A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway, 1964
Simon & Schuster
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780684824994
Summary
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. It is his classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s, filled with irreverent portraits of other expatriate luminaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; tender memories of his first wife, Hadley; and insightful recollections of his own early experiments with his craft. It is a literary feast, brilliantly evoking the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the youthful spirit, unbridled creativity, and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 21, 1899
• Where—Oak Park, Illinois
• Death—July 02, 1961
• Where—Ketchum, Idaho
• Education—Oak Park & River Forest High School
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1952; Nobel Prize, 1954
Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century, and for his efforts he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954. Hemingway wrote in short, declarative sentences and was known for his tough, terse prose. His main protagonists were always men and women of courage and conviction, who suffered unseen scars, both physical and emotional.
Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. After graduation from high school, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he worked briefly for the Kansas City Star. Failing to qualify for the United States Army because of poor eyesight, he enlisted with the American Red Cross to drive ambulances in Italy. He was severely wounded on the Austrian front on July 9, 1918. Following recuperation in a Milan hospital, he returned home and became a freelance writer for the Toronto Star.
In December of 1921, he sailed to France and joined an expatriate community of writers and artists in Paris while continuing to write for the Toronto Star. He began his fiction career with "little magazines" and small presses, which led to a volume of short stories, In Our Time (1925).
Then, as a novelist, he gained international fame: The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) established Hemingway as the most important and influential fiction writer of his generation. He covered the Spanish Civil War, portraying it in fiction in his brilliant novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, (1940), which continued to affirm his extraordinary career. He subsequently covered World War II.
Hemingway's highly publicized life gave him unrivaled celebrity as a literary figure. He became an authority on the subjects of his art: trout fishing, bullfighting, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing, and the cultures of the regions in which he set his work—France, Italy, Spain, Cuba, and Africa.
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) earned him the Pulitzer Prize and was instrumental in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954. Hemingway died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
This is a book of love, loathing and bitterness. Love of Paris is the matter of the parts in which Hemingway relates how he settled into a routine as a writer in the tranquil years before what he calls "the rich" arrived. Written with that controlled lyricism of which he was master, these pages are marvelously evocative.
Lewis Galantier - New YorkTimes (5-10-1964)
For it is impossible to read his recollections of life in Paris in the nine-twenties without regarding this posthumous book as extraordinarily mean. His portrait of Gertrude Stein, whose hospitality he frequently enjoyed, is cruel and humiliating, and his portrait of Scott Fizgerald, a friend, is the same.
Brooks Atkinson - New York Times (7-7-1964)
A Moveable Feast retained a certain irresistible charm. It was a privilege to be able to read about that time in Paris in the words of one of the most important literary expatriates, and it remains so to this day. Reading A Moveable Feast for the fourth (and probably not the last) time, I was struck by how much of it is still agreeable to me. It is actually possible to like Hemingway as he plays with his little son and his cat, fondly nicknamed Bumby and F. Puss, as he talks and travels with Hadley...
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post
Hemingway beautifully captures the fragile magic of a special time and place, and he manages to be nostalgic without hitting any false notes of sentimentality. "This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy," he concludes. Originally published in 1964, three years after his suicide, A Moveable Feast was the first of his posthumous books and remains the best
David Laskin, author
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 A Moveable Feast:
1. What do you make of Hemingway's remark in his Preface:
If the reader prefers, this may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.
What is he saying? Is he suggesting little of none of his memoir is true? (Don't worry if you're not sure: no one is—the line is a bit of a puzzle.)
2. Given his later renown and personal excesses (alcoholism, braggadocio and bluster, womanizing, meanness), what do you make of this young Hemingway? How would you describe him? Is he a likable? Admirable?
3. What was the relationship between Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, as described in A Moveable Feast? Where do you see the fault lines of their marriage? What part did horse racing play? Some have surmised that Hadley was the one woman (wife) he truly loved. What happened?
4. Talk about Hemingway's depictions of the famous literary characters in his Paris circle of friends. Whom do you find most interesting? What does he say, for instance, about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald? Some readers have found his observations (even his treatment) cruel; others see Hemingway as honest if acerbic. What do you think?
5. Which episodes do you find particularly funny—perhaps the luncheon incident with Ford Madox Ford? Or Ezra Pound? Or the trip to Lyons with Fitzgerald?
6. Writing from a distance of some 30 years, Hemingway paints a beauty, even glamour, in being poor and hungry...in Paris...at that moment. Why does this seem to have been such a happy time for him? What lends this work its twilight nostalgia?
7. Talk about the writing ritual Hemingway describes when he was struggling to write his first volume of short stories and his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. What kind of discipline and commitment does it take to persevere when his stories were returned by the publishers. In his final years Hemingway's talent had fallen off, and he found himself unable to create a great novel. Does that knowledge affect how you view his vigor during those early years?
8. In the last chapter of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway refuses to accept responsibility for the failure of his marriage, painting himself almost as a victim of Pauline's machinations. How do you feel about Hemingway's explanation?
9.Continuing with Question #8: This original account of Hemingway's betrayal was heavily edited by his fourth wife, Mary, who some surmise may have had a reason for the particular shape the chapter took.
But a newly expanded and altered edition was issued in 2009 by Hemingway's grandson. In the new version the final chapter differs—Hemingway admits his culpability in betraying Hadley. Does knowing this change things, does it alter your answer to Question #8?
10. Have you read any of Hemingway's novels or short stories (which some scholars consider his finest writing)? If so, does reading A Moveable Feast affect how you read his fiction? If you have not other Hemingway works, does this book inspire you to do so?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Sea
John Banville, 2005
Knopf Doubleday
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400097029
Summary
Winner, 2005 Man Booker Prize
In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife.
It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel—among the finest we have had from this masterful writer. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Benjamin Black
• Birth—December, 1945
• Where—Wexford, Ireland, UK
• Education—St. Peter's College, Wexford
• Awards—Booker Prize (more below)
• Currently—lives in Dublin, Ireland
John Banville is an Irish novelist and journalist. His novel The Book of Evidence (1989) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He sometimes writes under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.
Banville is known for his precise and cold prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators. His stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".
Background
Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland. His father worked in a garage and died when Banville was in his early thirties; his mother was a housewife. He is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own. His sister Vonnie Banville-Evans has written both a children's novel and a reminiscence of growing up in Wexford.
Banville was educated at a Christian Brothers school and at St Peter's College in Wexford. Despite having intended to be a painter and an architect he did not attend university. Banville has described this as "A great mistake. I should have gone. I regret not taking that four years of getting drunk and falling in love. But I wanted to get away from my family. I wanted to be free."
After school he worked as a clerk at Aer Lingus which allowed him to travel at deeply-discounted rates. He took advantage of this to travel in Greece and Italy. He lived in the United States during 1968 and 1969. On his return to Ireland he became a sub-editor at the Irish Press, rising eventually to the position of chief sub-editor. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970.
Early career
After the Irish Press collapsed in 1995, he became a sub-editor at the Irish Times. He was appointed literary editor in 1998. The Irish Times, too, suffered severe financial problems, and Banville was offered the choice of taking a redundancy package or working as a features department sub-editor. He left.
Banville has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1990. In 1984, he was elected to the Irish arts association Aosdana, but resigned in 2001 so that some other artist might be allowed to receive the annuity. He described himself in an interview with Argentine paper La Nacíon, as a West Brit. Banville also writes hardboiled crime fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black, beginning with Christine Falls (2006).
Banville has two adult sons with his wife, the American textile artist Janet Dunham. They met during his visit to San Francisco in 1968 where she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Dunham described him during the writing process as being like "a murderer who's just come back from a particularly bloody killing". Banville has two daughters from his relationship with Patricia Quinn, former head of the Arts Council of Ireland.
Banville has a strong interest in animal rights, and is often featured in Irish media speaking out against vivisection in Irish university research.
His writing
Banville is considered by critics as a master stylist of the English language, and his writing has been described as perfectly crafted, beautiful, dazzling. David Mehegan of the Boston Globe calls Banville "one of the great stylists writing in English today"; Don DeLillo called his work "dangerous and clear-running prose;" Val Nolan in the Sunday Business Post calls his style "lyrical, fastidious, and occasionally hilarious" [10]; The Observer described his 1989 work, The Book of Evidence, as "flawlessly flowing prose whose lyricism, patrician irony and aching sense of loss are reminiscent of Lolita." Banville himself has admitted that he is "trying to blend poetry and fiction into some new form." He is also known for his dark humour, and sharp wit.
Banville has written two trilogies; "The Revolutions Trilogy", consisting of Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter and a second unnamed trilogy consisting of The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, Athena.
Banville is highly scathing of all of his work, stating of his books "I hate them all ... I loathe them. They're all a standing embarrassment. Instead of dwelling on the past Banville is continually looking forward; "You have to crank yourself up every morning and think about all the awful stuff you did yesterday, and how how you can compensate for that by doing better today". He writes only about a hundred words a day for his literary novels, versus several thousand words a day for his Benjamin Black crime fiction. He appreciates his work as Black as a craft while as Banville he is an artist, though he does consider crime-writing, in his own words, as being "cheap fiction."
Banville is highly influenced by Heinrich von Kleist, having written adaptations of three of his plays (including Amphitrion) and having again used Amphitrion as a basis for his novel The Infinities. One of Banvilles earlier influences was James Joyce—"After I'd read the Dubliners, and was struck at the way Joyce wrote about real life, I immediately started writing bad imitations of the Dubliners."
Awards
Booker Prize, James Tail Black Memorial Prize, Irish Book Awards, Guiness Peat Aviation Award, Guardian Ficiton Award, Franz Kafka Prize, Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. (Author bio from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Banville's achievement seems remarkable to me. Banville appears to be fining down his writing to the central impulse of all his mature work, which he stated long ago in the extravagant Gothic tale Birchwood : "We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. The first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing."
John Crowley - Washington Post
With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov.... The Sea [is] his best novel so far.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
A gem.... [I]ts ceaseless undulations echoing constantly in the cadences of the prose. This novel shouldn't simply be read. It needs to be heard, for its sound is intoxicating.... A winning work of art.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Banville's novel, which won this year's Man Booker Prize, is narrated by an art historian, whose grief at the death of his wife has stalled his work on a "Big Book on Bonnard." In retreat at an Irish seaside town where he vacationed as a child, he sifts through memories of his entanglement with an upper-class family who stayed nearby. The plot is minimal; instead, the novel's drama takes place in Banville's remarkable imagery—a thunderstorm is "the sky stamping up and down in a fury, breaking its bones," and distant breakers are "like a hem being turned endlessly by a sleepy seamstress." Banville's technique generates a kind of supercharged sparseness, forcefully conveying the narrator's anguish, as he comes to an understanding that "we are defined and have our being through others" and must realign ourselves when those closest to us disappear.
The New Yorker
Banville’s language is captivating. Critics (unless you’re Michiko Kakutani, who found little to like) frequently compare his intricate, powerful imagery to that of Nabokov. It is the intense beauty of his language that allows readers to work through the often discomforting characters and stories he renders.
Bookmarks Magazine
(Starred review.) Irishman Banville's new book does more than simply explore a life. It explores life. This splendidly profound and beautifully written novel offers lessons aplenty about how the shadow of the past does not necessarily cast darkness over the present but certainly leaves its imprint.... In a word, this novel is brilliant. —Brad Hooper
Booklist
Banville's magnificent new novel, which won this year's Man Booker Prize and is being rushed into print by Knopf, presents a man mourning his wife's recent death—and his blighted life. "The past beats inside me like a second heart," observes Max Morden early on, and his return to the seaside resort where he lost his innocence gradually yields the objects of his nostalgia. Max's thoughts glide swiftly between the events of his wife's final illness and the formative summer, 50 years past, when the Grace family—father, mother and twins Chloe and Myles—lived in a villa in the seaside town where Max and his quarreling parents rented a dismal "chalet." Banville seamlessly juxtaposes Max's youth and age, and each scene is rendered with the intense visual acuity of a photograph ("the mud shone blue as a new bruise"). As in all Banville novels, things are not what they seem. Max's cruelly capricious complicity in the sad history that unfolds, and the facts kept hidden from the reader until the shocking denouement, brilliantly dramatize the unpredictability of life and the incomprehensibility of death. Like the strange high tide that figures into Max's visions and remembrances, this novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning of life.
Publishers Weekly
"I have carried the memory of that moment through a whole half century, as if it were the emblem of something final, precious and irretrievable," says the narrator of Banville's Booker Prize-winning novel of a relatively trivial moment. But when he recalls the mother and daughter whom he first loved as a barely pubescent child-whose presence pulled him out of the shadow of his paltry self-he observes, "The two figures in the scene, I mean Chloe and her mother, are all my own work." Memory, then, is the subject of this brief but magisterial work, a condensed teardrop of a novel that captures perfectly the essence of irretrievable longing. After the death of his wife, Max has retreated to the seashore where he spent his childhood summers, staying at an inn that was once the home of a magnificent, careless family called the Graces. It's as if reawakening the pain of his first, terrible loss-that high-strung and volatile Chloe-will ease his more recent loss. The novel is written in a complex, luminous prose that might strike some as occasionally overblown, and Chloe's final act didn't entirely persuade this reviewer. The result? A breathtaking but sometimes frustrating novel. Highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. The Sea is made up of three temporal layers: the distant past of Max’s childhood, the recent past of his wife’s illness and death, and the present of his return to Ballyless. Instead of keeping these layers distinctly separated, Banville segues among them or splices them together, sometimes within a single sentence. Why might he have chosen to do this, and what methods does he use to keep the reader oriented in his novel’s time scheme?
2. Morden frequently refers to the Graces as gods, and of course the original Graces were figures in classical mythology. What about these people makes them godlike? Does each of them possess some attribute that corresponds, for instance, to Zeus’s thunderbolt or Athena’s wisdom? What distinguishes the Graces from Max’s own unhappily human family? Are they still godlike at the novel’s end?
3. When Max first encounters the Graces, he hears from the upstairs of their house the sound of a girl laughing while being chased. What other scenes in the book feature chases, some playful, some not? Is Morden being chased? Or is he a pursuer? If so, who or what might he be pursuing?
4. Morden is disappointed, even “appalled” [p. 4], to find the Cedars physically unchanged from what it was when the Graces stayed there. Yet he is also disappointed that it contains no trace of its former occupants [p. 29]. What might explain his ambivalence? Has he come to Ballyless to relive his past or to be free of it? Given the shame and sadness that suffuses so much of his memory, how is one to interpret his sense of the past as a retreat [pp. 44–45]?
5. “How is it,” Maxwonders, “that in childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny, since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, a revenant?” [p. 8]. What might account for this sense of déjà vu? What episodes in this novel seem to echo earlier ones, and are there moments when the past seems to echo the future, as if time were running backward? In this light, consider Max’s realization that his childhood visions of the future had “an oddly antique cast” [p. 70], as if “what I foresaw as the future was in fact . . . a picture of what could only be an imagined past” [p. 71].
6. How does Banville depict the other characters in this novel? To what extent are they, as Max suggests, partial constructs, as Connie Grace was “at once a wraith of my imagination and a woman of unavoidable flesh and blood” [p. 65]? Does Max’s voice, wry, self-reflexive, and resplendently vivid, give these characters an independent life or partially obscure them? Are there moments when they seem to peek out from beneath its blanket and show themselves to the reader?
7. Throughout the novel Max suffers from an overpowering, all-pervasive sense of guilt. Is this guilt justified? What are his crimes, or using another moral language, his sins? Has he managed to atone for any of his failures or redeem any of his spoiled relationships by the novel’s end? Is such redemption possible in this novel’s view of human nature?
8. On learning that she is fatally ill, both Max and Anna are overcome by something he recognizes as embarrassment, an embarrassment that extends even to the inanimate objects in their home. Why should death be embarrassing? Compare the grown Max’s shame about death to his childhood feelings about sex, both his sexual fantasies about Connie Grace and their subsequent fulfillment with her daughter.
9. Significantly, Max’s fantasies about Mrs. Grace reach a crescendo during an act of voyeurism. What role does watching play in Max’s sense of others? Has observing people been his substitute for engaging with them? How does he feel about other people watching him? And what are we to make of the fact that Max is constantly watching himself—sometimes watching himself watching others, in an infinite regress of surveillance and alienation?
10. Max is a poor boy drawn to a succession of wealthy women, culminating in his very wealthy wife. Was his attraction to them really a screen for social climbing? In loving Connie and Chloe and Anna, was he betraying his origins? Are there moments in this novel when those origins reassert themselves?
11. Why might Max have chosen the painter Bonnard as the subject for a book? What episodes from the painter’s life parallel his own or illuminate it metaphorically? Note the way the description of the Graces’ picnic recalls Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe. What other scenes in the novel allude to works of art or literature, and what is the effect?
12. The Sea has a triple climax that features two deaths and very nearly a third. In what ways are these deaths linked, and to what extent is Max responsible for them? Do you interpret his drunken night walk on the beach as an attempt at suicide? How does your perception of Max change in light of Miss Vavasour’s climactic revelation about the events that precipitated Chloe’s drowning?
13. Just as the critical trauma of Max’s life grew out of a misapprehension, so the entire novel is shrouded in a haze of unreliable narrative. Max’s memories are at once fanatically detailed and riddled with lapses. He freely admits that the people in his past are half real and half made up. “From earliest days I wanted to be someone else,” he tells us [p. 160], and a chance remark of his mother’s suggests that even his name may be false [p. 156]. Can we accept any part of his account as true? Are there moments in this novel in which reality asserts itself absolutely? What effect do these ambiguities have on your experience of The Sea?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Started Early, Took My Dog
Kate Atkinson, 2011
Little, Brown & Company
371 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316066730
Summary
Tracy Waterhouse leads a quiet, ordered life as a retired police detective—a life that takes a surprising turn when she encounters Kelly Cross, a habitual offender, dragging a young child through town. Both appear miserable and better off without each other—or so decides Tracy, in a snap decision that surprises herself as much as Kelly. Suddenly burdened with a small child, Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of her problems, as much larger ones loom for her and her young charge.
Meanwhile, Jackson Brodie, the beloved detective of novels such as Case Histories, is embarking on a different sort of rescue—that of an abused dog. Dog in tow, Jackson is about to learn, along with Tracy, that no good deed goes unpunished. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—York, England, UK
• Education—M.A., Dundee University
• Awards—Whitbread Award; Woman's Own Short Story Award; Ian St. James Award;
Saltire Book of the Year Award; Prix Westminster
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Kate Atkinson was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature which she failed at the viva stage. During her final year of this course, she was married for the first time, although the marriage lasted only two years.
After leaving the university, she took on a variety of miscellaneous jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, Yorkshire for a time, before moving to Edinburgh, where she taught at Dundee University and began writing short stories. She now lives in Edinburgh.
Writing
She initially wrote for women's magazines after winning the 1986 Woman's Own Short Story Competition. She was runner-up for the Bridport Short Story Prize in 1990 and won an Ian St James Award in 1993 for her short-story "Karmic Mothers," which she later adapted for BBC2 television as part of its Tartan Shorts series.
Atkinson's breakthrough was with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award, ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins biography of William Ewart Gladstone. The book has been adapted for radio, theatre and television. She has since written several more novels, short stories and a play. Case Histories (2004) was described by Stephen King as "the best mystery of the decade." The book won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster.
Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Four of her novels have featured the popular former detective Jackson Brodie—Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News (2008), and Started Early, Took My Dog (2010). She has shown that, stylistically, she is also a comic novelist who often juxtaposes mundane everyday life with fantastic magical events, a technique that contributes to her work's pervasive magic realism.
Life After Life (2013) revolves around Ursula Todd's continual birth and rebirth. Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it "a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author's fully untethered imagination."
A God in Ruins (2015), the companion book to Life After Life, follows Ursula's brother Todd who survived the war, only to succumb to disillusionment and guilt at having survived.
Atkinson was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to literature. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[Atkinson's] books cannot be simply read. They must also be wrestled with, and that's where much of the fun lies…Ms. Atkinson remains a wonderful stylist and Grade A schemer.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
[C]omplicated, elegant and completely satisfying…Atkinson's dark wit and mastery at sketching connections—between people, places, times, things, emotions—are reminiscent of Ruth Rendell, and Atkinson shares that grand master's facility in balancing cynicism, compassion and pragmatism. The result is crime fiction that's also splendid modern literature.
Kevin Allman - Washington Post
British author Atkinson's magnificently plotted fourth novel featuring Jackson Brodie (after When Will There Be Good News?) takes the "semi-retired" PI back to his Yorkshire hometown to trace the biological parents of Hope McMasters, a woman adopted by a couple in the 1970s at age two. Jackson is faced with more questions than answers when Hope's parents aren't in any database nor is her adoption on record. In the author's signature multilayered style, she shifts between past and present, interweaving the stories of Tracy Waterhouse, a recently retired detective superintendent now in charge of security at a Leeds mall, and aging actress Tilly Squires. On the same day that Jackson and Tilly are in the mall, Tracy makes a snap decision that will have lasting consequences for everyone. Atkinson injects wit even in the bleakest moments—such as Jackson's newfound appreciation for poetry, evoked in the Emily Dickinson inspired title—yet never loses her razor-sharp edge.
Publishers Weekly
Jackson Brodie returns in Atkinson's fourth novel (Case Histories; One Good Turn; When Will There Be Good News?) featuring the former policeman. Jackson (semiretired at 50) is doing some private detective work and trying to come to grips with his personal life, which includes a teenage daughter from his first marriage, a son with a former lover, and a second wife who stole his savings. Jackson adds a small dog to the mix by rescuing it from its abusive owner as he undertakes an "innocent" request from a woman in Australia: Could Jackson help her find her birth parents in England? In this literary mystery on the theme of missing children, nothing is innocent or simple. The intricate narrative, composed with deftness and humor, moves among scenes set alternately in 1975 and the present and contains a cast of well-drawn characters whose relationships unfold like the layers of a peeled onion. Verdict: This book will not disappoint Atkinson and Jackson Brodie fans, but it might be a stretch for some readers to keep up with the multifaceted plot, though it is well worth the effort. —Nancy Fontaine, Dartmouth Coll., Hanover, NH
Library Journal
British private detective Jackson Brodie, star of three previous Atkinson novels (When Will There Be Good News, 2008, etc.), finds himself embroiled in a case which shows that defining crime is sometimes as difficult as solving it. Tracy Waterhouse, who is middle-aged, overweight and lonely, heads security for a mall in Leeds. Retired from the local police force, she remains haunted by one of her earliest cases, when she and her partner found a little boy abandoned in the apartment where his mother had been murdered days earlier. Although the murderer was supposedly found (but died before being brought to trial), Tracy never learned what happened to the child with whom she'd formed a quick bond. When Tracy sees a known prostitute/lowlife mistreating her child at the mall, she impulsively offers to buy the child, and the woman takes the money and runs. Tracy knows she has technically broken the law and even suspects the woman might not be the real mother, but her protective instinct and growing love for the little girl named Courtney overrides common sense; she begins arrangements to flee Leeds and start a new life with the child. Meanwhile, Jackson has come to Leeds on his own case. Raised and living in Australia, adoptee Hope McMaster wants information about her birth parents, who supposedly died in a car crash in Leeds 30 years ago. As he pursues the case, Jackson considers his relationships with his own kids—a troublesome teenage daughter from his first marriage and a young son whom DNA tests have recently proved he fathered with a former lover. Jackson's search and Tracy's quest intertwine as Jackson's questions make the Leeds police force increasingly nervous. It becomes clear that the 1975 murder case Tracy worked on is far from solved and has had lasting repercussions. The sleuthing is less important than Atkinson's fascinating take on the philosophic and emotional dimensions of her characters' lives.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. “For want of a nail the shoe was lost / For want of a shoe the horse was lost....” How do you think this traditional proverb, quoted by Kate Atkinson before the start of the novel, relates to what happens in Started Early, Took My Dog?
2. Another epigraph quotes Peter Sutcliffe, suggesting that this novel was partly inspired by the 1970s Yorkshire Ripper. Are there any other true crime cases that come to mind that resonate with the stories in this book?
3. A reviewer called this a “state of the nation novel — far sharper and more observant and satirically understanding than anything else out there at the moment.” Do you agree, and if so, what did the novel reveal for you about Britain today?
4. This is the fourth Jackson Brodie novel. What qualities make the former police detective so attractive to readers? And would you want to see him appear in another novel after this?
5. Another reviewer called Kate Atkinson “possibly the only author writing crime fiction that is also literary fiction alive today.” What are the elements that turn Started Early, Took My Dog into crime fiction, and what are its literary features? And do you agree with the way fiction is commonly classified into these separate genres by the critics, and also in libraries and bookshops?
6. On an impulse, Tracy Waterhouse buys little Courtney for a wad of cash from a woman she assumes to be her mother, after witnessing her behaving abusively toward the child. What do you think of Tracy’s motives, and do you think this kind of unusual transaction could ever be morally justified?
7. How do Courtney and Tracy change each other’s lives, and in what ways are they important to one another? How does their relationship compare to Jackson’s relationship with the dog?
8. The book alternates between telling part of the story in the 1970s and part of the story in the present day. What has changed between what was going on in the seventies in the police force and what is going on now? What is the same? How does Atkinson weave these two time periods together?
9. The characters in Started Early, Took My Dog are all tied to the past in different ways; some are held victim to it, but no one can escape it. How does the past influence the present lives of the characters in the book?
10. Discuss the role of guilt in the novel, and how it affects different people (e.g., Barry Crawford, Len Lomax, Ray Strickland, and Linda Pallister).
11. Sexism is an issue that shows itself in many forms throughout the novel, particularly in the police force in the 1970s. What type of sexism did Tracy and the other female characters face? How is that reflected in the way female prostitutes and female victims are portrayed in the book? Were you able to see past the sexism of some of the characters in the novel?
12. Kate Atkinson’s novels have often featured lost or abandoned children. Discuss the role of the lost girls — Courtney and Hope McMaster — in Started Early, Took My Dog. How do they relate to the other lost girls in Jackson’s own life?
13. Many of the women in the novel have no children of their own, for various reasons. How does each character manage her desire to have children, or her struggles when she loses her children?
14. The title is taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, a poet Jackson Brodie has recently discovered, and it ends with another Dickinson poem, “Hope.” Why do you think Kate Atkinson decided to finish on this note?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Language of Flowers
Vanessa Diffenbaugh, 2011
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345525550
Summary
A mesmerizing, moving, and elegantly written debut novel, The Language of Flowers beautifully weaves past and present, creating a vivid portrait of an unforgettable woman whose gift for flowers helps her change the lives of others even as she struggles to overcome her own troubled past.
The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey romantic expressions: honeysuckle for devotion, asters for patience, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it’s been more useful in communicating grief, mistrust, and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster-care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings.
Now eighteen and emancipated from the system, Victoria has nowhere to go and sleeps in a public park, where she plants a small garden of her own. Soon a local florist discovers her talents, and Victoria realizes she has a gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But a mysterious vendor at the flower market has her questioning what’s been missing in her life, and when she’s forced to confront a painful secret from her past, she must decide whether it’s worth risking everything for a second chance at happiness. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 20, 1978
• Rasied—Chico, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University
• Currently—lives in Monterey, California.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh is the author of two novels: her bestselling debut, The Language of Flowers (2011), and the more recent We Never Asked for Wings (2015).
Vanessa was born in San Francisco and raised in Chico, California. After graduating from Stanford University, she worked in the non-profit sector, teaching art and technology to youth in low-income communities.
Following the success of The Language of Flowers, Vanessa co-founded Camellia Network, a non-profit whose mission is to connect every youth aging out of foster care to the critical resources, opportunities, and support they need to thrive in adulthood.
She currently lives in Monterey, California, with her husband and four children. (From the publisher.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
In this original and brilliant first novel, Diffenbaugh has united her fascination with the language of flowers—a long-forgotten and mysterious way of communication—with her firsthand knowledge of the travails of the foster-care system…This novel is both enchanting and cruel, full of beauty and anger. Diffenbaugh is a talented writer and a mesmerizing storyteller.
Brigitte Weeks - Washington Post
An unexpectedly beautiful book about an ugly subject: children who grow up without families, and what becomes of them in the absence of unconditional love...Jane Eyre for 2011.
San Francisco Chronicle
In a world where talk is cheap, debut author Vanessa Diffenbaugh has written a captivating novel in which a single sprig of rosemary speaks louder than words. …The Language of Flowers deftly weaves the sweetness of newfound love with the heartache of past mistakes in a novel that will certainly change how you choose your next bouquet.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Instantly enchanting.... [Diffenbaugh] is the best new writer of the yea
Elle
A fascinating debut…. Diffenbaugh clearly knows both the human heart and her plants, and she keeps us rooting for the damaged Victoria.
O Magazine
Diffenbaugh's affecting debut chronicles the first harrowing steps into adulthood taken by a deeply wounded soul who finds her only solace in an all-but-forgotten language.... Struggling against all and ultimately reborn, Victoria Jones is hard to love, but very easy to root for.
Publishers Weekly
Diffenbaugh weaves together the two narratives using the Victorian language of flowers that ultimately helps shape Victoria's future as she grapples with a painful decision from her past.... Victoria might be her own worst enemy, but her...desire to live beyond what she was thought capable of will sway readers toward her favor.... [S]olid and well-written. —Mara Dabrishus, Ursuline Coll., Pepper Pike, OH
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. What potential do Elizabeth, Renata, and Grant see in Victoria that she has a hard time seeing in herself?
2. While Victoria has been hungry and malnourished often in her life, food ends up meaning more than just nourishment to her. Why?
3. Victoria and Elizabeth both struggle with the idea of being part of a family. What does it mean to you to be part of a family? What defines family?
4. Why do you think Elizabeth waits so long before trying to patch things up with her long-lost sister Catherine? What is the impetus for her to do so?
5. The first week after her daughter’s birth goes surprisingly well for Victoria. What is it that makes Victoria feel unable to care for her child after the week ends? And what is it that allows her to ultimately rejoin her family?
6. One of the major themes in The Language of Flowers is forgiveness and second chances – do you think Victoria deserves one after the things she did (both as a child and as an adult)? What about Catherine? And Elizabeth?
7. What did you think of the structure of the book – the alternating chapters of past and present? In what ways did the two storylines parallel each other, and how did they diverge?
8. The novel touches on many different themes (love, family, forgiveness, second chances). Which do you think is the most important? And what did you think was ultimately the lesson?
9. At the end of the novel, Victoria learns that moss grows without roots. What does this mean, and why is it such a revelation for her?
10. Based on your reading of the novel, what are your impressions of the foster care system in America? What could be improved?
11. Knowing what you now know about the language of the flowers, to whom would you send a bouquet and what would you want it to say?
(Questions issued by publisher. See The Language of Flowers website for interesting extras.)
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The Screwtape Letters
C.S. Lewis, 1941
HarperCollins
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060652937
Summary
In this humorous and perceptive exchange between two devils, C. S. Lewis delves into moral questions about good vs. evil, temptation, repentance, and grace.
Through this wonderful tale, the reader emerges with a better understanding of what it means to live a faithful life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 29, 1898
• Where—Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
• Death—November 22, 1963
• Where—Headington, England
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Fellow, British Academy; Carnegie Medal for The
Last Battle
C. S. Lewis was famous both as a fiction writer and as a Christian thinker, and his biographers and critics sometimes divide his personality in two: the storyteller and the moral educator, the "dreamer" and the "mentor." Yet a large part of Lewis's appeal, for both his audiences, lay in his ability to fuse imagination with instruction. "Let the pictures tell you their own moral," he once advised writers of children's stories. "But if they don't show you any moral, don't put one in. ... The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind."
Storytelling came naturally to Lewis, who spent the rainy days of his childhood in Ireland writing about an imaginary world he called Boxen. His first published novel, Out of the Silent Planet, tells the story of a journey to Mars; its hero was loosely modeled on his friend and fellow Cambridge scholar J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis enjoyed some popularity for his Space Trilogy (which continues in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength), but nothing compared to that which greeted his next imaginative journey, to an invented world of fauns, dwarfs, and talking animals—a world now familiar to millions of readers as Narnia.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of the seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, began as "a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood," according to Lewis. Years after that image first formed in his mind, others bubbled up to join it, producing what Kate Jackson, writing in Salon, called "a fascinating attempt to compress an almost druidic reverence for wild nature, Arthurian romance, Germanic folklore, the courtly poetry of Renaissance England and the fantastic beasts of Greek and Norse mythology into an entirely reimagined version of what's tritely called 'the greatest story ever told.'"
The Chronicles of Narnia was for decades the world's bestselling fantasy series for children. Although it was eventually superseded by Harry Potter, the series still holds a firm place in children's literature and the culture at large. (Narnia even crops up as a motif in Jonathan Franzen's 2001 novel The Corrections). Its last volume appeared in 1955; in that same year, Lewis published a personal account of his religious conversion in Surprised by Joy. The autobiography joined his other nonfiction books, including Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce, as an exploration of faith, joy and the meaning of human existence.
Lewis's final work of fiction, Till We Have Faces, came out in 1956. Its chilly critical reception and poor early sales disappointed Lewis, but the book's reputation has slowly grown; Lionel Adey called it the "wisest and best" of Lewis's stories for adults. Lewis continued to write about Christianity, as well as literature and literary criticism, for several more years. After his death in 1963, The New Yorker opined, "If wit and wisdom, style and scholarship are requisites to passage through the pearly gates, Mr. Lewis will be among the angels."
Extras
• The imposing wardrobe Lewis and his brother played in as children is now in Wheaton, Illinois, at the Wade Center of Wheaton College, which also houses the world's largest collection of Lewis-related documents, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
• The 1994 movie, Shadowlands, based on the play of the same name, cast Anthony Hopkins as Lewis. It tells the story of his friendship with, and then marriage to, an American divorcee named Joy Davidman (played by Debra Winger), who died of cancer four years after their marriage. Lewis's own book about coping with that loss, A Grief Observed, was initially published under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk.
• Several poems, stories, and a novel fragment published after Lewis's death have come under scrutiny as possible forgeries. On one side of the controversy is Walter Hooper, a trustee of Lewis's estate and editor of most of his posthumous works; on the other is Kathryn Lindskoog, a Lewis scholar who began publicizing her suspicions in 1988. Scandal or kooky conspiracy theory? The verdict's still out among readers. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
C.S. Lewis has been hailed as the...true successor of Dean [Jonathan] Swift .... Screwtape is the name of a diabolical being ranking in intellectual ability with Milton's Beelzebub, and ... Wormwood is his agent on earth whose instructions are to prevent people getting converted to Christianity....[the two] make no secret that human misery is their aim in life....
P.W. Wilson - New York Times (3/28/43)
If wit and wisdom, style and scholarship are requisites to passage through the pearly gates, Mr. Lewis will be among the angels.
The New Yorker
Lewis, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century writer, forced those who listened to him and read his works to come to terms with their own philosophical presuppositions.
Los Angeles Times
(Audio version.) Lewis's satire is a Christian classic. Screwtape is a veteran demon in the service of "Our Father Below" whose letters to his nephew and protege , Wormwood, instruct the demon-in-training in the fine points of leading a new Christian astray. Lewis's take on human nature is as on-target as it was when the letters were first published in 1941. John Cleese's narration is perfect as he takes Screwtape from emotional height to valley, from tight control to near apoplexy. This will be a popular in most libraries. —Nann Blaine Hilyard, Lake Villa Dist. Lib., IL
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Much of the appeal The Screwtape Letters derives from Lewis's startlingly original reversal: telling a story about Christian faith not from a Christian point-of-view but from the perspective of a devil trying to secure the damnation of one's man's soul. Why is this strategy so effective? What does it allow Lewis to accomplish that would have been impossible in a more straightforward approach?
2. In the first of Screwtape's letters, he instructs Wormwood not to attempt to win the patient's soul through argument, but rather by fixing his attention on "the stream of immediate sense experiences" (p. 2). Why is immersion in the particulars of "real life" fertile ground for temptation? Why is argument a risky strategy for devils to employ? Where else do you find this opposition between the particular and the universal—between materialism and spiritual faith—in The Screwtape Letters?
3. While Screwtape allows that war is "entertaining" and provides "legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers," (p. 18) he fears that "if we are not careful, we shall see thousands turning in this tribulation to the Enemy, while tens of thousands who do not go so far will nevertheless have their attentions diverted from themselves to causes which they believe to be higher than the self" (p. 19). Why would war have this effect? How does war alter human consciousness in a way unfavorable to temptation? How would you relate Lewis's own experience in WWI, which apparently confirmed his youthful atheism, to his position in The Screwtape Letters?
4. In describing the differences in how God and the Devil view men, Screwtape says: "We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons" (p. 30). What is it about God's relationship to man that Screwtape finds so unfathomable?
5. Why is Screwtape so pleased when the patient becomes friends with a group of people who are "rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and brightly skeptical about everything in the world"? (p. 37). What influence does Screwtape hope they will have on him? Why should their "flippancy" build up an "armor-plating" against God? In what ways does Lewis merge theology and social satire in this and other passages throughout The Screwtape Letters?
6. Screwtape assures Wormwood that although some ancient writers, such as Boethius, might reveal powerful secrets to humans, they have been rendered powerless by "the Historical Point of View," which regards such writers not as sources of truth but merely as objects of scholarly speculation. "To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior-this would be regarded as unutterably simple-minded" (p. 108). Why would Screwtape delight in this situation? How would he turn it to his advantage? How does this view of reading parallel post-modern approaches to literature? Where else does Screwtape encourage Wormwood to persuade humans that truth is irrelevant?
7. Lewis exhibits throughout his writings an uncanny sense of human nature and a style capable of brilliant aphorism: "Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury" (p. 81); "Gratitude looks toward the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead" (p. 58), to cite just two examples. Where else in The Screwtape Letters do you find universal statements about human nature? Do these statements accurately reflect not just a Christian ethos but the workings of human psychology more generally?
8. The sub-plot of The Screwtape Letters turns on Screwtape's relationship with his nephew Wormwood, the apprentice tempter and demonic understudy in charge of carrying out Screwtape's instructions. How do Screwtape and Wormwood regard each other? How does their relationship change over the course of the book? In what ways does their relationship offer an inverted reflection of God's relationship to man? What is Lewis suggesting by having the story end with Screwtape preparing to devour a member of his own family?
9. In discussing time, change, and pleasure, Screwtape asserts that "just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty" (p. 98). Why is the demand for novelty necessarily destructive? What natural balance does such a demand disrupt? In what areas do you find this insistence on change, or overvaluation of the new, operating today?
10. Love is an important theme in The Screwtape Letters. Describing the human idea of love and marriage, Screwtape tells Wormwood: "They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life as something lower than a storm of emotion" (p. 72). Screwtape is also confounded by God's love for man, which he grants as real but irrational. What is Lewis saying, in the book as a whole, about human and divine love?
11. Over the course of The Screwtape Letters, the state of the patient's soul fluctuates as he experiences a conversion, doubt, dangerous friendships, war, love, and finally, in death, oneness with God. What major strategies does Screwtape use to tempt the patient into the Devil's camp? Why do these temptations fail? In what ways can the patient be seen as an everyman?
12. In spite the patient's triumph over temptation, his glorious entrance to Heaven-"the degradation of it!-that this thing of earth and slime could stand upright and converse with spirits" (p.122)—Screwtape does not lose faith in his own cause. Why do you think Lewis chose to end the book in this ambiguous light? Why is Screwtape sustained by "the conviction that our Realism, our rejection (in the face of all temptations) of all silly nonsense and claptrap, must win in the end"? (p. 124). What warning is implied in the book's ending? In what ways does The Screwtape Letters speak to contemporary moral and spiritual issues both within and outside of the Christian Church?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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