Room
Emma Donoghue, 2010
Little, Brown & Co.
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781443449625
Summary
To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.
Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.
Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another. (From the publisher.)
See the 2015 movie with Brie Larson (Oscar winner) and Jacob Trimblay.
Author Bio
• Birth—October 24, 1969
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., University College Dublin; Ph.D., Cambridge University
• Awards—Irish Book Award
• Currently—lives in London, Ontario, Canada
Emma Donoghue was born in Dublin, Ireland, the youngest of eight children. She is the daughter of Frances (nee Rutledge) and academic and literary critic Denis Donoghue. Other than her tenth year, which she refers to as "eye-opening" while living in New York, Donoghue attended Catholic convent schools throughout her early years.
She earned a first-class honours BA from the University College Dublin in English and French (though she admits to never having mastered spoken French). Donoghue went on receive her PhD in English from Girton College at Cambridge University. Her thesis was on the concept of friendship between men and women in 18th-century English fiction.
At Cambridge, she met her future life partner Christine Roulston, a Canadian, who is now professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Western Ontario. They moved permanently to Canada in 1998, and Donoghue became a Canadian citizen in 2004. She lives in London, Ontario, with Roulston and their two children, Finn and Una.
Works
Donoghue has been able to make a living as a writer since she was 23. Doing so enables her to claim that she's never had an "honest job" since she was sacked after a summer as a chambermaid. In 1994, at only 25, she published first novel, Stir Fry, a contemporary coming of age novel about a young Irish woman discovering her sexuality.
Donoghue is perhaps best known for her 2010 novel, Room—its popularity practically made her a household name. Room spent months on bestseller lists and won the Irish Book Award; it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange prize, and the (Canadian) Governor General's Award. In 2015, the novel was adapted to film. Donoghue wrote the screenplay, which earned her a nomination for an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Bafta Award.
Since Room, Donoghue has published seven books, her most recent released in 2020—The Pull of the Stars. (Adapted from the author's website and Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/22/2016.)
Book Reviews
Here come the debating points that are embedded in Ms. Donoghue's story. Was the world inside Room somehow safer than the world outside? Will it be damaging for Jack to have to share his mother with new people in her life—or with the people she left behind? Will Ma still be content to do nothing but interact with her frisky son? Is it harder to choose freely from a whole bowl of lollipops than to have no choice at all? Room is sophisticated in outlook and execution, but it's not too complicated to use actual lollipops to frame that theoretical question. Fortunately Ms. Donoghue makes both Ma and Jack too unpredictable for any of those answers to be easy.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Jack's voice is one of the pure triumphs of the novel: in him, [Donoghue] has invented a child narrator who is one of the most engaging in years—his voice so pervasive I could hear him chatting away during the day when I wasn't reading the book. Donoghue rearranges language to evoke the sweetness of a child's learning without making him coy or overly darling… Through dialogue and smartly crafted hints of eavesdropping, Donoghue fills us in a on Jack's world without heavy hands or clunky exposition…a truly memorable novel…It presents an utterly unique way to talk about love, all the while giving us a fresh, expansive eye on the world in which we live.
Aimee Bender - New York Times Book Review
[O]ne of the most affecting and subtly profound novels of the year.... Not too cute, not too weirdly precocious, not a fey mouthpiece for the author's profundities, Jack expresses a poignant mixture of wisdom, love and naivete that will make you ache to save him—whatever that would mean: Delivering him to the outside world? Keeping him preserved here forever?…until you finish it, beware talking about Room with anyone who might clumsily strip away the suspense that's woven through its raw wonder. You need to enter this small, harrowing place prepared only to have your own world expanded.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
[A] riveting, powerful novel.... Donoghue's inventive storytelling is flawless and absorbing. She has a fantastic ability to build tension in scenes where most of the action takes place in the 12-by-12 room where her central characters reside. Her writing has pulse-pounding sequences that cause the reader's eyes to race over the pages to find out what happens next.... Room is likely to haunt readers for days, if not longer. It is, hands down, one of the best books of the year.
Liz Raftery - Boston Globe
Only a handful of authors have ever known how to get inside the mind of a child and then get what they know on paper. Henry James, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and, more recently, Jean Stafford and Eric Kraft come to mind, and after that one gropes for names. But now they have company. Emma Donoghue's latest novel, Room, is narrated by a 5-year-old boy so real you could swear he was sitting right beside you.... Room is so beautifully contrived that it never once seems contrived. But be warned: once you enter, you'll be Donoghue's willing prisoner right down to the last page.
Malcolm Jones - Newsweek
[T]he developments in this novel—there are enough plot twists to provide a dramatic arc of breathtaking suspense—are astonishing.... While there have been several true-life stories of women and children held captive, little has been written about the pain of re-entry, and Donoghue's bravado in investigating that potentially terrifying transformation grants the novel a frightening resonance that will keep readers rapt.
Publishers Weekly
Gripping, riveting, and close to the bone, this story grabs you and doesn't let go. Donoghue skillfully builds a suspenseful narrative evoking fear and hate and hope—but most of all, the triumph of a mother's ferocious love. Highly recommended for readers of popular fiction. —Susanne Wells, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.
Library Journal
Room is beautifully written as a first-person narrative from Jack’s perspective, and within it, Donoghue has constructed a quiet, private, and menacing world that slowly unbends with a mother and son’s love and determination. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist
Talented, versatile Donoghue relates a searing tale of survival and recovery, in the voice of a five-year-old boy.... Donoghue brilliantly shows mother and son grappling with very different issues as they adjust to freedom.... Wrenching, as befits the grim subject matter, but also tender, touching and at times unexpectedly funny.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think the entire book is told in Jack’s voice? Do you think it is effective?
2. What are some of the ways in which Jack’s development has been stunted by growing up in Room? How has he benefited?
3. If you were Ma, what would you miss most about the outside world?
4. What would you do differently if you were Jack’s parent? Would you tell Jack about the outside world from the start?
5. If Ma had never given birth to Jack, what would her situation in Room be like?
6. What would you ask for, for Sundaytreat, if you were Jack? If you were Ma?
7. Describe the dynamic between Old Nick and Ma. Why does the author choose not to tell us Old Nick’s story?
8. What does joining the outside world do to Jack? To Ma?
9. What role do you think the media play in the novel?
10. In a similar situation, how would you teach a child the difference between the real world and what they watch on television?
11. Why are we so fascinated by stories of long-term confinement?
12. What were you most affected by in the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Marisha Pessl, 2006
Penguin Group USA
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143112129
Summary
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, the dazzling debut of Marisha Pessl, is a buoyant combination of comedy, tragedy, mystery, and romance, a story of disturbing secrets and the eccentric high school student who uncovers them. In vivid prose sprinkled with literary and cultural references, Pessl weaves a complicated tale of self-awakening in a postmodern world.
Blue van Meer is the precocious only daughter of a dashing and scholarly father. After her mother’s death in a car accident when Blue is six, they hit the road together, traveling between her father’s ever-changing teaching positions in obscure college towns. While Blue’s intellectual gifts have been nurtured by her devoted father, she has never had a real home or friends. Instead, she has been raised on her father’s voice and on the literature and political history that he thrives on.
Enter Hannah Schneider and the Bluebloods, an enigmatic clique at St. Gallway, the private school Blue enters for her senior year. Hannah is the gorgeous, mysterious mentor to a select group of St. Gallway seniors, and she invites dutiful and shy Blue to join them. A film studies teacher, Hannah is alluring and unconventional, “the lone bombshell slinking into a Norman Rockwell,” who treats the students as friends and equals. For the first time in her life, Blue finds herself drawn out of the insular family world she and her father have created, and into the lives of these maverick and beautiful peers.
But after a suspicious death at Hannah’s house, this new world raises some disturbing questions, and Blue’s life begins to come “unstitched like a snagged sweater.” Who is Hannah Schneider and why is she so interested in Blue? Does Blue’s narcissistic father really love constant travel, or is he running away from more than the ghost of her mother? What really happened the day her mother died? Who can Blue really trust?
In one life-changing year, Blue will unveil a mystery bigger than her own life. Along the way she will learn to act like a teenager, to love unexpectedly, and to think for herself. Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a coming-of-age tale and a disturbing mystery, a snapshot of the dark relationship between ideology and violence but also the poignant tale of a young woman learning to stand on her own. Pessl is a virtuosic writer, energetic and erudite, perceptive about relationships, history, and politics, and able to paint a portrait of contemporary youth alongside a complicated picture of the political battles waged by their parents’ generation. Starting with a “Core Curriculum,” and complete with citations, Web sites, footnotes, and even a final exam, Pessl guides us through the dynamic evolution of Blue van Meer, named after a butterfly, from cocooned caterpillar to free-flying individual. (From Wikipedia.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 26, 1977
• Where—near Detroit, Michigan, USA
• Raised—Asheville, North Carolina
• Education—B.A., Barnard College (Columbia University)
• Currently—New York, New York
Marisha Pessl is an American writer best known for her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, published in 2006. Her second novel, Night Film, came out in 2013.
Pessl was born in Clarkston, Michigan, to Klaus, an Austrian engineer for General Motors, and Anne, an American homemaker. Pessl's parents divorced when she was three, and she moved to Asheville, North Carolina with her mother and sister.
Pessl had an intellectually stimulating upbringing, recalling that her mother read "a fair chunk of the Western canon out loud" to her and her sister before bed, and entered her in lessons for riding, painting, jazz, and French. She started high school at the Asheville School, a private, co-educational boarding school, but graduated from Asheville High School in 1995. She attended Northwestern University for two years before transferring to Barnard College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English Literature.
After graduating, Pessl worked as a financial consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, while writing in her free time. After two failed attempts at novels, she began writing a third in 2001 about the relationship between a daughter and her controlling, charismatic father. She completed the novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, in 2004 and it was published in 2006 to "almost universally positive" reviews, translated into thirty languages, and eventually becoming a New York Times Best Seller.
Pessl's second novel, Night Film, a psychological literary thriller, was published in 2013 to mixed reviews. Janet Maslin of the New York Times suspected it "was more exciting to write than to read," while Kirkus referred to it as "an inventive—if brooding, strange and creepy—adventure in literary terror."
Pessl married Nic Caiano, a hedge fund manager, in 2003, and they lived in New York City. Pessl and Caiano divorced in 2009.
Pessl was also a contributing musician to The Pierces' third studio album, Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge, released in 2007. She is credited in the liner notes as having played the French horn on track 9 titled "The Power Of..." (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/18/2013.)
Book Reviews
Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics is the most flashily erudite first novel since Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. With its pirouettes and cartwheels, its tireless annotations and digressions, it has a similar whiz-kid eagerness to wow the reader.
The New York Times
This skylarking book will leave readers salivating for more. The joys of this shrewdly playful narrative lie not only in the high-low darts and dives of Pessl's tricky plotting, but in her prose, which floats and runs as if by instinct, unpremeditated and unerring.
The New York Times Book Review
Blue's cross-referencing mania can be surprisingly enjoyable, because Pessl is a vivacious writer who's figured out how to be brainy without being pedantic.
Donna Rifkin - The Washington Post
(Audio version.) Pessl's showy (often too showy) debut novel, littered as it is with literary references and obscure citations, would seem to make an unlikely candidate for a successful audiobook. Yet actor and singer Emily Janice Card (a North Carolina native like the author) has a ball with Pessl's knotty, digressive prose, eating up Pessl's array of voices, impressions and asides like an ice-cream sundae. Card reads as if she is composing the book as she goes along, with a palpable sense of enjoyment present in almost every line reading. Her girlish voice, immature but knowing, is the perfect sound for Pessl's protagonist and narrator Blue van Meer, wise beyond her years even as she stumbles through a disastrous final year of high school. Card brings out the best in Pessl's novel and papers over its weak spots as ably as she can.
Publishers Weekly
Pessl's stunning debut is an elaborate construction modeled after the syllabus of a college literature course 36 chapters are named after everything from Othello to Paradise Lost to The Big Sleep that culminates with a final exam. It comes as no surprise, then, that teen narrator Blue Van Meer, the daughter of an itinerant academic, has an impressive vocabulary and a knack for esoteric citation that makes Salinger's Seymour Glass look like a dunce. Following the mysterious death of her butterfly-obsessed mother, Blue and her father, Gareth, embark, in another nod to Nabokov, on a tour of picturesque college towns, never staying anyplace longer than a semester. This doesn't bode well for Blue's social life, but when the Van Meers settle in Stockton, N.C., for the entirety of Blue's senior year, she befriends sort of a group of eccentric geniuses (referred to by their classmates as the Bluebloods) and their ringleader, film studies teacher Hannah Schneider. As Blue becomes enmeshed with Hannah and the Bluebloods, the novel becomes a murder mystery so intricately plotted that, after absorbing the late-chapter revelations, readers will be tempted to start again at the beginning in order to watch the tiny clues fall into place. Like its intriguing main characters, this novel is many things at once it's a campy, knowing take on the themes that made The Secret History and Prep such massive bestsellers, a wry sendup of most of the Western canon and, most importantly, a sincere and uniquely twisted look at love, coming of age and identity.
Publishers Weekly
Precocious Blue van Meer is used to moving around with her professor father, who travels from job to job and affair to affair. But she's not prepared for the consequences when both a friend and a favorite teacher die tragically.
Library Journal
Donna Tartt goes postmodern in this eclectically intellectual murder mystery. Blue van Meer, daughter of a womanizing widower, has spent her entire life following her erudite father on six-month stints to the small posts he chooses at obscure universities. During her senior year in high school, though, she convinces him to let her stay put for the entire academic year, which she will spend at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, N.C. There, while immediately proving her academic prowess by besting the presumed valedictorian, she also finds herself courted by an intriguing faculty member, Hannah Schneider, and is reluctantly accepted into her group of student followers: Milton, Charles, Leulah and Jade, each of whom seems to be hiding something about their past. The group meets at Hannah's every Sunday for international cuisine and intellectual banter, and soon Blue is also going on social excursions with the girls and secretly lusting after Milton. Things go awry when Blue and her compatriots break into Hannah's house and witness the mysterious drowning of one of Hannah's friends. The drowning becomes a rallying cry for the group to find out more about their teacher's secret life. The plot thickens again when Hannah herself dies, leaving Blue to put the pieces together and determine the truth. Who was Hannah Schneider really? What was the nature of her various relationships? And why did she welcome Blue into her clique so readily? The writing is clever, the text rich with subtle literary allusion. But while even the gimmicks work well (chapters are structured like a literature syllabus; hand-drawn visual aids appear throughout), they don't compensate for the fact that The Secret History came first. Sharp, snappy fun for the literary-minded.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Blue describes herself as a “Jane Goodall,” an observer not a main actor. She is quiet, in thrall to her father, bookish, and solitary. What did you think of her when we first meet her? How does she change over the course of the novel? At the end, what new characteristics has she acquired?
2. Her father, Gareth van Meer, is her opposite: charming and callous, verbose and secretive. He dazzles women, is adored by his students, and is completely committed to his daughter. Yet there are clues that all is not right with Gareth. Go back to some passages in the book where Blue hints that he is hiding something, such as when she describes her frightening apprehension, at the age of eleven, that he is a “terrifying, red-faced stranger bearing his dark, moldy soul” (p. 33). What is your opinion of him at the novel’s conclusion?
3. The relationship between Blue and her father changes over Blue’s senior year. At the start she loves and trusts him unconditionally, but at the end she has hard questions for him. How does Blue’s attitude toward him begin to change? Does he alter the way that he treats her? Try to imagine their future relationship; how might they feel toward each other?
4. The death of Hannah Schneider, movie-star beautiful and charismatic, is the mystery at the heart of the novel. Who was Hannah Schneider? What does Blue learn about her past, and about how they are linked? Do you have sympathy for Hannah? Was she well-intentioned or do you think she was disturbed and dangerous?
5. Hannah takes Blue under her wing and includes her in the group of students, the Bluebloods, that she has befriended and mentored. Why is she so interested in Blue? How does she encourage Blue to act? Try to think of what she provides for each of them that they wouldn’t otherwise have, the way she “reads” each of them “so you thought you were her favorite paperback” (p. 322). Is she a good influence on Blue and the others?
6. Small-town America is also a subject of this book; Gareth is a “perennial visiting lecturer,” who raises Blue in a series of obscure towns throughout America. Think back to some of the places that they have lived, and the accompanying Americana—the Wal-Marts, chain restaurants, and suburbs that Blue and her father drift through. How would you describe this America? How is it different from other, more mainstream, depictions of the country? Do you recognize these places? What do you think Blue thinks of them?
7. Zach Soderberg seems to Blue at first to be bland and simple, a regular guy who does not attract her as the wild and nonconformist Bluebloods do. But what does Zach offer that the others cannot? What do you think he sees in Blue? Why do you think the Bluebloods are so disparaging toward him? What role does he play in Blue’s transformation?
8. Blue calls her father’s endless stream of romantic conquests “June Bugs,” saying “Dad picked up women the way certain wool pants can’t help but pick up lint” (p. 29). What is her relationship to some of these women like? Does she grow more sympathetic to them? Consider some of the specific encounters Blue has with women Gareth is involved with. What does the incident with “Kitty,” in particular, teach her?
9. The Bluebloods are mesmerizing but merciless and are at first cruel even to Blue. How would you describe them as a clique? Individually? Which of them grow more sympathetic, and which become kinder toward Blue? Are any of them redeemed by the end of the story?
10. The relationship between ideology and violence is a subtext that turns into a main theme. Who is particularly ideological or political in this book? What do they believe in and advocate for? Try to trace Gareth van Meer’s beliefs, in particular, by returning to earlier passages in the novel where Blue mentions his ideas, reading material, or lectures.
11. At the end of the book, Blue is faced with a hard choice about the information she has uncovered. How does she act and why? Though he never says, do you think her father is proud of her ultimate decision about the secret she uncovers? What does her decision, which costs her plenty, tell you about Blue’s morals and inner strength? What would you have done?
12. Much of the investigation that Blue undertakes depends on her interpreting various clues and events correctly. Sometimes she succeeds, sometimes she fails. Who attempts to mislead her, and how do they do it? What enables her to grow better at understanding the machinations of the adults around her? Do you agree with her final assessment of the mystery at the heart of her origins and of the novel? Or do you agree with Gareth that “we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things” (p. 261)?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Elizabeth Street
Laurie Fabiano, 2006
Amazon Encore
438 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781935597025
Summary
Laurie Fabiano tells a remarkable, and previously unheard, story of the Italian immigrant experience at the start of the twentieth century. Culled from her own family history, Fabiano paints an entrancing portrait of Giovanna Costa, who, reeling from personal tragedies, tries to make a new life in a new world.
Shot through with the smells and sights of Scilla, Italy, and New York’s burgeoning Little Italy, this intoxicating story follows Giovanna as she finds companionship, celebrates the birth of a baby girl, takes pride in a growing business, and feels a sense of belonging on a family outing to Coney Island.
However, these modest successes are rewarded with the attention of the notorious Black Hand, a gang of brutal extortionists led by Lupo the Wolf. As the stakes grow higher and higher, readers share with Giovanna her desperate struggle to remain outside the fray, and then to fight for—and finally to save—that which is important above all other: family. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Laurie Fabiano loves her family and all things Italian. She has dedicated her career to marketing and event production for non-profit organizations empowering others to share their life stories and raising hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of those in need.
This book, her first, is her story. Laurie lives in Hoboken, New Jersey with her husband Joe and their daughter Siena (From the publisher .)
Book Reviews
Basing this story—including the kidnapping—on her own family's immigrant experiences, Fabiano provides a wealth of period detail, infusing the compulsively readable narrative with an authentic sense of time, place, and community. —Margaret Flanagan
Booklist.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Elizabeth Street:
1. Talk about the of the name of the Italian town in which Giovanni Costa was born. What is its mythological background — as well as its metaphorical implication in Fabiano's novel.
2. Describe Giovanni. What kind of a character is she? What inner strengths does she draw upon that give her the courage to pursue a new life far from home, stand up to an American corporation and, eventually, take on the Black Hand?
3. Talk about Giovanni's second marriage. Was it a pragmatic decision, cowardly, or courageous to marry a man she didn't love. Did she have other options? What might you have done in her place?
4. Much of the power of this book lies in its detailed descriptions—the sights and sounds of life in Little Italy, New York, at the turn of the last century. Read aloud and talk about some of the passages that struck you as most descriptive or interesting.
5. Have you come away from this book with a different insight into the immigrant experience of the early 1900s—the need to develop close knit families and communities, as well as the overwhelming challenges faced by many new arrivals? Talk about some of those hardships.
6. Does this book inspire you to investigate your own family's history as newcomers (we all were at one time) to this country? If you're recently descended from immigrants—and steeped in family lore—does Fabiano's book ring true to you? Does it feel authentic?
7. Talk about the experience of many of the Italians, particularly southerners, on their arrival at Ellis Island. What prompted the discriminatory treatment? How else were Italians discriminated against once they stepped foot on the mainland? What about other nationalities arriving earlier or around the same time—the Irish and Eastern Europeans on the East Coast of the U.S., and the Chinese on the West coast.
8. It would be impossible to read Elizabeth Street and not consider today's immigration issue. Can you make any comparisons between conditions in the novel and those in contemporary life?
9. What prompted the beginnings of the Black Hand? How did they gain power over the residents of Little Italy—and why, politically, was it allowed to flourish? Does Fabiano's depiction challenge or support what some have considered the romanticized myth of the underworld?
10. Had you known before about the devastating 1908 earthquake in Italy and tsunamis that followed?
11. According to Fabiano, the story is based on her great- grandmother and grandmother, who was indeed abducted as a child. Does knowing this affect your view of the novel?
12. There are a number of comparisons made of this book to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn...or Doctorow's Waterworks; even to a films like Gangs of New York or The Godfather. Have you read other works in which you see similarities—perhaps The Namesake or Shanghai Girls?
13. Overall, what was your experience reading Elizabeth Street? Was it engaging, were characters well developed, did the pace move well, was the ending satisfactory?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Out Stealing Horses
Per Petterson, 2003; English trans., 2005
Macmillan-Picador
250 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312427085
Summary
Winner, IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Out Stealing Horses has been embraced across the world as a classic, a novel of universal relevance and power. Panoramic and gripping, it tells the story of Trond Sander, a sixty-seven-year-old man who has moved from the city to a remote, riverside cabin, only to have all the turbulence, grief, and overwhelming beauty of his youth come back to him one night while he's out on a walk.
From the moment Trond sees a strange figure coming out of the dark behind his home, the reader is immersed in a decades-deep story of searching and loss, and in the precise, irresistible prose of a newly crowned master of fiction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July18, 1952
• Where—Oslo, Norway
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Norwegian Critics prize for Literature; Booksellers Best Book of the Year
Award; Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
• Currently—lives in Oslo, Norwary
Per Petterson is a prize-winning Norwegian novelist. His debut was Aske i munnen, sand i skoa (1987), a collection of short stories.
He has since published five novels to good reviews. Til Sibir (To Siberia, 1996; nominated for The Nordic Council's Literature Prize), a novel set in the Second World War, was published in English in 1998. His novel I kjølvannet, (In the Wake, 2002), is a young man's story of losing his family in the Scandinavian Star ferry disaster in 1990.
Petterson's breakthrough, however, was Ut og stjæle hester (Out Stealing Horses, 2003). The novel received two top literary prizes in Norway—the The Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Booksellers’ Best Book of the Year Award. The 2005 English language translation was awarded the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (the world's largest monetary literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English (€100,000). In the December 9. 2007 issue of the New York Times Book Review Out Stealing Horses was named one of the 10 best books of the year.
Out Stealing Horses has double meanings and two sets of twins. When asked “How did the Nazi Occupation of Norway translate into the plot of your novel?” Mr. Petterson responded:
Well, like I said, I do not plan, so that double meaning came up when I needed it. That is disappointing to some readers, I know. But for me it shows the strength of art. It is like carving out a sculpture from some material. You have to go with the quality of the material and not force upon it a form that it will not yield to anyway. That will only look awkward. Early in the book, in the 1948 part, I let the two fathers (of my main characters, Jon and Trond) have a problem with looking at each other. And I wondered, why is that? So I thought, well, it’s 1948, only three years after the Germans left Norway. It has to be something with the war. And then I thought, shit, I have to write about the war. You see, I hate research.
In 2012 Petterson published his ninth work of fiction, I Refuse, in Norway; the novel quickly became a best seller. By the time of its U.S. printing in 2015, rights had been sold to 16 countries.
Petterson is a trained librarian. He has worked as a bookstore clerk, translator and literary critic before becoming a full-time writer. He cites Knut Hamsun and Raymond Carver among his influences. All told, his works have been translated into nearly 50 languages. (Adated from Wikipedia. First retrieved in 2008.)
Book Reviews
This short yet spacious and powerful book—in such contrast to the well-larded garrulity of the bulbous American novel of today—reminds us of the careful and apropos writing of J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald and Uwe Timm. Petterson’s kinship with Knut Hamsun, which he has himself acknowledged, is palpable in Hamsun’s “Pan,” “Victoria” and even the lighthearted “Dreamers.” But nothing should suggest that his superb novel is so embedded in its sources as to be less than a gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life.
Thomas McGuane - New York Times
Read Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. From the first terse sentences of this mesmerizing Norwegian novel about youth, memory, and, yes, horse stealing; you know you're in the hands of a master storyteller.
Newsweek
Petterson's spare and deliberate prose has astonishing force.... Loss is conveyed with all the intensity of a boy's perception but acquires new resonance in the brooding consciousness of the older man.
The New Yorker
Award-winning Norwegian novelist Petterson renders the meditations of Trond Sander, a man nearing 70, dwelling in self-imposed exile at the eastern edge of Norway in a primitive cabin. Trond's peaceful existence is interrupted by a meeting with his only neighbor, who seems familiar. The meeting pries loose a memory from a summer day in 1948 when Trond's friend Jon suggests they go out and steal horses. That distant summer is transformative for Trond as he reflects on the fragility of life while discovering secrets about his father's wartime activities. The past also looms in the present: Trond realizes that his neighbor, Lars, is Jon's younger brother, who "pulls aside the fifty years with a lightness that seems almost indecent." Trond becomes immersed in his memory, recalling that summer that shaped the course of his life while, in the present, Trond and Lars prepare for the winter, allowing Petterson to dabble in parallels both bold and subtle. Petterson coaxes out of Trond's reticent, deliberate narration a story as vast as the Norwegian tundra.
Publishers Weekly
An aging loner remembers a childhood summer that marked a lifetime of loss. Fifteen-year-old Trond, spending the summer of 1948 with his father, away from their Oslo home in a cabin in the easternmost region of Norway, wakes to an invitation from his friend, Jon, to "steal" their neighbor's horses for an early-morning joy ride. But what Trond doesn't yet know is that the ride is Jon's farewell to him. The day before, when Jon was supposed to be minding his young twin brothers, Lars and Odd, Lars found Jon's prized gun and, imitating his older brother, accidentally killed his twin. Nearly 60 years later, Trond has returned to the rustic region after a devastating car accident that killed his wife and left him gravely injured, hoping to live out the rest of his days quietly, with his dog as his only companion. But late one night, he has a chance encounter with his only neighbor, an aging man named Lars. Trond realizes that this neighbor is his childhood friend's younger brother, and their meeting causes him to remember not only the morning of the horse theft, but the rest of the summer as well. After Jon's disappearance, Trond spends the summer working with his father to send lumber down the river to the Swedish border, ostensibly the reason for their retreat. He is stunned to learn that his father is having an affair with Jon's grieving mother, also the object of Trond's own first intimate moment. As Trond begins to talk to the other workers, he also realizes that his father has had complicated reasons for spending much of the war years in the eastern region of the country, close to Sweden's neutral borders. He even learns that the phrase "out stealing horses," which he had tossed around casually with his friend, has a meaning that reaches beyond their childhood pranks. Haunting, minimalist prose and expert pacing give this quiet story from Norway native Petterson an undeniably authoritative presence.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. “I needed to concentrate,” Trond says at the start of the book (pg. 7), explaining his decision to move to the country. Do you think he is happy in his isolation? Is he making a brave choice by withdrawing to the country, as he has always dreamt of doing; or do you think he’s fleeing the responsibilities of his life?
2. Soon after Odd is killed, Trond says "I felt it somewhere inside me; a small remnant, a bright yellow speck that perhaps would never leave me." What is it he feels? How does that day stealing horses with Jon, and learning what has happened to Odd, change Trond? Do you see the effects of that loss in him as an older man?
3. Petterson has been widely praised for his descriptions of nature, and of small quiet moments in everyday life. How does his writing make these ordinary moments compelling? Which images of landscapes or domestic scenes remained most vivid in your memory after finishing the book?
4. After his dream at the start of Chapter 5, which leaves him weeping, Trond says, "But then it is not death I fear." Do you believe him? If so, what is he afraid of?
5. How do you think Trond’s life would have changed if he had hit the man in Karlstad (pp. 231- 233)? Why does he attach so much significance to that decision?
6. Look at the scene in which Trond’s car goes off the road and he sees the lynx in the woods (pg. 65). At the end of the scene, Trond says “I can’t recall when I last felt so alive as when I got the car onto the road again and drove on.” Why does a near accident, and the sight of the lynx, thrill him?
7. Were you surprised by Ellen’s reaction to her father when she finds him at the end of the book? Would you be angrier in her position, or more forgiving? Has Trond been unfair to her?
8. How has Trond become like his father, and how has he managed to take a different path? What parallels do you see between the lives they lead in the book? How is Trond’s behavior as an adult influenced by the short time he spent with his father as a young man?
9. Look at the book’s final section, after Trond has discovered that his father isn’t coming back. How does his behavior change? Were you surprised by his reaction to the news?
10. How do you think Trond’s life will change after the end of the novel? Will he see more of his daughter? Will he and Lars become friends, or will he return to the isolation he had sought out when he moved to the country?
11. Look at Ellen’s monologue about the opening lines of David Copperfield (pg. 197). How do you understand the phenomenon she’s describing, of not being “the leading characters of our own lives”? Has this happened to anyone you know? Do you think it has happened to Trond? Is it a good or a bad thing?
12. Why do you think Trond’s father doesn’t tell him the story of the Resistance? Why does he leave it to Franz? How do you think Trond’s perception of his father would have changed if his father had told the story himself?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Sparrow
Mary Doria Russell, 1996
Random House
405 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449912553
Summary
It is the year 2019. From an outer space listening post on Puerto Rico come the sounds of exquisite singing—emanating from a planet that will be known by earth as Rakhat.
While the international community debates endlessly about sending a mission, a scientific team of eight Jesuits quietly launches its own.
What they discover on Rakhat makes them question the very basis of what it means to be human. Four decades later, Emilio Sandoz, the sole survivor, attempts to tell what happened. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 19, 1950
• Where—Elmhurst, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A. University of Illinois; M.A. Northeastern
University; Ph.D. University of Michigan
• Awards—The John W. Campbell Award, 1998
• Currently—lives in Cleveland, Ohio
Mary Doria Russell was born in suburban Chicago in 1950. Her mother was a U.S. Navy nurse and her father was a Marine Corps drill sergeant. She and her younger brother, Richard, consequently developed a dismaying vocabulary at an early age. Mary learned discretion at Sacred Heart Catholic elementary school and learned how to parse sentences at Glenbard East High; she moved on to study cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois, social anthropology at Northeastern University in Boston, and biological anthropology at the University of Michigan.
After earning a doctorate, Russell taught human gross anatomy at Case Western Reserve University in the 1980s but left the academic world to write fiction, which turned out to be a good career move.
Her novels have struck a deep chord with readers for their respectful but unblinking consideration of fundamental religious questions. The Sparrow and Children of God remain steady sellers, translated into more than a dozen languages. Russell has received nine national and international literary awards and has been a finalist for a number of others. She and her family live in Cleveland, Ohio. (From the publisher.)
Extra
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:
• I honestly think getting up early gives you cancer. You should definitely sleep in as often as possible.
• Coffee is good for you. Don't believe anyone who says different. All research concluding that coffee is bad is seriously flawed in scientific design.
• Here's how you know when you're grown up: you decide if you get to have a pet. You don't have to ask anyone else's permission. I just got myself a 4-year-old miniature dachshund named Annie from Petfinder.com. She makes me laugh out loud first thing in the morning, and at least half a dozen times a day after that.
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence (1935). I saw the David Lean movie Lawrence of Arabia when it first came out in 1962. I was twelve then, and ripe for hero worship, living in Lombard, Illinois, but ready to imagine a larger world than the Chicago suburbs. I found a musty old copy of Seven Pillars, and to this day I remain fascinated by the book and the man who wrote it. I can name a number of direct effects of reading the book.
Initially, I became interested in archeology because of Lawrence's early work, and that led me to anthropology, which sustained my interest through three degrees and years of professional work. I keep my hand in by editing the professional papers of friends in the field.
Lawrence taught me that speaking more than one language opens doors to experiences you'd miss if you only speak English. Over the years, I've studied Spanish, Russian, French and Croatian fairly formally, with less studious stabs at Latin, Hebrew, Italian and German. Each one has led me places I'd never have gone other wise. My study of Croatian led directly to the adoption of our son Daniel in Zagreb—so Lawrence is Dan's sort-of godfather!
I learned that intentions are irrelevant and regrets are useless: it doesn't matter what you thought would happen, or that you meant no harm. Unintended consequences of good intentions are a theme I return.
Lawrence taught me that how you write is as important as what you have to tell about. Choice of word, rhythm, detail, editing and overall structure make Seven Pillars literature, not just a military history or personal memoir.
There are echoes of Lawrence's experience in Deraa in my first novel, echoes of his war guilt in my third. I'm beginning research for a novel about the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, and will come full circle: T. E. Lawrence will actually be a character in that one.
I also caught the colon habit from reading Lawrence's work: quod erat demonstradum. (Interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Powerful... Father Emilio Sandoz [is] the only survivor of a Jesuit mission to the planet Rakhat, "a soul...looking for God." We first meet him in Italy...sullen and bitter.... But he was not always this way, as we learn through flashbacks that tell the story of the ill-fated trip.... The Sparrow tackles a difficult subject with grace and intelligence.
San Francisco Chronicle
A notable achievement... Russell shows herself to be a skillful storyteller who subtly and expertly builds suspense.
USA Today
Two narratives—the mission to the planet and its aftermath four decades later—interweave to create a suspenseful tale.
Seattle Times
It is rare to find a book about interplanetary exploration that has this much insight into human nature and foresight into a possible future.
San Antonio Express News
If you have to send a group of people to a newly discovered planet to contact a totally unknown species, whom would you choose? How about four Jesuit priests, a young astronomer, a physician, her engineer husband, and a child prostitute-turned-computer-expert? That's who Mary Doria Russell sends in her new novel, The Sparrow. This motley combination of agnostics, true believers, and misfits becomes the first to explore the Alpha Centuri world of Rakhat with both enlightening and disastrous results.... Vivid and engaging... An incredible novel.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Russell's debut novel...focuses on her characters, and it is here that the work truly shines. An entertaining infusion of humor keeps the book from becoming too dark, although some of the characters are so clever that they sometimes seem contrived. Readers who dislike an emphasis on moral dilemmas or spiritual quests may be turned off, but those who enjoy science fiction because it can create these things are in for a real treat.
Science Fiction Weekly
The dense prose in this complex tale may at first seem off-putting, but hang on for the ride; it's riveting! —Jennifer Henderson
Booklist
An enigma wrapped inside a mystery sets up expectations that prove difficult to fulfill in Russell's first novel, which is about first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. The enigma is Father Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit linguist whose messianic virtues hide his occasional doubt about his calling. The mystery is the climactic turn of events that has left him the sole survivor of a secret Jesuit expedition to the planet Rakhat and, upon his return, made him a disgrace to his faith. Suspense escalates as the narrative ping-pongs between the years 2016, when Sandoz begins assembling the team that first detects signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life, and 2060, when a Vatican inquest is convened to coax an explanation from the physically mutilated and emotionally devastated priest. A vibrant cast of characters who come to life through their intense scientific and philosophical debates help distract attention from the space-opera elements necessary to get them off the Earth. Russell brings her training as a paleoanthropologist to bear on descriptions of the Runa and Jana'ata, the two races on Rakhat whose differences are misunderstood by the Earthlings, but the aliens never come across as more than variations of primitive earthly cultures. The final revelation of the tragic human mistake that ends in Sandoz's degradation isn't the event for which readers have been set up. Much like the worlds it juxtaposes, this novel seems composed of two stories that fail to come together.
Publishers Weekly
Brilliant first novel about the discovery of extraterrestrial life and the voyage of a party of Jesuit missionaries to Alpha Centauri. Russell lays down two narratives: One begins in 2059, in the aftermath of the mission; the other in 2019, when a young astronomer intercepts a transmission of haunting songs from Alpha Centauri. In the latter, a linguist and Jesuit priest named Emilio Sandoz swiftly organizes a group of Jesuits and civilian specialists to turn an asteroid into a spaceship. The ship will reach the singing planet, called Rakhat, in four years of passenger time, even though 17 years will pass on Earth. In the narrative beginning in 2059, therefore, the mission's only survivor, Sandoz himself, is only a decade older. But he is a broken man physically and spiritually. The mission began well: Rakhat was beautiful and bountiful, and the men and women from Earth lived peacefully alongside a gentle and dreamy race, rather like the eloi of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, here called the runa. Then, inadvertently, the visitors improve the local diet, causing a surge in births among the Runa; suddenly, another, fiercer race appears to put things right. It seems that the Jana'ata raise the Runa like rabbits. The newborn are slain and eaten, as is the party from Earth, except for Sandoz, who is taken to the strange capitol city and sold into a brothel. There, he is raped repeatedly by the great poet who wrote the angelic songs that fetched the Jesuits in the first place. A startling portrait of an alien culture and of the nature of God as well, since, in his utter humiliation and in the annihilation of his spirit, Sandoz is reborn in faith. Shades of Wells, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Arthur C. Clarke, with just a dash of Edgar Rice Burroughs—and yet strikingly original, even so.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How do faith, love, and the role of God in the world drive the plot of this story? One reviewer characterized this book as "a parable about faith—the search for God, in others as well as Out There." Do you agree? If so, why?
2. This story takes place from the years 2019 to 2060. The United States is no longer the predominant world power, having lost two trade wars with Japan, which is now supreme in both space and on Earth. Poverty is rampant. Indentured servitude is once more a common practice, and "future brokers" mine ghettos for promising children to educate in return for a large chunk of their lifetime income. What kinds of changes do you think will occur by the twenty-first century—with governments, technology, society, and so on? Do you think America will lose its predominant status in the world?
3. Do you think it likely that we will make contact with extraterrestrials at some time in the future? What will the implications of such an event be? We've always viewed Earth, and human beings, as the center of the universe. Will that still be the case if we discover alien life forms? How will such a discovery change theology? Does God love us best? Will such a discovery confirm the existence of God or cause us to question his existence at all?
4. If, sometime within the next century, we hear radio signals from a solar system less than a dozen light years away from our own, do you think humankind would mount an expedition to visit that place? Who do you think might leadsuch an expedition? If you had to send a group of people to a newly discovered planet to contact a totally unknown species, whom would you choose? Is the trip to Rakhat a scientific mission or a religious one?
5. The Sparrow tells a story by interweaving two time periods—after the mission to Rakhat and before. Do you think this makes the story more interesting and easier to follow or more difficult to follow? How does this story differ from other stories you have read?
6. Why do you think Sandoz resists telling the story of what happened on Rakhat?
7. A basic premise of this story is an evaluation of the harm that results from the explorer's inability to assess a culture from the threshold of exploration. Do you see any parallels between the voyage of the eight explorers on the Rakhat mission and the voyages of other explorers from past history—Columbus, Magellan, Cortez, and others—who inaccurately assessed the cultures they discovered?
8. Despite currently popular revisionism, many historians view the early discoverers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries not as imperialists or colonists but as intellectual idealists burning to know what God's plan had hidden from them. Do you agree? Does this story make you reconsider the motives of those early explorers?
9. One of the mainstays of the Star Trek universe is the "prime directive" which mandates the avoidance of interference in alien cultures at all costs. Would the "prime directive" have changed the outcome of events on Rakhat?
10. In an interview, the author said, "I wanted readers to look philosophically at the idea that you can be seduced by the notion that God is leading you and that your actions have his approval." What do you think she means by that? In what way was Emilio Sandoz seduced by this notion?
11. The discoverers of Rakhat seem to be connected by circumstances too odd to be explained by anything but a manifestation of God's will. Do you think it was God's will that led to the discovery of and mission to Rakhat, as Sandoz initially believes? If that's the case, how could God let the terrible aftermath happen?
12. How is Emilio Sandoz's faith tested on Rakhat? One reviewer suggests that in his utter humiliation and in the annihilation of his spirit, Sandoz is reborn in faith. Do you agree? Consider Sandoz's dilemma on page 394. Did God lead the explorers to Rakhat—step by step—or was Sandoz responsible for what happened? If God was responsible for bringing the explorers to Rakhat, does that mean that God is vicious?
13. One reviewer wrote, "It is neither celibacy, faith, exotics goods, nor (as Sandoz bitterly asserts) the introduction of one of humanity's oldest inventions that leads to the crisis between humans and aliens. The humans get into trouble because they fail to understand how Rakhat society controls reproduction. In short, they fail because they fail to put themselves into the aliens' shoes." Do you agree? If so, why? If not, why not?
14. Is confession good for the soul? Do you think Emilio Sandoz will ultimately recover—both as a man and as a priest—from his ordeal?
15. Why do you think it's so important to Emilio to stand by his vow of celibacy when he so obviously loves Sofia Mendez?
16. The Jesuits saw so many of their fellows martyred all over the world throughout history. Why aren't they more sympathetic in dealing with Sandoz—a man victimized by his faith?
17. What is this story about? Is it a story about coming face-to-face with a sentient race that is so alien as to be incomprehensible, or about putting up a mirror to our own inner selves?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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