Margaret George, 2011
Penguin Group USA
704 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143120445
Summary
New York Times bestselling author Margaret George captures history's most enthralling queen—as she confronts rivals to her throne and to her heart.
One of today's premier historical novelists, Margaret George dazzles here as she tackles her most difficult subject yet: the legendary Elizabeth Tudor, queen of enigma-the Virgin Queen who had many suitors, the victor of the Armada who hated war; the gorgeously attired, jewel- bedecked woman who pinched pennies. England's greatest monarch has baffled and intrigued the world for centuries.
But what was she really like?
In this novel, her flame-haired, lookalike cousin, Lettice Knollys, thinks she knows all too well. Elizabeth's rival for the love of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and mother to the Earl of Essex, the mercurial nobleman who challenged Elizabeth's throne, Lettice had been intertwined with Elizabeth since childhood.
This is a story of two women of fierce intellect and desire, one trying to protect her country, and throne, the other trying to regain power and position for her family and each vying to convince the reader of her own private vision of the truth about Elizabeth's character. Their gripping drama is acted out at the height of the flowering of the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dudley, Raleigh, Drake-all of them swirl through these pages as they swirled through the court and on the high seas.
A magnificent, stay-up-all-night page-turner, Elizabeth I is George's finest and most compelling novel and one that is sure to please readers of Alison Weir, Philippa Gregory, and Hilary Mantel. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1943
• Where—Nashville, Tennessee, USA
• Education—B.A., Tufts University; M.A., Stanford University
• Currently—lives in Madison, Wisconsin
Margaret George is an American historian and historical novelist, specializing in epic fictional biographies. She is known for her meticulous research and the large scale of her books.
She is the author of the bestselling novels Elizabeth I (2011), The Autobiography of Henry VIII (1986), Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles (1992), and The Memoirs of Cleopatra (1997). The latter novel was adapted into an Emmy-nominated TV miniseries. Other bestselling novels include Mary Called Magdalene (2002) and Helen of Troy (2006). She co-authored a children's book about tortoises called Lucille Lost. George plans to write a novel about Boudicca, highlighting her conflict with Rome and Nero.
George, whose father joined the U.S. Foreign Service when she was four, lived all over the world—Taiwan, Israel, and Germany—before she was thirteen. Exposed early to historical sites, she learned that legends might have historical bases: she attended school in Jaffa, Israel, where Jonah set sail (en route to meeting the whale), and she lived on the Rhine in Germany across from the Drachenfels, where Siegfried of the Nibelungenlied killed the dragon.
She graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. and Stanford University with an M.A., co-majoring in biological science and English literature. She worked as a science writer for several years at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Since then she has lived in El Salvador and Sweden, and now calls Madison, Wisconsin, home.
Writing
She began writing at a very early age, composing on yellow lined tablets and illustrating them herself. By middle school, she had begun writing novels, but did not show them to anyone except a few close friends. Only when a book was completely finished did she try for publication. Although she is now known exclusively for historical tomes, she wrote in many genres—science fiction, teen, humor, chick lit (although it wasn’t called that then), action-adventure, before finding what suited her best.
Her first published novel, The Autobiography of Henry VIII, 1986, set the pattern. It successfully defended the notorious king’s honor and argued his case. Twenty-five years after its publication, it is still influential and was at the top of the fans’ recommended Henry VIII fiction list for "The Tudors" TV miniseries.
Her other books show the same key characteristics: careful research almost qualifying for non-fiction standards, enough length to give perspective to the subject’s life, and colorful imagery.
She has been interviewed on A & E’s Biography Series on Henry VIII (Henry VIII: Scandals of a King, 1996) and Elizabeth I (Elizabeth : The Virgin Queen, 1996), as well as a special about Cleopatra (Cleopatra’s World: Alexandria Revealed, 1999). She was also a consultant for the CNN special "The Two Marys" in 2004.
Her knowledge of ancient medicine, acquired through her research on Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene, and Helen of Troy, led to being an invited lecturer at The American Glaucoma Society (San Diego, 2009), The Glaucoma Foundation (New York City,1997) and the International Congress of Glaucoma Surgery (Luxor, Egypt, 2003). (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) Personal and political conflicts among such larger-than-life historical figures as Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, and Will Shakespeare intertwine in George's meticulously envisioned portrait of Elizabeth I during the last 25 years of her reign.… George painstakingly reveals a monarch who defined an era.
Publishers Weekly
George's writing is of an older, more formal style; neither cinematic nor intimately personal. Her story arc is leisurely to the point of plodding…. This is a book that would be treasured by history buffs but may try the patience of casual readers. —Therese Oneill, Monmouth, OR
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Narrating her own story, Elizabeth is in late middle age, still formidable.… George's mastery of period detail and her sure navigation through the rocky shoals of Elizabethan politics mean this lengthy novel never flags. —Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist
Overly busy novel of life inside the Virgin Queen's court—and mind.… [I]t is it's all rather clinical.… The tale is also nicely bloody and byzantine, but it goes on much too long.… Historically sound, but without the sympathetic spark of the best historical fiction.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. George brings the Elizabethan era to life. Which details or moments really made you feel as though you had been transported to another time?
2. How did Elizabeth’s court help to establish and support her public image? What challenges did her courtiers and advisers present? Besides Elizabeth, who had the most to gain by her not marrying?
3. Elizabeth admits on page 17 that she "had loved [Dudley] madly, as a young woman can do only once in her life." She continues by saying that time had evolved their relationship into a "sturdier, thicker, stronger, quieter thing." Which is more appealing to you—mad passion or quiet devotion?
4. Lettice says that she and Elizabeth "could almost be twins, except she loved the day and I the night" (p.178). In what ways are Elizabeth and Lettice reflections of each other? Which examples from the book can you find that illustrate this point?
5. Elizabeth, speaking of the death of King Philip of Spain, says, "Losing my steadfast enemy felt oddly like losing a steadfast friend; both defined me" (p. 399). How does Elizabeth’s relationship with Philip highlight key aspects of her personality? Of all the characters, who best fills the role of Elizabeth’s "steadfast friend"?
6. What sacrifices did Elizabeth make for her public role? Were they worth it? In her place, would you have done the same?
7. Love manifests itself in many ways, both romantic and otherwise. Compare and contrast the men who loved Elizabeth. How did Elizabeth benefit from these relationships?
8. George prefaces the novel with a quote from Shakespeare’s imagining of Elizabeth’s baptism in 1533. Does this quote accurately reflect Elizabeth’s life? If so, what examples would you draw from the novel to prove the point? If not, how would you amend the quote to better speak to her experience?
9. Did Elizabeth and Lettice’s relationship end the way that you expected? How would you describe the development of your feelings for these women over the course of the novel? Did one draw more sympathy or frustration than the other?
10. On the last page of the novel, Lettice attempts to explain the "kind of magic" that Elizabeth had as a ruler to make her subjects "feel as if they were wearing armor or sinking ships" (p. 662). What does she mean by this?
11. If you could choose any person in history for Margaret George to write about next, who would it be? What would you like to know about that person?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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The Shadow Catcher
Marianne Wiggins, 2007
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743265218
Summary
Following her National Book Award finalist, Evidence of Things Unseen, Marianne Wiggins turns her extraordinary literary imagination to the American West, where the life of legendary photographer Edward S. Curtis is the basis for a resonant exploration of history and family, landscape and legacy.
The Shadow Catcher dramatically inhabits the space where past and present intersect, seamlessly interweaving narratives from two different eras: the first fraught passion between turn-of-the-twentieth-century icon Edward Curtis (1868-1952) and his muse-wife, Clara; and a twenty-first-century journey of redemption.
Narrated in the first person by a reimagined writer named Marianne Wiggins, the novel begins in Hollywood, where top producers are eager to sentimentalize the complicated life of Edward Curtis as a sunny biopic: "It's got the outdoors. It's got adventure. It's got the do-good element." Yet, contrary to Curtis's esteemed public reputation as servant to his nation, the artist was an absent husband and disappearing father. Jump to the next generation, when Marianne's own father, John Wiggins (1920-1970), would live and die in equal thrall to the impulse of wanderlust.
Were the two men running from or running to? Dodging the false beacons of memory and legend, Marianne amasses disparate clues — photographs and hospital records, newspaper clippings and a rare white turquoise bracelet — to recover those moments that went unrecorded, "to hear the words only the silent ones can speak."
The Shadow Catcher, fueled by the great American passions for love and land and family, chases the silhouettes of our collective history into the bright light of the present. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 8, 1947
• Where—Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—Manheim Township High School, Lancaster
• Awards—Whiting Award, 1989; Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize
for best novel written by an American woman, 1990
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Marianne Wiggins was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has lived in Brussels, Rome, Paris, and London. She is the author of ten books of fiction, including John Dollar and Evidence of Things Unseen, for which she was a National Book Award finalist in fiction, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won an NEA grant, the Whiting Writers' Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. (From the publisher.)
More
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:
Q: What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer—and why?
A: Hands down, this was Tillie Olsen's Silences. It was published soon after I turned 30, when I had one book in print and had not really found my canvas nor my voice. I was at a turning point in my life, not knowing if I could make a "career" of writing and having a young daughter to support on my own. Olsen's masterpiece is not so much "written" as gasped — her passionate engagement with the subject of women writers grips you physically like a madwoman on a bus demanding your participation in her cause. I read it in the kitchen, I read it in bed — I still read parts of it at least once every month.
Q: What are your favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
A: When I moved back to the United States after living 16 years in London, I had to ship all my possessions to California through the Panama Canal. I'll always remember the look on that Allied Movers agent's face when he saw my shelves of books: over 300 cartons' worth, and that was after I weeded out the out-of-date travel books to places like Burma and Romania that I had bought for research for my novels. I'm going to have to sidestep this question, adapting my sister's line. She has five children and frequently, sincerely, says, "I love ‘em all." (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Wiggins seems to be writing her own psycho-history here. (The book is dedicated to her daughter, Lara Porzak, a photographer.) But if the novel fails to integrate all the cosmic elements she summons up — her digressions on maps, aerial perspective, Western land rights and Los Angeles traffic are strained — Wiggins ably challenges the smug idea that we can easily distinguish truth and falsehood in telling anyone’s story, especially our own. Fictive memoir? Fact-based novel? I don’t care what she calls this book. I’ll gladly read it again.
Richard B. Woodward - New York Times
There are passages in Marianne Wiggins's eighth novel so piercingly beautiful that I put the book down, shook my head and simply said, "Wow." She's reproduced a number of photographs in her text — appropriately, since her subject is a photographer — but these physical images pale in comparison to the pictures she creates with words.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post
The author can make you weep in a single sentence...The events and relationships are rendered on the page with an immediacy that catches you up short.
Boston Globe
(Starred review.) Wiggins is a writer who paints elegant pictures with words.... The pages are liberally sprinkled with photographs, insights, realistic pathos, and human situations. This creative novel will not disappoint. —Elizabeth Dickie
Booklist
Wiggins takes on real-life American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis. The author braids the stories of Curtis, whose photos of Native Americans and the western landscape shaped the region's mythology; his long-suffering wife, Clara; and a present-day writer, "Marianne Wiggins," who's summoned to a Las Vegas hospital to see the dying "father" whom she knows to be an imposter because her dad hanged himself decades earlier. Incorporated into the text are photographic images taken by the mysterious, obsessive Curtis, famed for his pictures of grave, brooding Indians posed in ceremonial dress-funeral portraits of a dying race, he called them. Especially poignant is the plight of Clara, who manages the household and raises their children virtually alone (the youngest goes 18 years without seeing her father). Yet when she finally sues for divorce, the children side with Curtis, choosing the mythical god over the disciplinarian. Wiggins intercuts the story of the writer/narrator's own absent father. The novel can seem diffuse—neither storyline is explored as fully as it might be—but the stratagem pays off in bravura passages like the one in which Wiggins riffs her way from ethnic roadside restaurants to gods of Greek myth to the American cult of celebrity...and in the process forges an emotional link between narrative lines. An ambitious, lively work, though its fragments don't coalesce perfectly.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. Marianne Wiggins's new novel, The Shadow Catcher, centers in part on the life of a real historical figure, Edward Sheriff Curtis. Discuss the unique process of weaving fact and fiction: What difficulties it might pose? What artistic freedoms might emerge?
2. The book features an unusual narrative technique, combining historical fiction with more documentary-style biography and history, as well as a personal narrative that reads like memoir. Why do you think the author chose to tell this story in this way?
3. The chapters in the novel about Edward and Clara are essentially told from Clara's point of view. Is this ultimately more a story about Clara than Edward?
4. The intimate details of a personal relationship that unfolded in the past may not be documented in the way a public life might be. Is love a timeless emotion, or is the feeling influenced by the times in which it occurs?
5. The Edward Curtis presented here is a much more complicated man than the heroic figure that has come down to us through the legacy of his work. How do mythic elements of a human life arise over time?
6. Do you think Edward Curtis's story is a singularly American one?
7. There is a character named "Marianne Wiggins" in The Shadow Catcher who, on the surface, shares much of the history of the actual Marianne Wiggins. When you are reading a novel, does the feeling of making a personal connection with the author add to your experience?
8. In another unusual feature for a novel, The Shadow Catcher is peppered with images—not only some of Edward Curtis's photographs, but photographs from Marianne Wiggins's family and images of historical and personal documents aswell. Why do you think the author included these?
9. This is not the first time a photographer has been a central character in one of Marianne Wiggins's novels. Discuss the art of photography as it might relate to fiction.
10. A watchword throughout this novel is "Print the Legend." Why do you think we sometimes cling to our cultural myths in the face of overriding evidence against their truth?
11. Late in the novel Wiggins writes, "How the average person dreams is pretty much how the average novelist puts a page together." Discuss the possible meanings of this statement.
12. Marianne Wiggins was born and raised in the East, lived in Europe for many years, and now lives in California. How might a person come to develop such an obvious passion for a region—in this case the Western landscape—not her original home?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Clara and Mr. Tiffany
Susan Vreeland, 2011
Random House
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400068166
Summary
Against the unforgettable backdrop of New York near the turn of the twentieth century, from the Gilded Age world of formal balls and opera to the immigrant poverty of the Lower East Side, bestselling author Susan Vreeland again breathes life into a work of art in this extraordinary novel, which brings a woman once lost in the shadows into vivid color.
It’s 1893, and at the Chicago World’s Fair, Louis Comfort Tiffany makes his debut with a luminous exhibition of innovative stained-glass windows, which he hopes will honor his family business and earn him a place on the international artistic stage. But behind the scenes in his New York studio is the freethinking Clara Driscoll, head of his women’s division. Publicly unrecognized by Tiffany, Clara conceives of and designs nearly all of the iconic leaded-glass lamps for which he is long remembered.
Clara struggles with her desire for artistic recognition and the seemingly insurmountable challenges that she faces as a professional woman, which ultimately force her to protest against the company she has worked so hard to cultivate. She also yearns for love and companionship, and is devoted in different ways to five men, including Tiffany, who enforces to a strict policy: he does not hire married women, and any who do marry while under his employ must resign immediately. Eventually, like many women, Clara must decide what makes her happiest—the professional world of her hands or the personal world of her heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 20, 1946
• Where—Racine, Wisconsin, USA
• Death—August 23, 2017
• Where—San Diego, California
• Education—San Diego State University
• Awards—Inkwell Grand Prize, Fiction, 1999; San Diego Book Awards' Theodore Geisel Award and Best Novel of the Year, 2002.
Susan Vreeland's short fiction has appeared in journals such as The New England Review, The Missouri Review, Confrontation, Calyx, Manoa, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her first novel, What Love Sees, was broadcast as a CBS Sunday night movie in 1996. Ms. Vreeland is the recipient of several awards, including a Women's National Book Association First Place Award in Short Fiction (1991) and a First Place in Short Fiction from New Voices (1993). Inkwell Magazine for her short story, "Gifts". She teaches English literature, creative writing, and art in San Diego public schools, where she has taught since 1969. (From the publisher.)
More
"When I was nine, my great-grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors," Susan Vreeland recalls in an interview on her publisher's web site. "With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper. How many girls throughout history would have longed to be taught that, but had to do washing and mending instead?"
As a grown woman, Vreeland found her own magical way of translating her vision of the world into art. While teaching high school English in the 1980s, she began to write, publishing magazine articles, short stories, and her first novel, What Love Sees. In 1996, Vreeland was diagnosed with lymphoma, which forced her to take time off from teaching—time she spent undergoing medical treatment and writing stories about a fictional Vermeer painting.
Creative endeavor can aid healing because it lifts us out of self-absorption and gives us a goal," she later wrote. In Vreeland's case, her goal "was to live long enough to finish this set of stories that reflected my sensibilities, so that my writing group of twelve dear friends might be given these and know that in my last months I was happy—because I was creating."
Vreeland recovered from her illness and wove her stories into a novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue. The book was a national bestseller, praised by the New York Times as "intelligent, searching and unusual" and by Kirkus Reviews as "extraordinarily skilled historical fiction: deft, perceptive, full of learning, deeply moving." Its interrelated stories move backward in time, creating what Marion Lignana Rosenberg in Salon called "a kind of Chinese box unfolding from the contemporary hiding-place of a painting attributed to Vermeer all the way back to the moment the work was conceived."
Vreeland's next novel, The Passion of Artemisia, was based on the life of the 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, often regarded as the first woman to hold a significant place in the history of European art. "Forthright and imaginative, Vreeland's deft recreation ably showcases art and life," noted Publishers Weekly.
Love for the visual arts, especially painting, continues to fire Vreeland's literary imagination. Her new novel, The Forest Lover, is a fictional exploration of the life of the 20th-century Canadian artist Emily Carr. She has also written a series of art-related short stories. For Vreeland, art provides inspiration for living as well as for literature. As she put it in an autobiographical essay, "I hope that by writing art-related fiction, I might bring readers who may not recognize the enriching and uplifting power of art to the realization that it can serve them as it has so richly served me."
Extras
• Two other novels relating to Vermeer were published within a year of Girl in Hyacinth Blue: The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber and Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.
• Vreeland taught high school English and ceramics for 30 years before retiring to become a full-time writer. She lived in San Diego, California, and died in 2017. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Clara and Mr. Tiffany is about art and commerce, love and duty. Peopled with characters both imagined and historic, it is also a study of New York's ultra-rich and desperate poor, its entitled men and its disenfranchised women. And it is the story of one extraordinary woman's passion and determination…Vreeland's ability to make this complex historical novel as luminous as a Tiffany lamp is nothing less than remarkable.
Eugenia Zuckerman - Washington Post
Vreeland (Luncheon of the Boating Party) again excavates the life behind a famous artistic creation--in this case the Tiffany leaded-glass lamp, the brainchild not of Louis Comfort Tiffany but his glass studio manager, Clara Driscoll. Tiffany staffs his studio with female artisans—a decision that protects him from strikes by the all-male union--but refuses to employ women who are married. Lucky for him, Clara's romantic misfortunes--her husband's death, the disappearance of another suitor—insure that she can continue to craft the jewel-toned glass windows and lamps that catch both her eye and her imagination. Behind the scenes she makes her mark as an artist and champion of her workers, while living in an eclectic Irving Place boarding house populated by actors and artists. Vreeland ably captures Gilded Age New York and its atmosphere—robber barons, sweatshops, colorful characters, ateliers—but her preoccupation with the larger historical story comes at the expense of Clara, whose arc, while considered and nicely told, reflects the times too closely in its standard-issue woman-behind-the-man scenario.
Publishers Weekly
Vreeland (Luncheon of the Boating Party) creates another affecting story of artistic vision and innovation, this time set within the crafts movement around the turn of the 19th century. She tells the story of Clara Driscoll, who ran the women's workshop at the New York studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany. In Vreeland's account, it was Clara who had the idea to create lampshades from stained glass; Mr. Tiffany, unconcerned with profits, gave her the freedom to follow her creative instincts. While Clara had her share of personal struggles, she lived happily among artists and bohemians during a time of great social change; settlement houses, women's suffrage, and trade unions were among the nascent progressive movements that influenced her life and times. Verdict: In trademark style, Vreeland adds depth to her novel by incorporating details about the artistic process. Her descriptions highlight the craftsmanship behind the timeless beauty of Tiffany's glass, and the true story of Clara Driscoll's life serves as a colorful canvas. Recommended for historical fiction readers; likely to become a favorite on the book club circuit. —Susanne Wells, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty
Library Journal
In her sixth work of fiction about the inter-penetration of life and art, Vreeland (Luncheon of the Boating Party, 2007, etc.) celebrates the putative designer of Tiffany's leaded-glass lampshades. That would be Clara Driscoll. Some art historians now believe that it was Clara, unacknowledged in her lifetime, who conceived the lampshades. What is indisputable is that, encouraged by Louis Tiffany, she was a major creative force at his Glass and Decorating Company. (This was separate from the jewelry company, run by his father Charles.) From 1892 to 1908, she oversaw the Women's Department; many of her workers were from poor immigrant families and still in their teens. Louis would not employ married women. Clara had returned to the company after her much older husband Francis died, omitting her from his will. Vreeland's account of the marriage is sketchy; her primary focus is on the workplace. Here Clara is a commanding figure: a mother hen to the Tiffany Girls, a feminist challenging the rampant sexism of the Men's Department and an imaginative innovator marrying glass to flowers and insects. Her greatest triumph was the dragonfly lamp at the Paris Exposition, though even there she was not given credit. However, she did find consolation in her bohemian downtown boardinghouse, especially in the company of the madcap painter George Waldo (gay, like several of their fellow lodgers) and his straight brother Edwin, a prospective husband until his mysterious disappearance. Vreeland guides us conscientiously through the world of glass, of cames and cabochons, though the detail can be overwhelming. More damagingly, she has let the stifling propriety of the time infect Clara as narrator; though prim among her peers, she could surely have unbuttoned to us, her readers. Louis, cocooned in reverence, suffers too. His one memorable scene comes after his wife's death when, a remorseful drunk, his language turns salty. A novel that reads like a labor of love. Unfortunately, the labor is as evident as the love.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How do Clara’s yearnings and goals change during the course of the novel. What personal growth is revealed, and what experiences prompt that growth?
2. At the first Tiffany Ball with Edwin in chapter nine, Clara says, “We straddled a double world.” How does that play out in Clara’s experience? What did she learn from Edwin?
3. Of all of the adjectives Clara and Alice heap on Tiffany in chapter twenty-seven, which ones do you believe are justified and which are exaggerations? In spite of their accusations, Clara says in the same scene that she adores him. How can that be? Did she truly love him? What kind of love was it?
4. How was Clara’s love different for each of the five men in her life? Given that love can sometimes be an indefinable thing, in each case, what prompted her love and how did it change, if at all?
5. Is George Waldo a tragic character? Is Edwin? Is Wilhelmina? How do you define tragic character?
6. Throughout the novel there are social contrasts–rich and poor, suffering and insouciance. Speculate on how these serve to make Clara a more well-rounded or deeper person, as well as how they serve to make the novel transcend the period depicted.
7. Mr. Tiffany makes a surprising final concession in chapter forty-seven. What was it based on? In light of it, should Clara have stayed working at Tiffany Studios? How was her decision right or wrong for her?
8. How is the Brooklyn Bridge an icon or symbol of the time? Consider its style, the construction process, the men and woman who worked on it. You may have to do a little research. Why was Edwin so moved by it? What other material things were symbols of the time? In what way were Tiffany lamps icons of the time?
9. The style and sensibility that had no name at the turn of the century came to be known as camp, one element of which is seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon and then exaggerating it. Another element of it is the playful duplicity of which Henry Belknap speaks. What art movements, artists, or pieces of art in your lifetimes reflect the camp sensibility? Do you own anything with camp sensibility? Oscar Wilde, spokesperson of high camp, said, “In matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style.” To what extent do you hold this to be true? Was he just being flippant by making this statement or is there any truth to it?
10. The protagonists of two other novels of mine are female artists. How do Clara’s goals, obstacles, and attitudes compare with those of Artemisia Gentileschi and Emily Carr? Has anything changed for women in the arts?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Dreams of Joy
Lisa See, 2011
Random House
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400067121
Summary
In her most powerful novel yet, Lisa See continues the story of sisters Pearl and May from Shanghai Girls, and Pearl’s strong-willed nineteen-year-old daughter, Joy.
Reeling from newly uncovered family secrets, and anger at her mother and aunt for keeping them from her, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father—the artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the communist regime.
Devastated by Joy’s flight and terrified for her safety, Pearl is determined to save her daughter, no matter the personal cost. From the crowded city to remote villages, Pearl confronts old demons and almost insurmountable challenges as she follows Joy, hoping for reconciliation. Yet even as Joy’s and Pearl’s separate journeys converge, one of the most tragic episodes in China’s history threatens their very lives.
Acclaimed for her richly drawn characters and vivid storytelling, Lisa See once again renders a family challenged by tragedy and time, yet ultimately united by the resilience of love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 18, 1955
• Where—Paris, France
• Education—B.A., Loyola Marymount University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Lisa See is an American writer and novelist. Her Chinese-American family (See has one Chinese great-grandparent) has had a great impact on her life and work. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995) and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list, and China Dolls (2014).
Flower Net, The Interior, and Dragon Bones make up the Red Princess mystery series. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love focus on the lives of Chinese women in the 19th and 17th centuries respectively. Shanghai Girls chronicles the lives of two sisters who come to Los Angeles in arranged marriages and face, among other things, the pressures put on Chinese-Americans during the anti-Communist mania of the 1950s. See published a sequel titled Dreams of Joy.
Writing under the pen name Monica Highland, See, her mother Carolyn See, and John Espey, published three novels: Lotus Land (1983), 110 Shanghai Road (1986), and Greetings from Southern California (1988).
Biography
Lisa See was born in Paris but has spent many years in Los Angeles, especially Los Angeles Chinatown. Her mother, Carolyn See, is also a writer and novelist. Her autobiography provides insight into her daughter's life. Lisa See graduated with a B.A. from Loyola Marymount University in 1979.
See was West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly (1983–1996); has written articles for Vogue, Self, and More; has written the libretto for the opera based on On Gold Mountain, and has helped develop the Family Discovery Gallery for the Autry Museum, which depicts 1930s Los Angeles from the perspective of her father as a seven-year-old boy. Her exhibition On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience was featured in the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, and the Smithsonian. See is also a public speaker.
She has written for and led in many cultural events emphasizing the importance of Los Angeles and Chinatown. Among her awards and recognitions are the Organization of Chinese Americans Women's 2001 award as National Woman of the Year and the 2003 History Makers Award presented by the Chinese American Museum. See has served as a Los Angeles City Commissioner. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/21/2014.)
Book Reviews
See revisits Shanghai Girls sisters Pearl and May in this surefire story of life in Communist China. Joy, the daughter Pearl has raised as her own in L.A., learns the truth about her parentage and flees to China to seek out her father and throw herself into the Communist cause, giving See ample opportunity to explore the People's Republic from an unlikely perspective as Joy reconnects with her artist father, Z.G. Li, and the two leave sophisticated Shanghai to go to the countryside, where Z.G., whose ironic view of politics is lost on naïve Joy, has been sent to teach art to the peasants. Joy, full of political vigor, is slow to pick up on the harsh realities of communal life in late 1950s China, but the truth sinks in as Mao's drive to turn China into a major agriculture and manufacturing power backfires. Pearl, meanwhile, leaves L.A. on a perhaps perilous quest to find Joy. As always, See creates an immersive atmosphere—her rural China is far from postcard pretty—but Joy's education is a stellar example of finding new life in a familiar setup, and See's many readers will be pleased to see the continued development of Pearl and May's relationship. Looks like another hit.
Publishers Weekly
This is the eagerly anticipated sequel to See's Shanghai Girls, and what a sequel it is! Continuing the story of Pearl and May Chin, who escaped the Japanese invasion of China during the 1930s, the novel centers on Joy, the daughter that both women have raised, one as aunt, one as mother. When 19-year-old Joy discovers the identity of her "real" mother, she returns to China in 1957. Readers will be drawn in as they experience Joy's life in Mao's Communist China: her life on a commune, starvation, love, oppression, and her fight to stay alive. It's this struggle for life that May and Pearl understand all too well, and it's what sends Pearl back to China. Pearl has the fierce mother love that allows her to disregard her own life to save her daughter. And that's the essential question: What makes a true mother? Verdict: Readers of historical fiction will appreciate the authentic details that See weaves into her novel. You don't have to read Shanghai Girls to love this book, but if you have, this sequel will make you want to reread its predecessor. —Marika Zemke, Commerce Twp. Community Lib., MI
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Joy is frequently described in terms of her Tiger astrological sign. In Dreams of Joy, where do you see her acting true to her Tiger nature? Where do you see her acting un-Tiger like?
2. Many of us grew up believing that the People’s Republic of China was “closed,” and that it remained that way until President Nixon “opened” it. Certainly Pearl (and even Joy, to a great extent) go to China with preconceived ideas of what they’ll see and experience. In what ways are they right—or wrong?
3. Does seeing the world through Joy’s eyes help you to understand Pearl? Similarly, does Pearl give insights into her daughter?
4. The novel’s title, Dreams of Joy, has many meanings. What does the phrase mean to the different characters in the novel, to Lisa, to the reader?
5. In many ways Dreams of Joy is a traditional coming-of-age novel for Joy. Lisa has said that she believes it’s also a coming of age novel for Pearl and May. Do you agree? If so, how do these three characters grow up? Do they find their happy endings?
6. Although May plays a key role in Dreams of Joy, she is always off stage How do you feel about this? Would you rather have May be an on-stage figure in this novel?
7. Pearl has some pretty strong views about motherhood. At one point she asks, “What tactic do we, as mothers, use with our children when we know they’re going to make, or have already made, a terrible mistake? We accept blame.” Later, she observes, “Like all mothers, I needed to hide my sadness, anger, and grief.” Do you agree with her? Does her attitude about mothering change during the course of the novel?
8. Joy’s initial perception of China is largely a projection of her youthful idealism. What are the key scenes that force her to adjust her beliefs and feelings in this regard?
9. Describe the roles that Tao, Ta-ming, Kumei, and Yong play in Dreams of Joy. Why are they so important thematically to the novel?
10. Food—or severe lack of it—are of critical importance in Dreams of Joy. How does food affect Joy’s growth as a person? Pearl’s?
11. Let’s consider the men—whether present in the novel as living characters or not—for a moment. What influence do Sam, Z.G., Pearl’s father, Dun, and Tao have on the story? How do they show men at their best and worst? Are any of these characters completely good—or bad?
12. Dreams of Joy is largely a novel about mothers and daughters, but it’s also about fathers and daughters. How do Joy’s feelings toward Sam and Z.G. change over the course of the novel? Does Pearl’s attitude towards her father change in any way?
13. There are several moments in the novel when people have to choose the moral or ethical thing to do. Where are those places? What purpose do they play? And why do you think Lisa choose to write them?
14. Z.G. quotes a 17th-century artist when he says, “Art is the heartbeat of the artist.” How has this idea influenced his life? What impact does this concept have on Joy?
15. Ultimately, Dreams of Joy is about “mother love”—the love Pearl feels for Joy, Joy feels for her mother, Joy experiences with the birth of her daughter, and the on-going struggle between Pearl and May over who is Joy’s true mother. In what ways do secrets, disappointments, fear, and overwhelming love affect mother love in the story?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Gangster We Are All Looking For
Le Thi Diem Thuy, 2003
Knopf Doubleday
160 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375700026
Summary
This acclaimed novel reveals the life of a Vietnamese family in America through the knowing eyes of a child finding her place and voice in a new country.
In 1978 six refugees—a girl, her father, and four “uncles”—are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child’s imagination, the world is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects, and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited.
As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father’s hopeless rage. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 2, 1972
• Where—Phana Thiet, South Vietnam
• Education—B.A., Hampshire College
• Awards—Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships
• Currently—lives in western Massachusetts, USA
Le Thi Diem Thuy (pronounced lay tee yim twee) is an award-winning poet, novelist, and performer. She is the author of the 2003 novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Born in the South Vietnamese village of Phan Thiet during the heart of the Vietnam War, Le left her homeland in 1978, alongside her father in a small fishing boat. They were picked up by an American naval ship and placed in a refugee camp in Singapore.
She and her father would eventually resettle in Linda Vista, in San Diego, California, where they shared in decaying 1940's-1950's Navy housing with fellow Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian "boat people" immigrants displaced by war. Le's mother and sister joined them two years later via a camp in Malaysia. Two of Le's siblings drowned during her childhood—her eldest brother in the ocean in Vietnam when he was six, her sister in a Malaysian refugee camp. Le adopted the name of her deceased sister after her father mistakenly reported her name when they were rescued at sea. She has four surviving siblings, two of which were born in America.
Le took her inspiration for writing from her love of fairy tales.
I wanted to write because I loved fairy tales. Reading a book of Grimm fairy tales, she recalls, I felt transported. Things happen very suddenly in fairy tales: A man puts on a cloak and vanishes. I could relate to that. Once I was somewhere and then I was here, and everything had vanished. I didn't take it as fantastic. I thought it was real.
She moved to Massachusetts in 1990 to enroll in Hampshire College where she concentrated on cultural studies and post-colonial literature. In 1993 Le traveled to Paris to research French colonial postcards from the early 1900s—images of Vietnamese people taken by French photographers. Some of the images she collected would later appear in her performance work. It is in France, that she solidified her identity as an American and English as her preferred language. Being in France and not hearing English every day, she says, helped clarify how "I hear English and carry it inside me."
On her return to Hampshire, she wrote poems, prose and pieces of dialog that would form the foundation for her senior thesis and first solo performance work, Mua He Do Lua / Red Fiery Summer. After graduation, she traveled the country from 1995 to 1997 performing Red Fiery Summer in community spaces and formal theaters. In 1996, she was commissioned to write her second solo performance work entitled The Bodies Between Us, which was subsequently produced by New WORLD Theater.
In the same year, she published a prose piece entitled "The Gangster We Are All Looking For" in Massachusetts Review. It was rerun in Harper's Magazine later that year, where it caught the attention of literary agent Nicole Aragi, who urged Le to expand the work into a novel. The unfinished book was picked up by Alfred A. Knopf and published in 2003 to glowing reviews.
In 1998, while working on her book, Le returned to her birthplace Vietnam for the first time in 20 years with her mother. Her trip made her appreciate the how much her parents had suffered when they settled in America.
It was profoundly sad for me. The most powerful thing was this [extended] family. I must have been related to 200 people there. I realized how isolated my parents must have felt, the extent of what they had lost and had never been able to regain.
Her mother returned to Vietnam permanently in 2001 after she was diagnosed with cancer. She is buried in her home village of Phan Thiet. Le's father moved back to Vietnam in 2003.
Shortly before publishing The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Le was cited by the New York Times as one of its "Writers On The Verge." Her work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Harper's Magazine, and The Very Inside anthology, and among her awards are Fellowships from the Radcliffe and Guggenheim foundations.
Her powerful solo performance work, including Red Fiery Summer and The Bodies Between Us, have been performed throughout the United States (at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Vineyard Theater, among others), as well as in Europe. While the former piece reflects many stories later included in The Gangster, her next novel will be based on Bodies. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Though dense with allusion and simile, Le's prose is precise and uncluttered. She has a strong pictorial talent, and can make the reader see everything from the wings of a butterfly preserved in a glass paperweight to the giddy acrobatics of little boys jumping into a pool. An unerring eye for the seemingly mundane details of everyday life guides her story, and a sly sense of humor graces an imagination busily occupied with the possibilities of metaphor.
Paul Baumann - New York Times
While the novel brilliantly illuminates its unlikely troika, what the narrative leaves out is just as striking. It seems significant that descriptions of the Vietnam War barely figure in the story and that American characters remain fuzzy, undifferentiated and impressionistic. In this way, the relationship of this engaging and original novel to more conventional American narratives of Vietnam may be thought to be like a photographic negative: What's white is dark, what's dark is white, and the image is strange and mesmerizing.
Peter Zinoman - Los Angeles Times
Le's first novel is a bracing, unvarnished, elliptical account of a Vietnamese refugee family, in America but not yet of it, hobbled by an unfamiliar environment and their own troubled relationships. It's narrated by the family's young daughter, newly arrived in San Diego with her father after being sponsored by a well-meaning but condescending American family. Her mother soon joins them, and the family endures an itinerant existence of low-wage jobs and cheap rental apartments. Other Vietnamese wander namelessly through the book, sharing space with the family but providing little of the warmth of community. Nearly plotless, the novel is organized into vignettes that each feature one piercing image: a drunken parent, a shattered display cabinet, a drowned boy. As the narrator makes her halting adjustment to America, she also tries to discover what the family has left behind in Vietnam. Her father's mysterious past caused him to be rejected by his in-laws; these grandparents are now known to the girl only through a worn photograph. Then there is her brother, whose fate is mentioned only in whispers. Le allows no sentimentality to creep into this work-indeed, she hints only subtly at the narrator's emotional state ("there is no trace of blood anywhere except here, in my throat, where I am telling you all of this"), as though any explicit show of feeling were too frivolous for the subject at hand. This is a stark and significant work that will challenge readers.
Publishers Weekly
In the opening pages of this affecting debut, a Vietnamese girl who has survived the open seas with her father and four "uncles" winds up in America at the home of a somewhat reluctant sponsor. There she finds a paperweight containing a butterfly and smashes it to release the beautiful creature-an act that gets the refugees thrown out. The butterfly is rather too patently a symbol for the young protagonist herself, who eventually flutters away from her prison, though not in so obvious a fashion. The story, however, is as much about her parents' marriage, strained to breaking not only by the effort to adapt to America but by memories of Vietnam. The mother had defied her south Catholic family to marry a northerner reputed to be a gangster, and violence and passion still run through their relationship. In addition, they have lost a son, who drowned in the South China Seas and sometimes comes to haunt his confused little sister. The story opens slowly but gathers strength, and though it remains somewhat muted, le's lyrical writing and skill with the telling vignette will reward patient readers. For all Asian/immigrant collections.
Library Journal
The narrator of Le's poetically spare but psychologically rich debut novel is only six when she and her father and four other Vietnamese men arrive in San Diego, thanks to a generous man who learned of the plight of Vietnamese boat people at church. Sadly, he dies before they arrive.... There is much pain in this exquisite novel, and much beauty. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
A detailed and moving saga of a Vietnamese family in America, subtly assembled from this limpid debut's kaleidoscopic array of gorgeous and troubling word pictures. The unnamed narrator's musings move forward and backward in time, from East to West, between her confused childhood and the "escape" she makes from her parents in California to relocate in the eastern US. The early pages describe her flight, with her father (Ba) and four uncles, from Vietnam by boat, their arrival in San Diego, and troubled relationships with a well-meaning American host family. After she and Ba have been reunited with her mother (Ma), the narrator then describes their constant moves from one apartment and job to another. We then learn about her parents' youth, and Ma's estrangement from her family for having married "a Buddhist gangster" who's also her social inferior. As these details emerge, thúy builds a heart-wrenching picture of her narrator's abstracted, conflicted psyche, repeatedly reemphasizing the girl's preternatural sensitivity to new sights, sounds, smells, and textures while revealing the death of her older brother by drowning in childhood, and how this loss haunted her family for many years after. The consequent impressions of disorientation, resentment, and loneliness are powerfully conveyed by numerous abrupt, startling images (a girl killed by a napalm bombing that "made her body glow, like a lantern"; a dead butterfly preserved in a glass disk and employed as a paperweight; and a climactic vision of the bodies of small "silver fish" washed out of the open sea onto a moonlit beach). The narrative thus resembles a song with a pronounced central refrain, around which an infinite number of verse variations are clustered. Beautiful stuff—and a brilliant debut.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Gangster We All Are Looking For:
1. The young narrator of Le's novel is nameless. Why is she never given a name? What might have been the author's reason?
2. Describe Ba, the father. What kind of a man is he? What is the source of his rage? Is he to be admired...pitied...disliked...or what?
3. What is the significance of the book's title? In what way is—or was—Ba a gangster? Has he changed since his escape from Vietnam and arrival in the US? When his daughter says that of all her father's friends, "he alone managed to crawl here, on his hands and knees, to this life," is she speaking of his will to survive...his predatory nature...his new found humility...or what?
3. The narrator refers to her own birth in the middle of the war as "both a curse and a miracle." What does she mean?
4. War comprises a setting of this novel. Talk about the mother's remark that war is "a bird with a broken wing flying over the countryside, trailing blood and burying crops in sorrow." What does our young narrator mean when she tells us that "war has no beginning and no end. It crosses oceans like a splintered boat"?
5. Follow up to Question #4: If you are old enough to have lived through it, what is your remembrance of the Vietnam War? If you are too young, what is your understanding of the war. If you are of Vietnamese descent, talk about the ways in which the war transformed Vietnam. What it was like (or what must it have been like) to experience the horror of the war on your homeland?
6. The word for water, in Vietnamese, is the same as for nation, country, and homeland; water is found everywhere in The Gangster, literally and figuratively. Talk about the symbolic use of water in this novel. What does water signify?
7. How does the narrator's mother adjust to her new life? Why is she distraught, for instance, over their landlord's draining of the swimming pool. What more might she mean when she laments, "I open the door and what is there to see?" How does Le's language alert us to the possiblity of something more significant than the loss of a pleasant view?
8. When the family is evicted from the apartment, a photograph is left behind. What does its loss signify for the mother? Why does she believe she has betrayed her parents...again?
9. Consider how self-identify, the sense of who one is, gets lost or overwhelmed in the course of a migration to a another land that is vastly different—as well as indifferent and even hostile. How would that feel? Does Le adequately describe her family's profound sense of displacement? Have you read other narratives about the immigrant experience? If so, how does Le's compare? If you have come from another country, what is it like to land in an alien culture?
10. Critics have expounded on the poetic and lyrical style of Le's prose. Are there passages that strike you as particularly beautiful in their use of language and imagery? How does Le's artistic vision affect your experience of reading her novel?
11. Le uses five interlocking stories in her novel, shifting time, place and point of view. Does this structure engage you...or do you find it distracting? Why might she have structured her novel in such a way? What advantages might it give a novelist, as opposed to a straightforward perspective and timeline?
12. Comment on the young narrator's remark: "I don't know how time moves or which of our sorrows or our desires it is able to wash away." Is time able—or not—to heal this family's sorrow and sense of loss?
13. In the story "Nu'o'c," the mystery that has permeated previous stories is revealed. Does its revelation bring the novel into focus for you? Does it pull the disparate elements together into a unified whole?
14. Do you like this book?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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