Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood, 2003
Knopf Doubleday
378 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385721677
Summary
Margaret Atwood's new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again.
The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.
With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter. (From the publisher.)
This is the first book in Atwood's dystopian trilogy: the second is The Year of the Flood (2009); the third is MaddAddam (2013)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 18, 1939
• Where—Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto; M.A. Radcliffe; Ph.D., Harvard University
• Awards—Governor General's Award; Booker Prize; Giller Award
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Canada
Early life
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Atwood is the second of three children of Margaret Dorothy (nee Killam), a former dietitian and nutritionist, and Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist. Due to her father’s ongoing research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of Northern Quebec and traveling back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, and Toronto. She did not attend school full-time until she was in grade 8. She became a voracious reader of literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and comic books. She attended Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto, and graduated in 1957.
Atwood began writing at the age of six and realized she wanted to write professionally when she was 16. In 1957, she began studying at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where she published poems and articles in Acta Victoriana, the college literary journal. Her professors included Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye. She graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and a minor in philosophy and French.
In late 1961, after winning the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately printed book of poems, Double Persephone, she began graduate studies at Harvard's Radcliffe College with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master's degree (MA) from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued further graduate studies at Harvard University for two years but did not finish her dissertation, “The English Metaphysical Romance." She has taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967–68), the University of Alberta (1969–70), York University in Toronto (1971–72), the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (1985), where she was visiting M.F.A. Chair, and New York University, where she was Berg Professor of English.
Personal life
In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk; they were divorced in 1973. She formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon after and moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, north of Toronto, where their daughter was born in 1976. The family returned to Toronto in 1980.
Other genres
While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she has also published fifteen books of poetry. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.
Atwood has also produced several children's books, including Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995) and Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)—delicious alliterative delights that introduce a wealth of new vocabulary to young readers
Speculative fiction vs. sci-fic
The Handmaid's Tale received the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. The award is given for the best science fiction novel that was first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. It was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, and the 1987 Prometheus Award, both science fiction awards.
Atwood was at one time offended at the suggestion that The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake were science fiction, insisting to the UK's Guardian that they were speculative fiction instead: "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen." She told the Book of the Month Club: "Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians."
She clarified her meaning on the difference between speculative and science fiction, admitting that others use the terms interchangeably: "For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do.... [S]peculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand and that takes place on Planet Earth." She said that science fiction narratives give a writer the ability to explore themes in ways that realistic fiction cannot.
Environmentalism
Although Atwood's politics are commonly described as being left-wing, she has indicated in interviews that she considers herself a Red Tory in the historical sense of the term. Atwood, along with her partner Graeme Gibson, is a member of the Green Party of Canada (GPC) and has strong views on environmental issues. She and Gibson are the joint honorary presidents of the Rare Bird Club within BirdLife International. She has been chair of the Writers' Union of Canada and president of PEN Canada, and is currently a vice president of PEN International. In a Globe and Mail editorial, she urged Canadians to vote for any other party to stop a Conservative majority.
During the debate in 1987 over a free trade agreement between Canada and the United States, Atwood spoke out against the deal, and wrote an essay opposing the agreement.
Atwood celebrated her 70th birthday at a gala dinner at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, marking the final stop of her international tour to promote The Year of the Flood. She stated that she had chosen to attend the event because the city has been home to one of Canada's most ambitious environmental reclamation programs: "When people ask if there's hope (for the environment), I say, if Sudbury can do it, so can you. Having been a symbol of desolation, it's become a symbol of hope." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/17/2013.)
Book Reviews
This is the intention of the novel: to goad us to thought by making us screen in the mind a powerful vision of competence run amok. What Atwood could not have intended, and what is no less alarming and exponentially more urgent, is the resonance between her rampaging plague scenario and the recent global outbreak of SARS. Moving from book to newspaper, or newspaper to book, the reader realizes, with a jolt, how the threshold of difference has been lowered in recent months. The force of Atwood's imagining grows in direct proportion to our rising anxiety level. And so does the importance of her implicit caution.
Steve Bricket - New York Times
Set in a future some two generations hence, Oryx and Crake can hold its own against any of the 20th century's most potent dystopias—Brave New World, 1984, The Space Merchants—with regard to both dramatic impact and fertility of invention, while it leaves such lesser recent contenders as Paul Theroux and Doris Lessing in the dust.
Thomas M. Disch - Washington Post
A less talented writer might have preached. But Atwood entices with deadpan humor and wry asides from Snowman's sunbaked subconscious, commenting on the fall of civilization.
Jakie Pray - USA Today
Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother—who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent—respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later—after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers—a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy—who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman—survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant.
Publishers Weekly
The doyenne of Canadian literature (she's won both a Booker and a Giller Prize), the versatile Atwood has an uncanny ability to write in a number of literary genres. Like The Handmaid's Tale, her latest work is set in a near future that is all too realistic and almost too terrifying to contemplate. Having once led a life of comfort and self-indulgence, Jimmy, now known as Snowman, has survived an ecological disaster that has destroyed the world as we know it. As he struggles to function without everything he once knew, including time, Snowman reflects on the past, on his relationships with two characters named Oryx and Crake, and on the role of each individual in the destruction of the natural world. From its opening scene, in which the children of Crake scavenge through debris, to its horrifying conclusion, this novel challenges the reader, cleverly pairing familiar aspects of the world with parts that have been irrevocably changed. A powerful and perturbing glimpse into a dark future, this is Atwood's impassioned plea for responsible management of our human, scientific, and natural resources and a novel that will cast long and lingering shadows in the reader's mind, well after the book is closed. —Caroline Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury, Ont.
Library Journal
Environmental unconcern, genetic engineering, and bioterrorism have created the hollowed-out, haunted future world of Atwood's ingenious and disturbing 11th novel, bearing several resemblances to The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Protagonist Jimmy, a.k.a. "Snowman," is perhaps the only living "remnant" (i.e., human unaltered by science) in a devastated lunar landscape where he lives by his remaining wits, scavenges for flotsam surviving from past civilizations, dodges man-eating mutant predators, and remembers. In an equally dark parallel narrative, Atwood traces Jimmy's personal history, beginning with a bonfire in which diseased livestock are incinerated, observed by five-year-old Jimmy and his father, a "genographer" employed by, first, OrganInc Farms, then, the sinister Helthwyzer Corporation. One staggering invention follows another, as Jimmy mourns the departure of his mother (a former microbiologist who clearly foresaw the Armageddon her colleagues were building), goes through intensive schooling with his brilliant best friend Glenn (who renames himself Crake), and enjoys such lurid titillations as computer games that simulate catastrophe and global conflict (e.g., "Extinctathon," "Kwiktime Osama") and Web sites featuring popular atrocities (e.g., "hedsoff.com"). Surfing a kiddie-porn site, Jimmy encounters the poignant figure of Oryx, a Southeast Asian girl apprenticed (i.e., sold) to a con-man, then a sex-seller (in sequences as scary and revolting as anything in contemporary fiction). Oryx will inhabit Jimmy's imagination forever, as will the perverse genius Crake, who rises from the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute to a position of literally awesome power at the RejoovenEsenseCompound, where he works on a formula for immortality, creates artificial humans (the "Children of Crake"), and helps produce the virus that's pirated and used to start a plague that effectively decimates the world's population. And Atwood (The Blind Assassin, 2000, etc.) brings it all together in a stunning surprise climax. A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Russian revolutionary Zamyatin's We. Atwood has surpassed herself.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Oryx and Crake includes many details that seem futuristic, but are in fact already apparent in our world. What parallels were you able to draw between the items in the world of the novel and those in your own?
2 . Margaret Atwood coined many words and brand names while writing the novel. In what way has technology changed your vocabulary over the past five years?
3. The game "Extinctathon" emerges as a key component in the novel. Jimmy and Crake also play "Barbarian Stomp" and "Blood and Roses." What comparable video games do you know of? What is your opinion of arcades that feature virtual violence? Discuss the advantages and dangers of virtual reality. Is the novel form itself a sort of virtual reality?
4. If you were creating the game "Blood and Roses," what other "Blood" items would you add? What other "Rose" items?
5. If you had the chance to fabricate an improved human being, would you do it? If so, what features would you choose to incorporate? Why would these be better than what we've got? Your model must of course be biologically viable.
6. The pre-catastrophic society in Oryx and Crake is fixated on physical perfection and longevity, much as our own society is. Discuss the irony of these quests, both within the novel and in our own society.
7. One aspect of the novel's society is the virtual elimination of the middle class. Economic and intellectual disparities, as well as the disappearance of safe public space, allow for few alternatives: People live either in the tightly controlled Compounds of the elites, or in the more open but seedier and more dangerous Pleeblands. Where would your community find itself in the world of Oryx and Crake?
8. Snowman soon discovers that despite himself he's invented a new creation myth, simply by trying to think up comforting answers to the "why" questions of the Children of Crake. In Part Seven-the chapter entitled "Purring"-Crake claims that "God is a cluster of neurons," though he's had trouble eradicating religious experiences without producing zombies. Do you agree with Crake? Do Snowman's origin stories negate or enhance your views on spirituality and how it evolves among various cultures?
9. How might the novel change if narrated by Oryx? Do any similarities exist between her early life and Snowman's? Do you always believe what she says?
10. Why does Snowman feel compelled to protect the benign Crakers, who can't understand him and can never be his close friends? Do you believe that the Crakers would be capable of survival in our own society?
11. In the world of Oryx and Crake, almost everything is for sale, and a great deal of power is now in the hands of large corporations and their private security forces. There are already more private police in North America than there are public ones. What are the advantages of such a system? What are the dangers?
12. In what ways does the dystopia of Oryx and Crake compare to those depicted in novels such as Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale? What is the difference between speculative fiction—which Atwood claims to write—and science fiction proper?
13. The book has two epigraphs, one from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and one from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Why do you think these were chosen?
14. The ending of the novel is open, allowing for tantalizing speculation. How do you envision Snowman's future? What about the future of humanity—both within the novel, and outside its pages?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison, 1977
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400033423
In Brief
Winner, National Book Critics Circle Award
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly.
With this novel, Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world. (From the publisher.)
More
Toni Morrison is perhaps the most celebrated contemporary American novelist. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, Morrison powerfully evokes in her fiction the legacies of displacement and slavery that have been bequeathed to the African-American community.
Song of Solomon (1977) is perhaps the most lyrical of her novels, following Milkman Dead as he struggles to understand his family history and the ways in which that history has both been damaged by and transcended the horror of slavery. All of Morrison's fiction, from her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970) Paradise (1998), explores both the need for and the impossibility of real community and the bonds that both unite and divide African-American women. (Also from the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Chloe Anthony Wofford
• Birth—February 18, 1931
• Where—Lorain, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Howard University; M.A., Cornell,
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1993, National Book Critics' Circle
Award, 1977; Pulitzer Prize, 1988.
• Currently—lives in Princeton, NJ and New York, NY
With her incredible string of lyrical, imaginative, and adventurous modern classics Toni Morrison lays claim to being one of America's best novelists. Race issues are at the heart of many of Morrison's most enduring novels, from the ways that white concepts of beauty affect a girl's self image in The Bluest Eye to themes of segregation in Sulu and slavery in her signature work Beloved. Through it all, Morrison relates her tales with lyrical eloquence and spellbinding mystery.
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison's unique approach to writing stems from a childhood spent steeped in folklore and mythology. Her family reveled in sharing these often tales, and their commingling of the fantastic and the natural would become a key element in her work when she began penning original tales of her own.
The other majorly influential factor in her writing was the racism she experienced firsthand in, as Jet magazine described it, the "mixed and sometimes hostile neighborhood" of Lorain, Ohio. When Morrison was only a toddler, her home was set afire by racists while her family was still inside of it. During times such as these, she found strength in her father, who instilled in her a great sense of dignity. This pride in her cultural background would heavily influence her debut novel.
In The Bluest Eye, an eleven-year old black girl named Pecola prays every night for blue eyes, seeing them as the epitome of feminine beauty. She believes these eyes, symbolizing commonly held white concepts of attractiveness, would put an end to her familial woes, an end to her father's excessive drinking and her brother's meandering. They would give her self-esteem and purpose. The Bluest Eye is the first of Toni Morrison's cries for racial pride and it is an auspicious debut told with an eerie poeticism.
Morrison next tackled segregation in Sulu, which chronicles the friendship between two women who, much like the author, grew up in a small, segregated village in Ohio. Song of Solomon followed. Arguably her first bona fide classic and certainly her most lyrical work, Song of Solomon breathed with the mythology of Morrison's youth, a veritable modern folktale pivoting on an eccentric whimsically named Milkman Dead who spends his life trying to fly. This is one of Morrison's most breathtaking, most accomplished and fully dimensional novels, a story of powerful convictions told in an unmistakably original manner.
In Song of Solomon, Morrison created a distinct world where the supernatural commingles comfortably with the mundane, a setting that would reappear in her masterpiece, Beloved. Beloved is a ghost story quite unlike any other, a tale of guilt and love and the horrendous legacy of slavery. Taking place not long after the end of the Civil War, Beloved finds Sethe, a former slave, being haunted by the daughter she murdered to save the child from being sold into slavery. It is a gut wrenching story that is buoyed by its fantastical plot device and the sheer beauty of Morrison's prose.
Beloved so moved Morrison's literary peers that forty-eight of them signed an open letter published in the New York Times demanding she be recognizing for this major effort. Subsequently, the book won her a Pulitzer Prize. A year after publishing her next novel Jazz in 1992, she would become the very first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Towards the end of the century, Morrison's work became increasingly eclectic. She not only published another finely crafted, incendiary novel in Paradise, which systematically tracks the genesis of an act of mob violence, but she also published her first children's book The Big Box. In 2003, she published Love, her first novel in five years, a complex meditation on family and the way one man fuels the obsessions of several women. The following year she assembled a collection of photographs of school children taken during the era of segregation. What makes Remember: The Journey to School Integration so particularly haunting is that Morrison chose to compose dialogue imagining what the subjects of each photo may have been thinking. In 2008, Morrison published A Mercy.
That imagination, that willingness to take chances, to examine history through a fresh perspective, is such an integral part of Morrison's craft. She is as vital as any contemporary artist, and her stories may focus on the black American experience, but the eloquence, imaginativeness, and meaningfulness of her writing leaps high over any racial boundaries.
Extras
• Chloe Anthony Wofford chose to publish her first novel under the name Toni Morrison because she believed that Toni was easier to pronounce than Chloe. Morrison later regretted assuming the nom de plume.
• In 1986, the first production of Morrison's sole play Dreaming Emmett was staged. The play was based on the story of Emmett Till, a black teen murdered by racists in 1955.
• Morrison's prestigious status is not limited to her revered novels or her multitude of awards. She also holds a chair at Princeton University. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
A stunningly beautiful book.... I would call the book poetry, but that would seem to be denying its considerable power as a story. Whatever name you give it, it's full of magnificent people, each of them complex and multilayered, even the narrowest of them narrow in extravagant ways.
Washington Post Book World - Anne Tyler
Morrison's prose is a delight, full of the lyrical variety and allusiveness that distinguish a rich folkloric tradition. Her real gift, though, is for characterization, and Song of Solomon is peopled with an amazing collection of losers and fighters, innocents and murderers, followers of ghosts and followers of money, all of whom add to the pleasure of this exceptionally diverse novel.
Atlantic Monthly
Exuberant.... An artistic vision that encompasses both a private and a national heritage.
Time
A fine novel exuberantly constructed.... So rich in its use of common speech, so sophisticated in its use of literary traditions and language from the Bible to Faulkner...it is also extremely funny.
Hudsen Review
Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstance and personality, and reveling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs.
The New Yorker
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison's lyrical third novel, begins with an arresting scene—a man on a roof threatening to jump, a woman standing on the ground, singing, and another woman entering labor. The child born of that labor is Macon "Milkman" Dead III; Song of Solomon is the epic story of his life-time journey toward an understanding of his own identity and ancestry. Milkman is born burdened with the materialistic values of his father and the weight of a racist society; over the course of his odyssey he reconnects to his deeper family values and history, rids himself of the burden of his father's expectations and society's limitations, and literally learns to fly.
When the novel opens, Milkman is clearly a man with little or no concern for others. Like his father, he is driven only by his immediate sensual needs; he is spoiled and self-centered and pursues money and sexual gratification at all costs. The novel centers around his search for a lost bag of gold that was allegedly taken from a man involved in his grandfather's murder and then abandoned by his Aunt Pilate. The search for gold takes Milkman and his friend Guitar, a young black militant, to Shalimar, a town named for his great-grandfather Solomon, who according to local legend escaped slavery by taking flight back to Africa on the wind. On his journey, under the influence of his Aunt Pilate, a strong, fearless, natural woman whose values are the opposite of Milkman's father's, Milkman begins to come to terms with his family history, his role as a man, and the possibilities of his life apart from a cycle of physical lust and satisfaction.
In telling the story of Milkman's quest to discover the hidden history of the Deads, Morrison expertly weaves together elements of myth, magic, and folklore. She grapples with fundamental issues of class and race, ancestry and identity, while never losing sight of Milkman's compelling story. The language in Song of Solomon, Morrison's only novel with a male protagonist, is earthy and poetic, the characters eccentric, and the detail vivid and convincing. The result is a novel that is at once emotionally intense, provocative, and inspiring in its description of how one man rediscovered the latent power within him.
Song of Solomon is considered to be Toni Morrison's masterpiece and is in the top echelon of literary works produced by any American writer. It is also her breakthrough novel in both critical and commercial success: It was the first African American novel since Native Son to be a main selection of the Book of the Month club and it won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award among others. The book received a second life, and best-seller status, twenty years after its initial publication when talk show host Oprah Winfrey announced it as a selection for her on-air book club.
Sacred Fire
Discussion Questions
1. You might talk about Morrison's treatment of flight and what it represents (i.e., both abandonment and freedom). Also consider how Morrison's use of flying places her work in the genre of magical realism.
2. Much of Morrison's work deals with the search for identity and particularly how savery degrades self-identity, strips it from the soul. You might talk about the importance of identity and how family history plays a role in defining the self. What does it mean to be without family history or self-knowledge?
3. Oppression is very much a motif in this work. You might talk about the kinds of oppression characters experience.
4. Characters have Biblical names, which relate them to a transcendant, universal pattern of experience, a pattern that surpasses time and place. Try to identify parallels with the old testament stories?
5. Discuss the role that songs play in this work...as a form of oral history.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Oscar and Lucinda
Peter Carey, 1988
Knopf Doubleday
443 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679777502
Summary
Winner, 1988 Booker Prize
This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent—a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms—could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex.
Only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 7, 1943
• Where—Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia
• Education—Monash University
• Awards—Booker Prize (twice); National Book Council Award;
Commonealth Writers Prize (twice); Franklin Miles Award
(thrice); Prix duMeilleur Livre Etranger; Colin Roderick Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York, USA
"My fictional project has always been the invention or discovery of my own country," the prizewinning Australian author Peter Carey has said. This postcolonial undertaking has sometimes led Carey to wrestle with the great works of English literature: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) draws on Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, while Jack Maggs (1997), a version of Dickens's Great Expectations, is told from the perspective of the convict who returns to England from Australia.
But although Carey went to what he calls "a particularly posh" Australian boarding school, he claims he didn't discover literature until he was out of school. He studied chemistry at Monash University for just a year before leaving to work in advertising. There, surrounded by readers and would-be writers, he discovered the great literature of the 20th century, including authors like Joyce, Faulkner and Beckett. "To read Faulkner for the first time was for me like discovering another planet," Carey said in an interview with The Guardian. "The pleasure of that language, the politics of giving voice to the voiceless."
Publishers rejected Carey's first three novels, so he began writing short stories. These, he later said, "felt like the first authentic things I had done." He was still working for an advertising agency when his first collection of short stories appeared in 1973, and he kept the part-time job after moving to an "alternative community" in Queensland. His first published novel, Bliss (1981), won a prestigious Australian literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. The book is about an advertising executive who has a near-death experience and ends up living in a rural commune.
Carey's later novels ranged farther outside the bounds of his own experience, but he continued to develop his concern with Australian identity. 1988's Oscar and Lucinda, which tells the story of a colonial Australian heiress and her ill-fated love for an English clergyman, won the Booker Prize and helped establish Carey as one of the literary heavyweights of his generation. He won another Booker Prize for True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), the story of a notorious 19th-century outlaw whose legacy still shapes Australia's consciousness.
Though Carey now lives and teaches in New York City, his home country and its past still possess his imagination. ''History,'' he writes, ''is like a bloodstain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we paint over it.''
Extras
• Peter Carey and J. M. Coetzee are the only two-time Booker Prize winners to date.
• Carey caused a stir in the British press when he declined an invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II. The royal invitation is extended to all winners of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, which Carey received in 1998 for Jack Maggs. He did meet the Queen after he won the award a second time, for True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001.
• Fans of Carey's work know that in 1997, Oscar and Lucinda was made into a critically acclaimed movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett. But they may not know that Carey wrote the screenplay for the critically panned Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World (1991) as well as the screenplay adaptation of his own novel, Bliss (1991). (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Bursting with informed gusto, freewheeling comedy, pauses of pathos and moments of surreal poetry – swaggering streetboys ‘with their hands boasting against their braces,’ scared cockatoos flying up "like screeching feathers from a burst pillow"– Oscar & Lucinda is a creative explosion of delight at life’s wayward, diverse plentifulness.
Peter Kemp - Sunday Times (London)
Carey is one of the great story-tellers of our time, the kind who make you take the telephone off the hook, forget the television and ignore the doorbell.... He has the rare gift of making the written world more vivid than life. A magnificent book.
Evening Standard (UK)
Luminous and magical, Oscar and Lucinda dances with a shimmer of light and dark as its two noble gamblers play out dreams of God and glass. A spectacular achievement.
The Age (Australia)
It is Thomas Wolfe one is reminded of most when reading Peter Carey...they share that magnificent vitality, that ebullient delight in character, detail and language that turns a novel into an important book.
New York Times Book Review
A kind of rollercoaster ride...The reader emerges...gasping, blinking, reshaped in a hundred ways, conscious that the world is never going to look the same again.
Washington Post
We have a great novelist living on the planet with us, and his name is Peter Carey.
Los Angeles Times
As fine a love story and as fascinating an exploration as any reader could wish...Carey writes as if the world he has created, and his own private life, are at stake.
Chicago Tribune
The stuff of shimmering, transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th-century history and the millions of painstaking details.
Time
If Illywhacker astounded us with its imaginative richness, this latest Carey novel does so again, with a masterly sureness of touched added. It's a story, in a sense the story, of mid-19th century England and Australia, narrated by a man of our time and therefore permeated with modern consciousness. Oscar is a shy, gawky, Oxford-educated Church of England minister with a tortured conscience; Lucinda is a willful, eccentric Australian who sinks her family inheritance into a glass factory; and the basis for the star-crossed love that develops between them is a shared passion for gambling. They meet on the boat to Sydney, Oscar becomes Lucinda's lodger after being defrocked for his "vice" and, finally, leaving a trail of scandal behind them, they construct a glass church in the Outback, their wildest gamble yet. The narrative techniques though which Carey dramatizes the effects of English religious beliefs and social mores upon frontier Australia smack of both Dickens and of Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman; but he doesn't lean upon his sources, he uses them, for his own subtle and controlled purposes. His prose (full of such flashes as "A cormorant broke from the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dream and life") is an almost constant source of surprise, and he is clearly in the forefront of that literary brilliance now flowing out of Australia..
Publishers Weekly
As he demonstrated in Bliss (1981) and Illywhacker (1985), Carey is partial to eccentrics. Here, he provides a splendid array of cranks and monomaniacs — with two of them, the title characters, living out an odd and tender love story. Yet theirs is only the central plot in an astonishingly complex literary performance that moves between England and Australia in the 1860's. There are dozens of characters and at least five important storylines, two set in the Old World and three in the New. Mostly, though, this is a leisurely and witty fable about the two great enthusiasms of the 19th century — religion and science. Many great schemes were hatched to try to harmonize the two, and so it is here. Lucinda, an Australian heiress, consults Joseph Paxton, architect of London's Crystal Palace, and then she and Oscar, a clergyman, set out to erect a glass church — in darkest New South Wales. The whole book is also a literary parody. Here, the results are uneven, largely because Carey has made some errant choices. His first targets are Fielding and Sterne. But these were 18th-century writers who expressed the energy of a particular moment: the last gasp of Merrie Olde England, about to be submerged by piety, industrialism, and red plush draperies with ball fringe. Carey is off the mark here. He fares better when he begins to parody Trollope. His style then becomes more appropriate to the material; also less facetious and digressive. Oscar and Lucinda (582 pp.) is sometimes too slow, and its energetic whimsicality can be grating. Against that, though, set writing that is far more often lucid and fine, beautifully drawn characters, and a remarkably clever narrative scheme. A brave and original novel.
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 Oscar and Lucinda:
1. The earliest of the many arresting episodes in this book is the Christmas pudding incident. How does Oscar's delight in this new taste—and the subsequent anger of his father—set the stage for the events of the novel?
2. In relation to Question #1, many see the pudding scene as a retelling of Adam and the forbidden fruit in Genesis. Does that reading make sense to you? How might that interpreta-tion, the fall and expulsion from paradise, play itself out in the remainder of the story?
3. What explains Oscar's conversion from his father's fundamentalist sect to the Anglican Church? Discuss Oscar's hopscotch-like theology. Does God direct where the stone falls...or is it a game of chance? What does Oscar believe? What do you believe?
4. Talk about Oscar's religious beliefs. Is he good...or corrupt? Is he endangering his soul by gambling? Or does the fact that he devotes his winnings to charitable causes justify, or make right, his gambling obsession? What does Oscar believe?
5. In relation to Question #2: Peter Carey invokes 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal in this novel. Pascal postulates that belief in God is a necessary bet: if you're right about the existence of God, you win. Even if you're wrong, and there is no God, you still win because you've led a good life. Oscar adheres to Pascal's ideas: belief in God is a gamble. What do you think? Is Oscar (or Pascal) right? Can faith be reduced to a bet—a matter of chance?
6. What kind of characters are Oscar and Lucinda? They're eccentric, of course, but how else might you describe them? What makes them fall in love? (Can you recall the moment when Lucinda suddenly realizes that she might be in love with Oscar?) Why aren't the two honest in their feelings with one another?
7. Discuss the ways Lucinda flouts prevailing societal codes for women of her day?
8. In what way do Oscar and Lucinda refuse to accept their society's racist views of Australia's Aboriginals?
9. Is it a flaw, or a strength, in their characters that neither Oscar nor Lucinda understands or cares (which?) how others view them?
10. Reviewer Aravind Adiga writes that "for Oscar and Lucinda, [gambling is] an expression of their desire for real change and reformation. In that sense, gambling is also an expression of their innocence." Thus the two make their fantastic wager on the glass church. Can you comment on Adiga's observation? Do you think he's right—that their gambling is not only a rebellion but also a way to right the wrongs of rigid societal codes—against Aboriginals, women and innovators? (See the full review in The Second Circle.)
11. What is Lucinda's fascination with glass? (Consider the name Lucinda...just for fun.)
12. Relating to Question #11: glass is obviously (clearly?) symbolic in this work. What does it represent? Carey has said in an interview with BBC World Book Club that glass is perfect and pure but also dangerous—when glass breaks, it cuts. How does that idea connect with a church of made of glass—which is being carried into the wilds of Australia? What might it mean, metaphorically, that Oscar bets he can carry the glass without breaking it?
12. Although it may be overly schematic, consider the metaphor of church and commerce betting against one another for the soul of Australia (or any society). What are the ramifications of such a bet by two powerful institutions— particularly for indigenous people?
13. Oscar comes to regard the trials of his journey through the outback as punishment for his sins. Do you think he's right? Will his suffering redeem him in God's eyes?
14. What affect does the use of shifting perspectives have on your reading of the novel? Did you find the varying points of view illuminating or confusing or interruptive?
13. What was your experience reading this book? Did you find it humorous, sad, funny, intriguing? Talk about Carey's writing style—his descriptive passages; insinuations and indirect sentences; and satirical eye. He has been compared by some to Charles Dickens in his idiosyncratic characters and convoluted plots. Do you see similarities?
14. Were you satisfied or disappointed by the novel's ending? Where were the plot's turning points—where different decisions by either Oscar or Lucinda might have changed the story's outcome?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Song Yet Sung
James McBride, 2008
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594483509
Summary
In the days before the Civil War, a runaway slave named Liz Spocott breaks free from her captors and escapes into the labyrinthine swamps of Maryland's eastern shore, setting loose a drama of violence and hope among slave catchers, plantation owners, watermen, runaway slaves, and free blacks.
Liz is near death, wracked by disturbing visions of the future, and armed with "the Code," a fiercely guarded cryptic means of communication for slaves on the run. Liz's flight and her dreams of tomorrow will thrust all those near her toward a mysterious, redemptive fate.
Filled with rich, true details—much of the story is drawn from historical events—and told in New York Times bestselling author James McBride's signature lyrical style, Song Yet Sung is a story of tragic triumph, violent decisions, and unexpected kindness. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—New York, New York
• Education—Oberlin Conservatory of Music; M.A., Columbia
University
• Awards—American Arts and Letters Richard Rodgers Award,
1996; ASCAP Richard Rodgers Horizons Award, 1996;
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 1997
• Currently—Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USA
James McBride's bestselling memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, explores the author's struggle to understand his biracial identity and the experience of his white, Jewish mother, who moved to Harlem, married a black man, and raised 12 children. His first novel, Miracle at St. Anna (film version by Spike Lee), followed a black regiment through turbulent events in Italy late in World War II. It was a book of considerable breadth and character diversity.
Readers may not know that the multitalented McBride has another dual identity: He's trained as a musician and a writer and has been highly successful in both careers.
After getting his master's degree in journalism from Columbia University at the age of 22, he began a career in journalism that would include stints as staff writer at the Boston Globe, People magazine, and the Washington Post. But McBride also loved writing and performing music, and at age 30, he quit his job as a feature writer at the Washington Post to pursue a music career in New York. After Anita Baker recorded a song he'd written, "Good Enough," McBride had enough contacts in the industry to spend the next eight years as a professional musician, writing, recording, and performing (he plays the saxophone).
He was playing tenor sax for jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott while he wrote The Color of Water "on airplanes and in hotels." Like the jazz music McBride plays, the book alternates voices, trading off between McBride's perspective and that of his mother. The Color of Water was a worldwide success, selling millions of copies and drawing high praise from book critics. "This moving and unforgettable memoir needs to be read by people of all colors and faiths," wrote Publishers Weekly. It now appears on reading lists at high schools and colleges around the country.
After the enormous success of The Color of Water, McBride felt some pressure to continue writing memoirs, or at least to continue with the theme of race relations in America. Instead, he turned to fiction, and although his second book draws part of its inspiration from family history, it isn't autobiographical. "My initial aim was to write a novel about a group of black soldiers who liberate a concentration camp in Eastern Europe," McBride explains on his web site. "I read lots of books and spent a lot of time researching the subject but soon came to the realization that I'm not qualified to write about the holocaust. It's too much." Instead, he recalled the war stories of his uncle and cousin, who served in the all-black 92nd Infantry Division, and began researching World War II in Italy—particularly the clashes between Italian Partisans and the German army.
The resulting novel, Miracle at St. Anna, is "an intricate mosaic of narratives that ultimately becomes about betrayal and the complex moral landscape of war" (the New York Times Book Review) and has earned high marks from critics for its nuanced portrayal of four Buffalo Soldiers and the Italian villagers they encounter. McBride, perhaps not surprisingly, likens writing fiction to playing jazz: "You are the soloist and the characters are the bandleaders, the Duke Ellingtons and Count Basies. They present the song, and you must play it as they determine.
Extras
• McBride has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Gary Burton, and the PBS television character Barney. He has also written the score for several musicals and currently leads a 12-piece jazz/R&B band.
• One of his most taxing assignments as a journalist was to cover Michael Jackson's 1984 Victory Tour for six months. "I thought I was going to lose my mind," he told USA Today.
• For a book fair, he performed with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band made up of writers including Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Ridley Pearson. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Anyone handling such material runs the risk of reprising Uncle Tom's Cabin, which, however effective it was as propaganda, has no real claim to the truth of art. McBride's portrayal of the situation is more lucid, better controlled and in the end much more convincing…Edward P. Jones, who may be the first black American to have written about slavery without rancor, has said that his measured portrayal of the slave masters of Virginia in The Known World was like writing about Hitler from Hitler's mother's point of view. In Song Yet Sung, McBride has captured a version of Jones's dispassionate tone, which can deliver the cauterizing power of anger without the corrosive effects of bitterness. That's a radically new way of telling this old story, and it just might turn out to be balm for a wound that has so far stubbornly refused to heal.
Madison Smartt Bell - New York Times
In a complex, ever-tightening, increasingly suspenseful web that rises toward a dramatic climax..., McBride shows the complexity of his characters' inner lives and dilemmas — particularly his black characters. The cadence of their speech, the way they interact, the small details of their thoughts, desires, fears and hopes: These the author renders with exquisite ease. In scene after scene McBride shows the many ways blacks worked to aid each other to freedom. "The Code" is part of this, a secret language of actions, signs, symbols and words by which the slaves communicate messages of resistance right under their masters' noses. The novel does have its weaker moments. At times McBride's exposition seems rushed, as if he's got more information to give than time to give it. His action scenes can feel like stage directions for a film. Some may groan that Liz's prescience is forced, especially as she sees further and further into the future, right up to bejeweled rappers spitting violence and misogyny. And some may point out the convenience of Liz's only predicting a future up to our present.... [Nontheless,] McBride...does have the ability to captivate, compel and challenge those of us still working to shape those tomorrows
David Anthony Durham - Washington Post
Escaped slaves, free blacks, slave-catchers and plantation owners weave a tangled web of intrigue and adventure in bestselling memoirist (The Color of Water) McBride's intricately constructed and impressive second novel, set in pre-Civil War Maryland. Liz Spocott, a beautiful young runaway slave, suffers a nasty head wound just before being nabbed by a posse of slave catchers. She falls into a coma, and, when she awakes, she can see the future—from the near-future to Martin Luther King to hip-hop—in her dreams. Liz's visions help her and her fellow slaves escape, but soon there are new dangers on her trail: Patty Cannon and her brutal gang of slave catchers, and a competing slave catcher, nicknamed "The Gimp," who has a surprising streak of morality. Liz has some friends, including an older woman who teaches her "The Code" that guides runaways; a handsome young slave; and a wild inhabitant of the woods and swamps. Kidnappings, gunfights and chases ensue as Liz drifts in and out of her visions, which serve as a thoughtful meditation on the nature of freedom and offer sharp social commentary on contemporary America. McBride hasn't lost his touch: he nails the horrors of slavery as well as he does the power of hope and redemption.
Publishers Weekly
McBride's second novel, following Miracle at St. Anna (soon to be a Spike Lee-directed major motion picture), might better be titled Novel Yet Edited: the review copy, at least, reads like a very rough first draft. Its setting-a small Chesapeake Bay town just before the outbreak of the Civil War, a place where the reality of slavery was more ambiguous than in other parts of the country-certainly lends it potential. The mature reader, however, learns very little new about the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, or the feelings of either the oppressed or the oppressors. Indeed, the novel largely seems written for a YA audience. The pace of the action is slowed by implausibility, repetitive and often cartoonish description, fairly obvious anachronisms, and a tremendous amount of unnecessary detail to the exclusion of the feelings of the (mostly flat) main characters. This is particularly disappointing given McBride's poignant 1996 memoir, The Color of Water. Recommended with reservations to public libraries.
Library Journal
The slave-owning culture of Maryland's eastern shore in the 1850s comprises the world of McBride's second novel (following Miracle at St. Anna, 2002, and the bestselling memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, 1996). Recaptured runaway slave Liz Spocott, wounded by a musket blast and chained to fellow runaways in the attic of "trader"-crime boss Patty Cannon, learns "the Code" by which embattled slaves communicate and survive from a skeletal woman ("The old Woman With No Name") and, acting on a chance opportunity, escapes again. The novel then assumes the shape of a series of quests and pursuits. Liz wanders along a perilous route which she hopes will lead her to the Freedom Train, hence northward to safety-accompanied and bedeviled by prophetic "visions" that reach far into "the future of the colored race." The latter are often eerily compelling, but when "the Dreamer" Liz "sees" rap and hip-hop performances, and eventually Martin Luther King's "Free At Last" speech, the novel groans under the weight of forced Significance. Far more compelling are parallel tales: of the Woolman, a gigantic black who lives in a swamp and keeps an alligator named Gar; widowed landowner Kathleen Sullivan, unhinged by sexual longing for her handsome young slave Amber; and Denwood Long, a former slave-catcher lured out of retirement to return Liz to her irate owner Colonel Spocott. While its language is frequently stiff and unconvincing, the book has great compensatory strengths. McBride views the "peculiar institution" of slavery from an impressive multiplicity of involved characters' and observers' viewpoints. He describes emotionally charged, hurried actions superbly, and he makes expert use of folklore, legend and the eponymous unsung song (which we do eventually hear). In Denwood's grim, fatalistic pursuit of his destiny, McBride has fashioned a myth of retribution and sacrifice that recalls both William Faulkner's sagas of blighted generations and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Explosively dramatic.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When we first meet Liz, she is on the run from her master. Yet throughout the book she refuses offers of passage to the North, saying “I’m free here.” What do you think Liz’s plan was when she first ran away? If she was planning to go North, what changed her mind? Or did she simply wish to die in the wilds of Maryland?
2. Discuss the author’s use of language. How does he evoke the speech patterns of an earlier era? What techniques does he use to bring the rural Maryland eastern shore to life?
3. Although he is a notorious slave catcher, Denwood Long—“the Gimp”—commands a degree of respect even from those he has caught. But he himself claims, “I’m going to hell in spite of redemption.” Based on his actions in the book, do you think he is worthy of respect? Do you find him sympathetic? Do you think he has found any measure of redemption by the end of the story?
4. Late in the book, it becomes clear that the singer of the “song yet sung” is Martin Luther King. Given that Liz’s nightmare vision of tomorrow, with its evocation of rap music and gang culture, clearly postdates King, why do you think the author chose him to fill this role?
5. Discuss the death of the Woolman. What motivates Liz to kill him? Is it an act of mercy? Do you think she has any thought of saving the Gimp? If so, why?
6. Amber believes that “Some [people] is up to the job of being decent, and some ain’t.” What do you think of this assessment? Is decency an inherent trait, or is it a conscious choice? Based on the characters and events in this book, what do you think the author’s answer to this question would be?
7. Throughout the book, Liz becomes more and more attuned to the world around her: “a kind of clarity seemed to settle upon her… at times she felt so sensitive to the elements about her, she felt as if her skin were ready to fly off her body.” What is the connection, if any, between this growing sensitivity and Liz’s visions of the future? How does Liz’s “two-headedness” allow the author to develop the larger themes of the novel?
8. Consider the ending of the novel—the violent deaths and Liz’s precarious future. At the same time, Amber is free, Kathleen’s future is secure, and Woolman’s son offers a link to the far-off coming of the song yet sung. Overall, did this novel leave you with a sense of hope? Did it provide you with any new insights on human nature? On America?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri, 2003
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618485222
Summary
Jhumpa Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller—the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail—the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase—that opens whole worlds of emotion.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans.
On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world.
Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along a first-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.
With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.
The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 11, 1967
• Where—London, England, UK
• Raised—Kingston, Rhode Island, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College; 2 M.A's., M.F.A., and
Ph.D., Boston University
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize (see more below)
• Currently—lives in Rome, Italy
Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name.She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna but goes by her nickname Jhumpa. Lahiri is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama.
Biography
Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Indian immigrants from the state of West Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was two; Lahiri considers herself an American, having said, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been." Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father Amar Lahiri works as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island; he is the basis for the protagonist in "The Third and Final Continent," the closing story from Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri's mother wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata).
When she began kindergarten in Kingston, Rhode Island, Lahiri's teacher decided to call her by her pet name, Jhumpa, because it was easier to pronounce than her "proper names". Lahiri recalled, "I always felt so embarrassed by my name.... You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are." Lahiri's ambivalence over her identity was the inspiration for the ambivalence of Gogol, the protagonist of her novel The Namesake, over his unusual name. Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989.
Lahiri then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, M.F.A. in Creative Writing, M.A. in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997–1998). Lahiri has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
In 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor and now Senior Editor of Time Latin America. The couple lives in Rome, Italy with their two children.
Literary career
Lahiri's early short stories faced rejection from publishers "for years." Her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, was finally released in 1999. The stories address sensitive dilemmas in the lives of Indians or Indian immigrants, with themes such as marital difficulties, miscarriages, and the disconnection between first and second generation United States immigrants. Lahiri later wrote,
When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life.
The collection was praised by American critics, but received mixed reviews in India, where reviewers were alternately enthusiastic and upset Lahiri had "not paint[ed] Indians in a more positive light." However, according to Md. Ziaul Haque, a poet, columnist, scholar, researcher and a faculty member at Sylhet International University, Bangladesh,
But, it is really painful for any writer living far away in a new state, leaving his/her own homeland behind; the motherland, the environment, people, culture etc. constantly echo in the writer’s (and of course anybody else’s) mind. So, the manner of trying to imagine and describe about the motherland and its people deserves esteem. I think that we should coin a new term, i.e. “distant-author” and add it to Lahiri’s name since she, being a part of another country, has taken the help of "imagination" and depicted her India the way she has wanted to; the writer must have every possible right to paint the world the way he/she thinks appropriate.
Interpreter of Maladies sold 600,000 copies and received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (only the seventh time a story collection had won the award).
In 2003, Lahiri published The Namesake, her first novel. The story spans over thirty years in the life of the Ganguli family. The Calcutta-born parents emigrated as young adults to the United States, where their children, Gogol and Sonia, grow up experiencing the constant generational and cultural gap with their parents. A film adaptation of The Namesake was released in 2007, directed by Mira Nair and starring Kal Penn as Gogol and Bollywood stars Tabu and Irrfan Khan as his parents. Lahiri herself made a cameo as "Aunt Jhumpa".
Lahiri's second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, was released in 2008. Upon its publication, Unaccustomed Earth achieved the rare distinction of debuting at number 1 on the New York Times best seller list. The Times Book Review editor, Dwight Garner, wrote, "It’s hard to remember the last genuinely serious, well-written work of fiction — particularly a book of stories — that leapt straight to No. 1; it’s a powerful demonstration of Lahiri’s newfound commercial clout."
Her fourth book and second movel, The Lowland, was published in 2013, again to wide acclaim. The story of two Indian born brothers who take different paths in life, it was placed on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize.
Lahiri has also had a distinguished relationship with The New Yorker magazine in which she has published a number of her short stories, mostly fiction, and a few non-fiction including "The Long Way Home; Cooking Lessons," a story about the importance of food in Lahiri's relationship with her mother.
Since 2005, Lahiri has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center, an organization designed to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers. In 2010, she was appointed a member of the Committee on the Arts and Humanities, along with five others.
Literary focus
Lahiri's writing is characterized by her "plain" language and her characters, often Indian immigrants to America who must navigate between the cultural values of their homeland and their adopted home. Lahiri's fiction is autobiographical and frequently draws upon her own experiences as well as those of her parents, friends, acquaintances, and others in the Bengali communities with which she is familiar. Lahiri examines her characters' struggles, anxieties, and biases to chronicle the nuances and details of immigrant psychology and behavior.
Unaccustomed Earth departs from this earlier original ethos as Lahiri's characters embark on new stages of development. These stories scrutinize the fate of the second and third generations. As succeeding generations become increasingly assimilated into American culture and are comfortable in constructing perspectives outside of their country of origin, Lahiri's fiction shifts to the needs of the individual. She shows how later generations depart from the constraints of their immigrant parents, who are often devoted to their community and their responsibility to other immigrants.
Television
Lahiri worked on the third season of the HBO television program In Treatment. That season featured a character named Sunil, a widower who moves to the United States from Bangladesh and struggles with grief and with culture shock. Although she is credited as a writer on these episodes, her role was more as a consultant on how a Bengali man might perceive Brooklyn.
Awards
• 1993 – TransAtlantic Award from the Henfield Foundation
• 1999 – O. Henry Award for short story "Interpreter of Maladies"
• 1999 – PEN/Hemingway Award (Best Fiction Debut of the Year) for "Interpreter of Maladies"
• 1999 – "Interpreter of Maladies" selected as one of Best American Short Stories
• 2000 – Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 2000 – "The Third and Final Continent" selected as one of Best American Short Stories
• 2000 – The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year for "Interpreter of Maladies"
• 2000 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut "Interpreter of Maladies"
• 2002 – Guggenheim Fellowship
• 2002 – "Nobody's Business" selected as one of Best American Short Stories
• 2008 – Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for "Unaccustomed Earth"
• 2009 – Asian American Literary Award for "Unaccustomed Earth"
(Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/12/13.)
Book Reviews
Jhumpa Lahiri's quietly dazzling new novel, The Namesake, is that rare thing: an intimate, closely observed family portrait that effortlessly and discreetly unfolds to disclose a capacious social vision.... In chronicling more than three decades in the Gangulis' lives, Ms. Lahiri has not only given us a wonderfully intimate and knowing family portrait, she has also taken the haunting chamber music of her first collection of stories and reorchestrated its themes of exile and identity to create a symphonic work, a debut novel that is as assured and eloquent as the work of a longtime master of the craft.
Michiku Kakutani - New York Times
This is a fine novel from a superb writer.... In the end, this quiet book makes a very large statement about courage, determination, and above all, the majestic ability of the human animal to endure and prosper.
Christopher Tilghman - The Washington Post
[Jhumpa] Lahiri's deeply knowing, avidly descriptive, and luxuriously paced first novel is...triumphant.... [Her] Lahiri's keen and zealous attention as she painstakingly considers the viability of transplanted traditions, the many shades of otherness, and the lifelong work of defining and accepting oneself.
Donna Seaman - Booklist
This first novel is an Indian American saga, covering several generations of the Ganguli family across three decades. Newlyweds Ashoke and Ashima leave India for the Boston area shortly after their traditional arranged marriage. The young husband, an engineering graduate student, is ready to be part of U.S. culture, but Ashima, disoriented and homesick, is less taken with late-Sixties America. She develops ties with other Bengali expatriates, forming lifelong friendships that help preserve the old ways in a new country. When the first Ganguli baby arrives, he is named Gogol in commemoration of a strange, life-saving encounter with the Russian writer's oeuvre. As Gogol matures, his unusual name proves to be a burden, though no more than the tensions and confusions of growing up as a first-generation American. This poignant treatment of the immigrant experience is a rich, stimulating fusion of authentic emotion, ironic observation, and revealing details. Readers who enjoyed the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, will not be disappointed. Recommended for public and academic libraries. —Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA
Library Journal
A first novel from Pulitzer-winner Lahiri (stories: Interpreter of Maladies, 1999) focuses on the divide between Indian immigrants and their Americanized children. The action takes place in and around Boston and New York between 1968 and 2000. As it begins, Ashoke Ganguli and his pregnant young wife Ashima are living in Cambridge while he does research at MIT. Their marriage was arranged in Calcutta: no problem. What is a problem is naming their son. Years before in India, a book by Gogol had saved Ashoke’s life in a train wreck, so he wants to name the boy Gogol. The matter becomes contentious and is hashed out at tedious length. Gogol grows to hate his name, and at 18 the Beatles-loving Yale freshman changes it officially to Nikhil. His father is now a professor outside Boston; his parents socialize exclusively with other middle-class Bengalis. The outward-looking Gogol, however, mixes easily with non-Indian Americans like his first girlfriend Ruth, another Yalie. Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships. Many scenes cry out for dialogue that would enable her characters to cut loose from a buttoned-down world in which much is documented but little revealed. After an unspecified quarrel, Ruth exits. Gogol goes to work as an architect in New York and meets Maxine, a book editor who seems his perfect match. Then his father dies unexpectedly—the kind of death that fills in for lack of plot—and he breaks up with Maxine, who like Ruth departs after a reported altercation (nothing verbatim). Girlfriend number three is an ultrasophisticated Indian academic with as little interest in Bengali culture as Gogol;these kindred spirits marry, but the restless Moushumi proves unfaithful. The ending finds the namesake alone, about to read the Russian Gogol for the first time. A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The Namesake opens with Ashima Ganguli trying to make a spicy Indian snack from American ingredients—Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts—but "as usual, there's something missing." How does Ashima try and make over her home in Cambridge to remind her of what she's left behind in Calcutta? Throughout The Namesake, how does Jhumpa Lahiri use food and clothing to explore cultural transitions—especially through rituals, like the annaprasan, the rice ceremony? Some readers have said that Lahiri's writing makes them crave the meals she evokes so beautifully. What memories or desires does Lahiri bring up for you? Does her writing ever make you "hunger"?
2. The title The Namesake reflects the struggles Gogol Ganguli goes through to identify with his unusual names. How does Gogol lose first his public name, his bhalonam, and then his private pet name, his daknam? How does he try to remake his identity, after choosing to rename himself, and what is the result? How do our names precede us in society, and how do they define us? Do you have a pet name, or a secret name—and has that name ever become publicly known? Do you have different names with different people? Did you ever wish for a new name? How are names chosen in your family?
3. Newsweek said of Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, "Jhumpa Lahiri writes such direct, translucent prose you almost forget you're reading." The Namesake is also subtle in style, elegant, and paced realistically. How are the events of the novel simultaneously dramatic and commonplace? What details made the characters real to you? Did you ever lose yourself in the story?
4. When Gogol is born, the Gangulis meet other Bengali families with small children, and Ashima finds with the new baby that "perfect strangers, all Americans, suddenly take notice of her, smiling, congratulating her for what she's done." How, for all of us, do children change our place in the community, and what we expect from it? Have you ever connected with someone you may have otherwise never spoken with—of a different ethnic background or economic class—through their children or your own?
5. In his youth, Ashoke Ganguli is saved from a massive train wreck in India. When his son Gogol is born, Ashoke thinks, "Being rescued from that shattered train had been the first miracle of his life. But here, now, reposing in his arms, weighing next to nothing but changing everything, is the second." Is Ashoke's love for his family more poignant because of his brush with death? Why do you think he hides his past from Gogol? What moments define us more—accidents or achievements, mourning or celebration?
6. Lahiri has said, "The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially for those who are culturally displaced, as immigrants are...who grow up in two worlds simultaneously." What do you think Gogol wants most from his life? How is it different from what his family wants for him, and what they wanted when they first came to America to start a family? How have expectations changed between generations in your own family? Do you want something different for your own children from what your parents wanted for you?
7. Jhumpa Lahiri has said of The Namesake, "America is a real presence in the book; the characters must struggle and come to terms with what it means to live here, to be brought up here, to belong and not belong here." Did The Namesake allow you to think of America in a new way? Do you agree that "America is a real presence" in The Namesake? How is India also a "presence" in the book?
8. The marriage of Ashima and Ashoke is arranged by their families. The closest intimacy they share before their wedding is when Ashima steps briefly, secretly, into Ashoke's shoes. Gogol's romantic encounters are very different from what his parents experienced or expected for their son. What draws Gogol to his many lovers, especially to Ruth, Maxine, and eventually Moushumi? What draws them to him? From where do you think we take our notions of romantic love—from our family and friends, or from society and the media? How much does your cultural heritage define your ideas and experience of love?
9. Lahiri explores in several ways the difficulty of reconciling cross-cultural rituals around death and dying. For instance, Ashima refuses to display the rubbings of gravestones young Gogol makes with his classmates. And when Gogol's father suddenly dies, Gogol's relationship with Maxine is strained and quickly ends. Why do you think their love affair can't survive Gogol's grief? How does the loss of Gogol's father turn him back toward his family? How does it also change Sonia and Ashima's relationship?
10. Did you find the ending of The Namesake surprising? What did you expect from Moushumi and Gogol's marriage? Do you think Moushumi is entirely to blame for her infidelity? Is Gogol a victim at the end of the book? In the last few pages of The Namesake, Gogol begins to read The Overcoat for the first time—the book his father gave him, by his "namesake." Where do you imagine Gogol will go from here?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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