. 309]. What is the meaning of this passage? What does art offer Humbert and his beloved that sexual passion cannot? Is this aesthetic appeal merely the mask with which Humbert conceals or justifies his perversion, or is the immortality of art the thing that Humbert and his creator have been seeking all along? In what ways is Lolita at once a meditation on, and a re-creation of, the artistic process?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Red Tent
Anita Diamant, 1997
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312427298
Summary
Deeply affecting, The Red Tent combines rich storytelling with a valuable contribution in modern fiction: a new perspective of female life in biblical society. It is a vast and stirring work described as what the Bible might have been had it been written by God's daughters instead of sons.
Far beyond the traditional women-of-the-Bible sagas in both impact and vigor, The Red Tent is based upon a mention in Genesis of Jacob's only female offspring—his daughter, Dinah.
Author Anita Diamant, in the voice of Dinah, gives an insider's look at the details of women's lives in biblical times and a chronicle of their earthy stories and long-ignored histories. The red tent of the title is the place where women were sequestered during their cycles of birthing, menses, and illness. It is here that Dinah hears the whispered stories of her four mothers—Jacob's wives Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah—and tells their tales to us in remarkable and thought-provoking oratories. Familiar passages from the Bible take on new life as Dinah fills in what the Bible has left out—the lives of women. Dinah tells us of her initiation into the religious and sexual practices of the tribe; Jacob's courtship with Rachel and Leah; the ancient world of caravans, farmers, midwives, and slaves; her ill-fated sojourn in the city of Sechem; her years in Canaan; and her half-brother Joseph's rise in Egypt.
Skillfully interweaving biblical tales with characters of her own invention, the author re-creates the life of Dinah providing an illuminating portrait of a courageous woman and the life she might have lived. A new view of the panorama of life in biblical times emerges from the female perspective, and the red tent itself becomes a symbol of womanly strength, love, and wisdom.
The Red Tent is one of those extremely rare publishing phenomenons—a little promoted, but dynamically successful book (over 250,000 copies sold) that owes its success to enthusiastic word-of-mouth endorsements. (From the publisher.). (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1951
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Washington University; M.A., State University of New York, Binghamton
• Currently—lives in Newton, Massachusetts
Anita Diamant is an American author of fiction and non-fiction books. She is best known for her novel, The Red Tent, a New York Times best seller. She has also written several guides for Jewish people, including The New Jewish Wedding and Living a Jewish Life.
Early life and education
Diamant spent her early childhood in Newark, New Jersey, and moved to Denver, Colorado, when she was 12 years old. She attended the University of Colorado Boulder and transferred to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where she earned a bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature in 1973. She then went on to receive a master's degree in English from State University of New York at Binghamton in 1975.
Career
Diamant began her writing career in 1975 as a freelance journalist. Her articles have been published in the Boston Globe magazine, Parenting, New England Monthly, Yankee, Self, Parents, McCalls, and Ms.
She branched out into books with the release of The New Jewish Wedding, published in 1985, and has since published seven other books about contemporary Jewish practice.
Her debut as a fiction writer came in 1997 with The Red Tent, followed by the novels, Good Harbor and The Last Days of Dogtown, an account of life in a dying Cape Ann, Massachusetts village, Dogtown, in the early 19th century. Day After Night, is a novel about four women who survived the Holocaust, and find themselves detained in a British displaced persons camp. The Boston Girl, published in 2014, is the story of a young Jewish woman growing up in early 20th century Boston.
Diamant is the founding president of Mayyim Hayyim: Living Waters Community Mikveh and Education Center, a community-based ritual bath in Newton, Massachusetts.
She lives in Newton, is married, and has one daughter. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/9/2014.)
Book Reviews
Diamant vividly conjures up the ancient world of caravans, shepherds, farmers, midwives, slaves, and artisans.... Her Dinah is a compelling narrator that has timeless resonance.
Merle Rubin - Christian Science Monitor
Skillfully interweaving biblical tales with events and characters of her own invention, Diamant's (Living a Jewish Life, 1991) sweeping first novel re-creates the life of Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob, from her birth and happy childhood in Mesopotamia through her years in Canaan and death in Egypt. When Dinah reaches puberty and enters the Red Tent (the place women visit to give birth or have their monthly periods), her mother and Jacob's three other wives initiate her into the religious and sexual practices of the tribe. Diamant sympathetically describes Dinah's doomed relationship with Shalem, son of a ruler of Shechem, and his brutal death at the hands of her brothers. Following the events in Canaan, a pregnant Dinah travels to Egypt, where she becomes a noted midwife. Diamant has written a thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating portrait of a fascinating woman and the life she might have lived. Recommended for all public libraries. —Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Library Journal
Cubits beyond most Woman-of-the-Bible sagas in sweep and vigor, this fictive flight based on the Genesis mention of Dinah, offspring of Jacob and Leah, disclaims her as a mere "defiled" victim and, further, celebrates the ancient continuity and unity of women. Dinah was the cherished only daughter of "four mothers," all of whom bore sons by Jacob. It is through daughters, though, that the songs, stories, and wisdom of the mothers and grandmothers are remembered. Dinah tells the mothers' tales from the time that that shaggy stranger Jacob appears in the land of his distant kin Laban. There are Jacob's marriages to the beautiful Rachel and the competent Leah, "reeking of bread and comfort." Also bedded are Zilpah, a goddess worshipper who has little use for men, and tiny, dark, and silent Bilhah. Hard-working Jacob is considerate to the equally hard-working women, who, in the "red tent"—where they're sequestered at times of monthly cycles, birthing, and illness—take comfort and courage from one another and household gods. The trek to Canaan, after Jacob outwits Laban, offers Dinah wonders, from that "time out of life" when the traveling men and women laugh and sing together, on to Dinah's first scent of a great river, "heady as incense, heavy and dark." She observes the odd reunion of Jacob and Esau, meets her cruel and proud grandmother, and celebrates the women's rite of maturity. She also loves passionately the handsome Prince Shalem, who expects to marry her. Dinah's tale then follows the biblical account as Jacob's sons trick and then slaughter a kingdom. Diamant's Dinah, mad with grief, flees to Egypt, gives birth to a son, suffers, and eventually finds love and peace. With stirring scenery and a narrative of force and color, a readable tale marked by hortatory fulminations and voluptuous lamentations. For a liberal Bible audience.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Read Genesis 34 and discuss how The Red Tent changes your perspective on Dinah's story and also on the story of Joseph that follows. Does The Red Tent raise questions about other women in the Bible? Does it make you want to re-read the Bible and imagine other untold stories that lay hidden between the lines?
2. Discuss the marital dynamics of Jacob's family. He has four wives; compare his relationship with each woman?
3. What do you make of the relationships among the four wives?
4. Dinah is rich in "mothers." Discuss the differences or similarities in her relationship with each woman.
5. Childbearing and childbirth are central to The Red Tent. How do the fertility childbearing and birthing practices differ from contemporary life? How are they similar? How do they compare with your own experiences as a mother or father?
6. Discuss Jacob's role as a father. Does he treat Dinah differently from his sons? Does he feel differently about her? If so, how?
7. Discuss Dinah's twelve brothers. Discuss their relationships with each other, with Dinah, and with Jacob and his four wives. Are they a close family?
8. Female relationships figure largely in The Red Tent. Discuss the importance of Inna, Tabea, Werenro, and Meryt.
9. In the novel, Rebecca is presented as an Oracle. Goddesses are venerated along with gods. What do you think of this culture, in which the Feminine has not yet been totally divorced from the Divine? How does El, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, fit into this?
10. Dinah's point of view is often one of an outsider, an observer. What effect does this have on the narrative? What effect does this have on the reader?
11. The book travels from Haran (contemporary Iraq/Syria), through Canaan and into Shechem (Israel), and into Egypt. What strikes you about the cultural differences Dinah encounters vis-a-vis food, clothing, work, and male-female relationships.
12. In The Red Tent, we see Dinah grow from childhood to old age. Discuss how she changes and matures. What lessons does she learn from life? If you had to pick a single word to describe the sum of her life, what word would you choose? How would Dinah describe her own life experience?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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