Fall of Giants (Century Trilogy, 1)
Ken Follett, 2010
Penguin Group (USA)
960 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451232854
Summary
Ken Follett's World Without End was a global phenomenon, a work of grand historical sweep, beloved by millions of readers and acclaimed by critics as "well-researched, beautifully detailed [with] a terrifically compelling plot" (The Washington Post) and "wonderful history wrapped around a gripping story" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).
Fall of Giants is his magnificent new historical epic. The first novel in The Century Trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families-American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh-as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.
Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams enters a man's world in the Welsh mining pits...Gus Dewar, an American law student rejected in love, finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson's White House...two orphaned Russian brothers, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, embark on radically different paths half a world apart when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution...Billy's sister, Ethel, a housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts, takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London...
These characters and many others find their lives inextricably entangled as, in a saga of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, Fall of Giants moves seamlessly from Washington to St. Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty. As always with Ken Follett, the historical background is brilliantly researched and rendered, the action fast-moving, the characters rich in nuance and emotion. It is destined to be a new classic.
In future volumes of The Century Trilogy, subsequent generations of the same families will travel through the great events of the rest of the twentieth century, changing themselves-and the century itself. With passion and the hand of a master, Follett brings us into a world we thought we knew, but now will never seem the same again. (From the publisher.)
This is the first book of Follett's Century Trilogy. The second book (2012) is Winter of the World.
Author Bio
• Birth—June 5, 1949
• Where—Cardiff, Wales, UK
• Education—B.A., University College, London
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Hertfordshire, England
Kenneth Martin Follett is a Welsh author of thrillers and historical novels who has sold more than 150 million copies of his works. Many of his books have reached number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, including Edge of Eternity, Fall of Giants, A Dangerous Fortune, The Key to Rebecca, Lie Down with Lions, Triple, Winter of the World, and World Without End.
Early years
Follett was born in Cardiff, Wales, the first child of four children, to Martin Follett, a tax inspector, and Lavinia (Veenie) Follett. Barred from watching films and television by his Plymouth Brethren parents, he developed an early interest in reading but remained an indifferent student until he entered his teens. His family moved to London when he was ten years old, and he began applying himself to his studies at Harrow Weald Grammar School and Poole Technical College.
He won admission in 1967 to University College London, where he studied philosophy and became involved in center-left politics. He married his wife Mary in 1968, and their son was born in the same year. After graduating in the autumn of 1970, Follett took a three-month post-graduate course in journalism, working as a trainee reporter in Cardiff on the South Wales Echo. A daughter was born in 1973.
Career
After three years in Cardiff, Follett returned to London as a general-assignment reporter for the Evening News. He eventually left journalism for publishing, having found it unchallenging, and by the late 1970s became deputy managing director of the small London publisher Everest Books.
During that time, Follett began writing fiction as a hobby during evenings and weekends. Later, he said he began writing books when he needed extra money to fix his car, and the publisher's advance a fellow journalist had been paid for a thriller was the sum required for the repairs. Success came gradually at first, but the 1978 publication of Eye of the Needle, became an international bestseller and sold over 10 million copies, earning Follett wealth and international fame.
Each of Follett's subsequent novels, some 30, has become a best-seller, ranking high on the New York Times Best Seller list. The first five best sellers were fictional spy thrillers. Another bestseller, On Wings of Eagles (1983), is a true story based on the rescue of two of Ross Perot's employees from Iran during the 1979 revolution.
Kingsbridge series
For the most part, Follett continued writing spy thrillers, interspersed with historical novels. But he usually returned to espionage. Then in 1989, Follett surprised his readers with his first non-spy thriller, The Pillars of the Earth (1989), a novel about building a cathedral in a small English village during the Anarchy in the 12th century.
Pillars was wildly successful, received positive reviews, and stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for 18 weeks. All told, (internationally and domestically), it has sold 26 million copies and even inspired a 2017 computer game by Daedalic Entertainment of Germany.
Two sequels followed a number of years later — in 2007 and 2017. World Without End (2007) returns to Kingsbridge 200 years after Pillars and focuses on lives devastated by the Black Death. A Column of Fire (2017), a romance and novel of political intrigue, is set in the mid-16th century — a time when Queen Elizabeth finds herself beset by plots to dethrone her.
Century trilogy
Follett initiated his Century trilogy in 2010. The series traces five interrelated families — American, German, Russian, English and Welsh — as they move through world-shaking events, beginning with World War I and the Russian Revolution, up through the rise of the Third Reich and World War II, and into the Cold War era and civil-rights movements.
Adaptations
A number of Follett's novels have been made into movies and TV mini series. Eye of the Needle was made into an acclaimed film, starring Donald Sutherland. Seven novels have been adapted as mini-series: The Key to Rebecca, Lie Down with Lions, On Wings of Eagles, The Third Twin (rights were sold for a then-record price of $1,400,000), The Pillars of the Earth, World Without End, and A Dangerous Fortune.
Follett also had a cameo role as the valet in The Third Twin and later as a merchant in The Pillars of the Earth.
Awards
2013 - Grand Master at the Edgar Awards (New York)
2012 - Que Leer Prize-Best Translation (Spain) - Winter of the World
2010 - Libri Golden Book Award-Best Fiction (Hungary) - Fall of Giants
2010 - Grand Master, Thrillerfest (New York)
2008 - Honorary Doctor of Literature - University of Exeter
2007 - Honorary Doctor of Literature - University of Glamorgan
2007 - Honorary Doctor of Literature - Saginaw Valley State University
2003 - Corine Literature Prize (Bavaria) - Jackdaws
1999 - Premio Bancarella Literary Prize (Italy) - Hammer of Eden
1979 - Edgar Award-Best Novel - Eye of the Needle
Personal life
During the late 1970s, Follett became involved in the activities of Britain's Labour Party when he met the former Barbara Broer, a Labour Party official. Broer became his second wife in 1984.
Follett, an amateur musician, plays bass guitar for Damn Right I Got the Blues. He occasionally plays a bass balalaika with the folk group Clog Iron. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/4/2017.)
Book Reviews
Follett is masterly in conveying so much drama and historical information so vividly. He puts to good use the professional skills he has honed over the years—giving his characters a conversational style neither pseudo-quaint nor jarringly contemporary. That works well. And for all his belief in the redemptive quality of liberal humanism, he makes sure not to endow his characters with excessively modern sensibilities. As for the occasional cliche—well, unless you're Tolstoy, you're not going to have the time or the ability to be original throughout your 1,000-page blockbuster. Ken Follett is no Tolstoy, but he is a tireless storyteller, and although his tale has flaws, it's grippingly told, and readable to the end.
Roger Boylan - New York Times
[I]n every way, a Big Book.... Just as Herman Wouk did in The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, Follett creates a large cast of fictional characters and deploys them across the globe, using their private experiences to illuminate the catastrophic events that marked the early years of the century.... [Follett] knows how to tell a compelling, well-constructed story. Once its basic elements are in place, the narrative acquires a cumulative, deceptively effortless momentum.... Perhaps the major reasons for the novel's ultimate success are Follett's comprehensive grasp of the historical record and his ability to integrate research into a colorful, engaging narrative.
William Sheehan - Washington Post
A dark novel, motivated by an unsparing view of human nature and a clear-eyed scrutiny of an ideal peace. It is not the least of Follett's feats that the reader finishes this near 1000-page book intrigued and wanting more.
Chicago Times
Follett's greatest virtue as a novelist that he has been able to bring forward a writing style he perfected in his earlier thrillers.... Essentially, he's writing several interrelated books at once, without ever losing the inevitable forward impulse. And while it sounds bizarre to consider a book this huge a 'page-turner,' that's exactly what Fall of Giants is.
The Seattle Times
Fall of Giants stands with Ken Follett's best... Fall of Giants is classic Follett. It's long—almost 1,000 pages; it's populated with hundreds of characters whose lives are intertwined; it's set on a tumultuous world stage; it's a good read.... Everything in this novel is oversized, from the scope of history it covers to the characters he creates. It's a book that will suck you in, consume you for days or weeks, depending upon how quick a reader you are, then let you out the other side both entertained and educated. That's quite the feat.
USA Today
A big Book, Follett's hugely ambitious saga is a sweeping success. Ken Follett has hit another one out of the park with the initial installment of the hugely ambitious Century Trilogy. His fans will rejoice at the richness, complexity, historical sweep and simmering lust in a saga spanning the years 1911 to 1923.
Newark Star Ledger
This first in a century-spanning trilogy from bestseller Follett (Eye of the Needle) makes effective and economical use of its lead characters, despite its scope and bulk. From a huge cast, eight figures emerge to play multiple roles that illustrate and often illuminate the major events, trends, and issues of the years leading up to and immediately beyond WWI: American diplomat Gus Dewar; Earl Fitzherbert, a wealthy Englishman; Fitz's sister, Lady Maud; German military attaché Walter von Ulrich; Russian brothers Grigori and Lev Peshkov; Welsh collier Billy Williams and his sister, Ethel, whom Fitz hires as a housemaid. Ingenious plotting allows Follett to explore such salient developments of the era as coal mine safety in Wales, women's suffrage, the diplomatic blundering that led to war, the horrors of trench warfare, and the triumph of the Bolsheviks. While this tome doesn't achieve the emotional depth of the best historicals, it is a remarkable and wonderfully readable synthesis of fact and fiction.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. Before reading Fall of Giants, what did you know about World War I? Did you learn anything new upon finishing the novel?
2. Is there a custom or practice from the book's early twentieth-century time period that you wish existed in our modern day? What would it be, and why do you think it should have a place in today's world?
3. Is it significant that Fall of Giants begins with the stories of Billy and Ethel Williams? Would the novel have been different if other characters' stories opened the book, such as those of Grigori and Lev Peshkov, or Gus Dewar?
4. Talk about the historical figures that appear throughout Fall of Giants, such as Woodrow Wilson, King George V, Vladimir Lenin, and others. What did you think of Ken Follett's depiction of them? Do you like seeing notable people such as these come alive in fiction, or do you prefer reading about them in a strictly historical context?
5. When you first read about Billy Williams in chapter one, did you anticipate how his life would unfurl—for example, that he would end up in running for Parliament? What about other characters: Could you guess what some of them would end up doing or being at the book's end?
6. Do you enjoy reading epic novels such as this one? What makes them so appealing to readers, in your opinion?
7. In continuation of the above question, if you had to identify one of the main characters' stories as one that would make a good "stand-alone" novel, which would it be? Why do you think his/her story would make an enjoyable book on its own?
8. Think about the main characters and what place faith held in their lives. Did religion help or hinder their respective circumstances? What is the overall role of religion in Fall of Giants?
9. Along these lines, discuss the characters who abandoned their respective faiths. What caused them to walk away from their beliefs? To what end?
10. Follett depicts life in the early twentieth century through a series of detailed and imagery-rich scenes: the pitch-darkness of a Welsh coal mine, the opulence of an English country manor, the austerity of pre-industrial Russia, the horrors of a French battlefield. Which scenes stood out for you? Why did they make such an impression?
11. Follett writes from the vantage points of people whose home countries come to the brink of—and finally enter into—a world war. What was it like to read the perspectives of enemies as they embark on battle with one another? Did you find yourself taking sides in any way? Did reading about World War I through fiction cause you to think differently about the conflict?
12. Follett populates this novel with several strong female characters. Compare/contrast some of them; who was your favorite? Which one did you like least? Apply the same question to the book's male figures. When considering those of different backgrounds and social classes, were any of the male figures similar to one another?
13. Discuss Maud and Ethel's relationship. Did you expect them to form such a lasting bond, considering they met as mistress and servant? What did you think of the circumstances surrounding how their friendship ultimately dissolved?
14. Also contemplate Ethel and Maud's work as women's rights advocates. Were there aspects of each woman's personal life that seemed at odds with her commitment to advancing the cause of women?
15. Go back to the Aberowen mine explosion in chapter two. Do you think it's a metaphor for any of the novel's themes? How do things change in Aberowen, and elsewhere, after this disaster?
16. Discuss examples of the disparity between how women and men were treated during this era. Were women regarded better, or worse, than you imagined they'd be? How far have women come since the early 1900s? What inequalities between the sexes still persist today?
17. Think about the ways the main characters' lives intersected throughout the book. Were there any characters that didn't meet over the entirety of the novel that you wished did? Who, and why?
18. What did you think of Earl Fitzherbert at the beginning of Fall of Giants? How did he evolve as a man throughout the course of the narrative? Did your opinion of Fitz change from your initial impression of him?
19. Consider the book's title. Who or what are the "giants" of the story? How did they fall?
20. What did you think of the book's ending? Did the author succeed in wrapping up the many threads and strands in Fall of Giants? Which of the characters in Fall of Giants do you expect to be reading about in books two and three of The Century Trilogy.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Lucia, Lucia
Adriana Trigiani, 2003
Random House
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812967791
Summary
It is 1950 in glittering, vibrant New York City. Lucia Sartori is the beautiful twenty-five-year-old daughter of a prosperous Italian grocer in Greenwich Village.
The postwar boom is ripe with opportunities for talented girls with ambition, and Lucia becomes an apprentice to an up-and-coming designer at chic B. Altman’s department store on Fifth Avenue. Engaged to her childhood sweetheart, the steadfast Dante DeMartino, Lucia is torn when she meets a handsome stranger who promises a life of uptown luxury that career girls like her only read about in the society pages.
Forced to choose between duty to her family and her own dreams, Lucia finds herself in the midst of a sizzling scandal in which secrets are revealed, her beloved career is jeopardized, and the Sartoris’ honor is tested. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Big Stone Gap, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., St. Mary’s College, Indiana, USA
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
As her squadrons of fans already know, Adriana Trigiani grew up in Big Stone Gap, a coal-mining town in southwest Virginia that became the setting for her first three novels. The "Big Stone Gap" books feature Southern storytelling with a twist: a heroine of Italian descent, like Trigiani, who attended St. Mary's College of Notre Dame, like Trigiani. But the series isn't autobiographical—the narrator, Ave Maria Mulligan, is a generation older than Trigiani and, as the first book opens, has settled into small-town spinsterhood as the local pharmacist.
The author, by contrast, has lived most of her adult life in New York City. After graduating from college with a theater degree, she moved to the city and began writing and directing plays (her day jobs included cook, nanny, house cleaner and office temp). In 1988, she was tapped to write for the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World, and spent the following decade working in television and film. When she presented her friend and agent Suzanne Gluck with a screenplay about Big Stone Gap, Gluck suggested she turn it into a novel.
The result was an instant bestseller that won praise from fellow writers along with kudos from celebrities (Whoopi Goldberg is a fan). It was followed by Big Cherry Holler and Milk Glass Moon, which chronicle the further adventures of Ave Maria through marriage and motherhood. People magazine called them "Delightfully quirky... chock full of engaging, oddball characters and unexpected plot twists."
Critics sometimes reach for food imagery to describe Trigiani's books, which have been called "mouthwatering as fried chicken and biscuits" (USA Today) and "comforting as a mug of tea on a rainy Sunday" (New York Times Book Review). Food and cooking play a big role in the lives of Trigiani's heroines and their families: Lucia, Lucia, about a seamstress in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and The Queen of the Big Time, set in an Italian-American community in Pennsylvania, both feature recipes from Trigiani's grandmothers. She and her sisters have even co-written a cookbook called, appropriately enough, Cooking With My Sisters: One Hundred Years of Family Recipes, from Bari to Big Stone Gap. It's peppered with anecdotes, photos and family history. What it doesn't have: low-carb recipes. "An Italian girl can only go so long without pasta," Trigiani quipped in an interview on GoTriCities.com.
Her heroines are also ardent readers, so it comes as no surprise that book groups love Adriana Trigiani. And she loves them right back. She's chatted with scores of them on the phone, and her Web site includes photos of women gathered together in living rooms and restaurants across the country, waving Italian flags and copies of Lucia, Lucia.
Trigiani, a disciplined writer whose schedule for writing her first novel included stints from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m. each morning, is determined not to disappoint her fans. So far, she's produced a new novel each year since the publication of Big Stone Gap.
I don't take any of it for granted, not for one second, because I know how hard this is to catch with your public," she said in an interview with The Independent. "I don't look at my public as a group; I look at them like individuals, so if a reader writes and says, 'I don't like this,' or, 'This bit stinks,' I take it to heart.
Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:
• I appeared on the game show Kiddie Kollege on WCYB-TV in Bristol, Virginia, when I was in the third grade. I missed every question. It was humiliating.
• I have held the following jobs: office temp, ticket seller in movie theatre, cook in restaurant, nanny, and phone installer at the Super Bowl in New Orleans. In the writing world, I have been a playwright, television writer/producer, documentary writer/director, and now novelist.
• I love rhinestones, faux jewelry. I bought a pair of pearl studded clip on earrings from a blanket on the street when I first moved to New York for a dollar. They turned out to be a pair designed by Elsa Schiaparelli. Now, they are costume, but they are still Schiaps! Always shop in the street—treasures aplenty.
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is what she said:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. When I was a girl growing up in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, I was in the middle of a large Italian family, but I related to the lonely orphan girl Jane, who with calm and focus, put one foot in front of the other to make a life for herself after the death of her parents and her terrible tenure with her mean relatives. She survived the horrors of the orphanage Lowood, losing her best friend to consumption, became a teacher and then a nanny. The love story with the complicated Rochester was interesting to me, but what moved me the most was Jane's character, in particular her sterling moral code. Here was a girl who had no reason to do the right thing, she was born poor and had no connections and yet, somehow she was instinctively good and decent. It's a story of personal triumph and the beauty of human strength. I also find the book a total page turner- and it's one of those stories that you become engrossed in, unable to put it down. Imagine the beauty of the line: "I loved and was loved." It doesn't get any better than that! (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Trigiani does a wonderful job evoking Lucia’s beloved, homey Greenwich Village and the couture-clad Upper East Side. Vivid, too, are the descriptions of Italian cooking and feasting, and the Sartoris’ storybook hometown in the old country.
Boston Herald
[Trigiani] writes with commanding authenticity about Italian-American life, the landscape of Italy, and New York City.... Lucia, her Italian family, her ambitious girlfriends, her colorful boss, and her mysterious lover are colorful, poignant characters, representative of another time, yet as real as today.... Trigiani has proved she is a multi-faceted writer whose name and stories will be celebrated for years to come.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
In 1950 Greenwich Village, 25-year-old Lucia has it all: a warm and loving Italian family, a papa with a successful grocery business, an engagement ring from her childhood sweetheart, and best of all, a career she loves as a seamstress and apprentice to a talented dress designer at B. Altman's department store. When Lucia meets a rich, handsome businessman whose ambitions for a luxurious uptown lifestyle match her own, her goals for her future soar even higher. Over the next two years, however, her dreams gradually unravel. Sorvino is well-cast as the narrator of Trigiani's (Milk Glass Moon) first-person tale. She ably conveys the confidence, eagerness, and romantic yearnings of youth, as well as the guilt Lucia suffers when she disappoints her loved ones. Sorvino is also adept at providing voices for a large cast of characters: the rich Italian accent of Lucia's father, the scolding tone of her mother, the shy voice of her sister-in-law and the smooth, movie-star tones of the rich stranger Lucia pins her hopes on. This is an engaging, well-told tale about life's unexpected twists and turns, the ways that even small choices have large repercussions and the hopeful notion that sometimes, when you least expect it, you can find happiness.
Publishers Weekly
Trigiani here leaves the rural Virginia setting of her "Big Stone Gap" trilogy for New York City. Kit, an aspiring playwright, agrees to afternoon tea with "Aunt" Lu, an old, but still elegant, fellow tenant. Kit's casual question about Lu's frequently worn mink coat is rewarded by the story of two pivotal years in Lucia Sartori's life. For the bulk of the novel, we are swept back to Greenwich Village in the early 1950s, where we meet Lucia's family. Beautiful and talented Lucia, who works in the custom dress shop at B. Altman's, wants to retain her maiden name after marriage, continue in a nonfamily business, and delay having children, all taboo for an Italian Catholic. Then she meets the irresistible John Talbot, and Lucia's happy life seems destined to unravel. Trigiani creates a compelling story, artfully uniting a snapshot of the past with the present. This bittersweet novel should have broad appeal. —Rebecca Sturm Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Library Journal
Adriana Trigiani’s enchanting new novel will find a warm welcome from every reader who has encountered a fork in the road to love and taken the more perilous path.... A testament to the power of familial love and friendship.... Perhaps [this] is Trigiani’s greatest gift to her reader: the recognition that devotion, loyalty, and forgiveness will ultimately win the day.
BookPage
A heartfelt depiction of homespun characters whose emotions are always very close to the surface.... Trigiani offers an inviting picture of Italian life as well as a finely detailed appreciation of Old World craftsmanship. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist
More like a big, sloppy wet kiss to Greenwich Village than anything as mundane and unromantic as a novel: Trigiani's fourth (after Milk Glass Moon, 2002, etc.) starts off in extremely unpromising territory but thankfully doesn't stick with it for long. Narrator Kit is a flighty writer of universally rejected plays and an occasional journalist who lives in the Village and is given to mundane reflections on just how wonderful her neighborhood is. Fortunately, she doesn't have much of a life, so when her neighbor—a charming, gracious old lady everyone calls Aunt Lu—invites her in for some tea and ends up telling Kit the story of her life, Kit has no good reason to say no. In the early 1950s, Lucia Sartori lived with her large Italian family in the Village, where her father and brother ran the beloved Groceria food market. Lucia herself, still in her 20s and considered the neighborhood beauty, worked in the custom clothing section in the grand B. Altman's department store on Fifth Avenue and was engaged to the most promising bachelor around, Dante DeMartino. Spunky Lucia, though, breaks the engagement when she discovers that the DeMartinos expect her to leave work and live with them as a cleaning, cooking, baby-producing housewife. It isn't long before Lucia gets snapped up by John Talbot, a rakishly handsome man-about-town who's vaguely employed in the importing business (alarm bells clang in everyone's head, except for that of the normally bright Lucia). Trigiani is mostly interested in Lucia's relationships with her coworkers and family, only intermittently cutting back to her blossoming romance with John. But she knows how to deliver on basic desires: her story is filled-to-bursting with gorgeous clothes, sumptuous meals, beautiful weather, and the rhapsody of New York City. Where it runs into problems is with its humans: solidly depicted but never quite lifelike. Silly but romantic stuff, written in a state of never-ending swoon.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think the novel begins in the present before telling Lucia's story in flashback? Is this an effective way to relate Lucia's story? How do you think your reading or interpretation of the novel is affected as a result of partially knowing the story's ending?
2. Lucia, Lucia is set in 1950s Greenwich Village. Discuss how Trigiani portrays the neighborhood, especially in contrast to its usual bohemian image.
3. On page 45, Lucia's father tells her, "You deserve your own life." Do you think Lucia eventually gets her own life, or is what happens to her the result of circumstances beyond her control? Overall, how much is Lucia free of her traditions? How much is she a captive of them?
4. What role do the men in Lucia's family—her father and brothers—play in shaping her life and her destiny?
5. What's behind Lucia's decision to stay at home and care for her mother despite the opportunity to advance her career? Also, why does she stay on at B. Altman's despite having to change positions and the changes in the store? Is it only because she has to care for her mother, or are there other factors?
6. Why do you think Lucia keeps all of her wedding presents in her apartment and continues to wear her mink coat? What do you think Lucia's life was like in the years after being jilted by John Talbot until the time she tells her story to Kit?
7. Religion plays a large role in shaping the Sartoris' behavior and customs, as well as the behavior of those closest to them. What is Lucia's view of religion and faith, especially during her and her family's various trials?
8. Dante and John Talbot love Lucia in different ways. Discuss the ways they both love her and the different ways she loves them back. Does Lucia have a true love? Given her experiences, what do you think is Lucia's view of love?
9. How do you think Lucia's life would have turned out if she had married John Talbot? If she had married Dante? Do you think Lucia would have been happier if she'd moved to Hollywood to work with Delmarr?
10. On page 249, Lucia tells Kit that people don't change very much in their lives. Do you think Lucia changes? If so, how?
11. While in Lucia's apartment (page 10) Kit feels as if she's in a room filled with things with meaning but no purpose. Do you think this in any way symbolizes Lucia's life, or is this only Kit's superficial impression of Lucia?
12. Why does Lucia choose to bestow her things on Kit? Is Kit like Lucia? Does Lucia see some of herself in Kit, or vice versa?
13. Lucia believes in beauty, style, and elegance. Do these qualities betray her or do they give her life meaning?
14. Do you think there is any truth in John Talbot's saying to Lucia that she is a woman who can survive being left at the altar (page 255), or is he just making excuses for himself?
15. In her last meeting with John Talbot in the state prison, Lucia seems unusually poised and equanimous throughout their conversation. Are you surprised either by her composure or by her attitude toward him?
16. What do you think are Lucia's dreams? On page 256, Lucia says that she has no regrets over the events in her life. Do you believe her? Do you think Lucia has led a happy life?
(Questions issued by publishers.)
Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
The Outlander
Gil Adamson, 2007
HarperCollins
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061491344
In Brief
In 1903 Mary Boulton flees alone across the West, one heart-pounding step ahead of the law. At nineteen, she has just become a widow—and her husband's killer. As bloodhounds track her frantic race toward the mountains, she is tormented by mad visions and by the knowledge that her two ruthless brothers-in-law are in pursuit, determined to avenge their younger brother's death. Responding to little more than the primitive instinct for survival at any cost, she retreats ever deeper into the wilderness—and into the wilds of her own mind.
With the stunning prose and captivating mood of great works like Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain or early Cormac McCarthy, Gil Adamson's extraordinary debut novel weds a brilliant literary style to the gripping, moving, picaresque tale of one woman's desperate journey. (From the publisher.)
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About the Author
• Birth—1961
• Awards—Drummer General's Award; Books in Canada First
Novel; Hammett Award; ReLit Award; 2009 Canada Reads
• Currently—Toronto, Canada
Gil Adamson (born Gillian Adamson, 1961) is a Canadian writer. She won the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 2008 for her 2007 novel The Outlander.
Adamson's first published work was Primitive, a volume of poetry, in 1991. She followed up with the short story collection Help Me, Jacques Cousteau in 1995 and a second volume of poetry, Ashland, in 2003, as well as multiple chapbooks and a commissioned fan biography of Gillian Anderson, Mulder, It’s Me, which she coauthored with her sister-in-law Dawn Connolly in 1998.
The Outlander, a novel set in the Canadian West at the turn of the 20th century, was published by House of Anansi in the spring of 2007 and won the Hammett Prize that year. The novel was later selected for the 2009 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by actor Nicholas Campbell.
Adamson currently lives in Toronto with poet Kevin Connolly. (From Wikipedia.)
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Critics Say . . .
An absorbing adventure from a Canadian poet and short story writer who knows how to keep us enthralled. Of course, the Girl Being Chased is one of the most enduring figures of chivalric and chauvinistic literature, a staple of television dramas and horror films.... But Gil is short for Gillian, and her strange and complicated heroine has nothing in common with Hollywood's worn-out damsels in distress…there are pages here you can't read slowly enough to catch every word. Adamson is as captivating with descriptions of vast mountain ranges as she is with the smaller calamities, like the drowning of a yearling "frightened into madness.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
A hallucinatory road novel—or, more accurately, trail novel—written in a chanting prose that's rich with wilderness description, physical adventure and barbed humor.... Here's a novel that offers both an intense journey (Mary's) and a portrait of a specific time and place: the Canadian frontier.
Seattle Times
Set in 1903, Adamson's compelling debut tells the wintry tale of 19-year-old Mary Boulton ("[w]idowed by her own hand") and her frantic odyssey across Idaho and Montana. The details of Boulton's sad past—an unhappy marriage, a dead child, crippling depression—slowly emerge as she reluctantly ventures into the mountains, struggling to put distance between herself and her two vicious brothers-in-law, who track her like prey in retaliation for her killing of their kin. Boulton's journey and ultimate liberation—made all the more captivating by the delirium that runs in the recesses of her mind-speaks to the resilience of the female spirit in the early part of the last century. Lean prose, full-bodied characterization, memorable settings and scenes of hardship all lift this book above the pack. Already established as a writer of poetry (Ashland) and short stories (Help Me, Jacques Cousteau), Adamson also shines as novelist.
Publishers Weekly
Canadian poet and short fiction writer Adamson (Ashland), a 2007 Hammett Prize nominee, has shaped a picaresque tale in the style of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. Set in 1903, it reveals Mary Boulton's life with her cruel husband, John, in jagged flashbacks reflecting her sporadic delirium from hunger and the harsh elements. After their sickly newborn son dies, Mary takes the only way out she knows: she kills John with his hunting rifle and escapes West, with John's two angry brothers in pursuit. Various eccentrics help her along her harrowing journey, including William Moreland, a rough mountain man who eventually leaves her to return to the wilderness. Mary barely survives until a Crow Indian finds and takes her to a nearby mining town, where she recuperates. The brothers eventually track her down there, arriving just after a calamitous landslide. Authentic historical details, a strong female character running for her life, and a murder-driven plot will appeal to fiction readers in all public libraries. Highly recommended.
Library Journal
The slow unfolding of story and character coupled with lyrical descriptions of the terrain, an occasional touch of bizarre humor, and a multitude of well-chosen historical details will appeal to readers of literary writing as well as historical-fiction fans. —Ellen Loughran
Booklist
The perambulations of a young woman across an austere landscape, knowing what she's running from but fuzzy about what she's running toward. At the age of 19, Mary Boulton becomes a fugitive: The self-made widow killed her husband with his own rifle. This murderous act doesn't occur in frustration or in rage but is done calmly, almost dispassionately, owing to a cumulative series of outrages in their brief marriage. The novel traces her journey across an early-20th-century landscape. Pursuing her are her two beefy twin brothers-in-law, who want revenge if not justice for the killing of their younger brother. Along the way Mary has several significant encounters, first with William Moreland, a self-sufficient frontiersman who readily admits he can't put up with civilization. After their relationship heats up considerably, he leaves, Mary being almost more civilization than a body can stand. She continues west and temporarily settles in the forlorn mining town of Frank, where she meets up with the Reverend Bonnycastle, a limited but sincere minister. Their relationship is one of surrogate father-daughter. She also meets the requisite eccentrics, including McEchern, a dwarf who owns a small business but who makes most of his money through the sale of white lightning. Disaster strikes when a) Mary visits a mine closely followed by b) a rockslide that buries most of the town. It turns out that a woman in a mine is considered something other than an omen of good fortune. The narrative picks up steam as the twins finally catch word of Mary's whereabouts and Moreland has a change of heart and decides that Mary is just what he needs to anchor him more firmly to his natural existence. At times the book reads almost like an allegory, for Adamson refers to her characters by abstractions like "the widow," "the Reverend" and "the Ridgerunner." A lovingly crafted novel.
Kirkus Reviews
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Book Club Discussion Questions
1. When we meet the widow, she is emotionally remote, frightened, and unable to form a plan. She has a strong will to survive, but few skills. By the end of the book she seems like a different woman. Is she a different person, or the same person with new skills? Never mind fictional characters, is it possible for people to change?
2. What is the cause of the widow's madness? Is this a manifestation of severe post-partum depression, or has Mary always been a little off? Will she always be, or is there some hope?
3. Regarding religion, the author says of Mary that "she had a child's disinterest in any father other than her own." Does Mary truly understand faith? Does she herself have any faith? Has she has been given any real instruction in faith? Does one need instruction? Of all the characters in this novel, who has the greatest sense of faith, or of the divine?
4. What motivates the bird lady to take in "strays and lame ducks"? She is described as a Good Samaritan—do you think she is one? Why are Zenta and Jeffrey so protective of her? Also, she tells the widow that the maid Zenta "dislikes you more than any other person I've brought to the house." Is there something about Mary that is different than the other "lame ducks"?
5. The names in this novel are out of a fairy tale: the widow, the Ridgerunner, the Reverend, the giant, the dwarf. Why did the author decide to choose such archetypal monikers for her characters? Do the characters come across as archetypes, or as fleshed-out personalities?
6. While sewing an injured miner's wound closed, Mary thinks "This is what the embroidery lessons were for." Did you learn anything new about women's (and men's) lives at the turn of the last century? Is historical detail important to you, or do you pay most attention to the story and character?
7. At one point, the widow realizes she has found "a kind of amnesty" with the Reverend. Is amnesty different from forgiveness? Do you think Mary wants forgiveness, or that she forgives herself?
8. The natural world itself is almost a character in The Outlander. Different characters have different relationships with it. For instance, in the "fine black boots," the twins seem out of place in the mountains, while William Moreland has been content to live alone in the wilderness for over a decade. What was your feeling about this element of the novel? In real life, have most of us lost a sense of the natural world?
9. After the avalanche, the widow lies in McEchern's store "as if dead" and thinks "he is gone, he is gone." It seems clear she is thinking of Bonny—but perhaps her lament for "him" is wider than that. What have men meant to her over the span of this novel?
10. After the landslide, Mary registers a change in herself. She is "like a different woman, one direly accustomed to loss. With nothing to her name, she had simply let go, let go of everything." What has she been holding onto? What does letting go accomplish?
11. "Find me." Why does Mary leave at the end? Does she want to live alone, as Moreland has—or is it a lover's game? Will the Ridgerunner have much trouble finding her? Where will she/they go now? Deeper into the wild, or toward civilization?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Staying On (The Raj Quartet, Epilogue)
Paul Scott, 1977
University of Chicago Press
216 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780226743493
Summary
Winner, 1977 Booker Prize
In this sequel to "The Raj Quartet," Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status.
Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage.
Staying On won the Booker Prize in 1977 and was made into a 1979 motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 25, 1920
• Where—Southgate (north London), England, UK
• Death—March 1, 1978
• Where—London, Englan
• Awards—Booker Prize—1971, 1977
Paul Mark Scott was a British novelist, playwright, and poet, best known for his monumental tetralogy "The Raj Quartet." His novel Staying On won the Booker Prize for 1977.
Paul Scott was born in Southgate, north London, the younger of two sons. His father, Thomas (1870-1958), was a Yorkshireman who moved to London in the 1920s and was a commercial artist specialising in furs and lingerie. His mother, Frances, nee Mark (1886-1969) was the daughter of a labourer from south London, socially inferior to her husband but with artistic and social ambitions. In later life Scott differentiated between his mother’s creative drive and his father’s down-to-earth practicality.
He was educated at Winchmore Hill Collegiate School (a private school) but was forced to leave suddenly, and without any qualifications, when 14, at a time that his father’s business was in severe financial difficulty. He worked as an accounts clerk for CT Payne and took evening classes in bookkeeping. He started writing poetry in his spare time. It was in this environment that he came to understand the rigid social divisions of suburban London, so that when he went to British India he had an instinctive familiarity with the interactions of caste and class in an imperial colony.
He was called up (conscripted) in to the army as a private in early 1940 near the start of World War II and was assigned to Intelligence Corps. He met and married his wife, Penny, née Avery, in Torquay in 1941.
In 1943 he was posted as an Officer Cadet to India, where he was commissioned. He ended the war as a Captain in the Indian Army Service Corps organizing logistics for the Fourteenth Army’s reconquest of Burma, which had fallen to the Japanese in 1942. Despite being initially appalled by the attitudes of the British, the heat and dust, the disease and poverty and the sheer numbers of people, he, like so many others, fell deeply in love with India.
After demobilisation in 1946 he was employed as an accountant for two small publishing houses and remained until 1950. His two daughters (Carol and Sally) were born in 1947 and 1948. In 1950 Scott moved to the literary agent Pearn, Pollinger & Higham (later to be split into Pollinger Limited and David Higham Associates) and subsequently became a director. Whilst there he was responsible for representing Arthur C Clarke, Morris West, M M Kaye, Elizabeth David, Mervyn Peake, and Muriel Spark, amongst others.
Scott published a collection of three religious poems under the title I, Gerontius in 1941, but his writing career began in earnest with his first novel Johnny Sahib in 1952; despite seventeen rejections it met with modest success. He continued to work as a literary agent to support his family, but managed to publish regularly. The Alien Sky (US title, Six Days in Marapore) appeared in 1953, and was followed by A Male Child (1956), The Mark of the Warrior (1958), and The Chinese Love Pavilion (1960). He also wrote two radio-plays for the BBC, Lines of Communication (1952) and Sahibs and Memsahibs (1958). All the novels were respectfully received though selling only moderately, but in 1960 Scott decided to try to earn a living as a full time author, and resigned from his literary agency.
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His novels persistently draw on his experiences of India and service in the armed forces with strong subtexts of uneasy relationships between male friends or brothers; both the social privilege and the oppressive class and racial stratifications of empire are represented, and novel by novel the canvas broadens. The Alien Sky remains the principal fictional exploration of a very light-skinned Eurasian (mixed race, British-Indian) woman who has married a white man by pretending to be white; A Male Child is set principally in London and deals with the domestic effects of losing a family member to imperial service; and The Chinese Love Pavilion, after an Indian opening, is largely concerned with events in Malaya under Japanese occupation.
In retrospect these novels can be seen as studies towards "The Raj Quartet," and one of its minor characters appears by name in The Birds of Paradise (1962), but the lack of commercial success forced Scott to broaden his range. His next two novels, The Bender (1963), a satirical comedy, and The Corrida at San Feliu (1964), comprising multiple linked texts and drawing extensively on family holidays to the Costa Brava, are a clear attempt to experiment with new forms and locales. However, while still well received neither was especially successful, either financially or artistically, and Scott decided that he must either write the novel of the Raj of which he believed himself capable, or return to salaried work.
Scott flew to India in 1964 to see old friends, both Indian and Anglo-Indian, make new acquaintances in independent India, and recharge his batteries by reconfronting the place that obsessed him. Artistically he felt drained and a failure, feelings that were reinforced by financial straits and physical weakness. Since serving in India, Scott suffered from undiagnosed amoebic dysentery, which can seriously affect mood as well as digestion, and had managed to handle it by what his biographer, Hilary Spurling, describes as “alarming” quantities of alcohol. The condition was exacerbated by the visit and on his return he had to undergo painful treatment, but afterwards felt better than he had for years.
The Raj Quartet
In June 1964, Scott began to write The Jewel in the Crown, the first novel of what was to become "The Raj Quartet". It was published in 1966 to minor and muted enthusiasm. The remaining novels in the sequence were published over the next nine years – The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1971) and A Division of the Spoils (1974). Scott wrote in relative isolation and only visited India twice more during the genesis of "The Raj Quartet", in 1968 and in 1971, latterly for the British Council. He worked in an upstairs room at his home in Hampstead overlooking the garden and Hampstead Garden Suburb woodland—a far cry from the archetypal administrative province, between the Ganges and the foothills of the Himalaya, in which the novels were set. He supplemented his earnings from his books with writing reviews for the Times, the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman and Country Life.
The Jewel in the Crown engages with and rewrites E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), and so is necessarily set in a small, Hindu-majority rural town with an army garrison, but the wider province is implicit, and the later novels spread out to the cold-weather capital on the plains, the hot-weather capital in the hills, a neighbouring Muslim-ruled Princely State, and the railways-lines that bind them together—as well as Calcutta, Bombay, and the Burmese theatre of war. The cast also expands to include at least 24 principals, more than 300 named fictional characters, and a number of historical figures including Churchill, Gandhi, Jinnah, Wavell, and Slim. The story is initially that of the gang rape of a young British woman in 1942, but follows the ripples of the event as they spread out through the relatives and friends of the victim, the child of the rape, those arrested for it but never charged and subsequently interned for political reasons, and the man who arrested them. It also charts events from the Quit India riots of August 1942 to the violence accompanying the Partition of India and creation of Pakistan in 1946-7, and so represents the collapse of imperial dominance, a process Scott describes as 'the British coming to the end of themselves as they were'.
Scott's wife Penny had supported him throughout the writing of "The Raj Quartet" despite his heavy drinking and sometimes violent behaviour, but once it was complete she left him and filed for divorce. Forced to reassess his life and options he turned to teaching, and in 1976 and 1977 he was visiting Professor at the University of Tulsa in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. His coda to "The Raj Quartet", Staying On, was published in 1977 just before his second visit. Soon after its publication, and while he was in Tulsa, Scott was diagnosed with colon cancer.
At the time of their publication, the novels of "The Raj Quartet" were, individually and collectively, received with little enthusiasm. Only The Towers of Silence and Staying On achieved success with the award of the Yorkshire Post Fiction Award and the Booker Prize in 1971 and 1977 respectively. Sadly, Scott was too ill to attend the Booker presentation in November 1977. He died at the Middlesex Hospital, London on 1 March 1978.
Scott stated that “For me, the British Raj is an extended metaphor [and] I don’t think a writer chooses his metaphors. They choose him.” From his earliest experiences in north London, he felt himself an outsider in his own country. As his biographer comments,
Probably only an outsider could have commanded the long, lucid perspectives he brought to bear on the end of the British raj, exploring with passionate, concentrated attention a subject still generally treated as taboo, or fit only for historical romance and adventure stories. However Scott saw things other people would sooner not see, and he looked too close for comfort. His was a bleak, stern, prophetic vision and, like Forster's, it has come to seem steadily more accurate with time.
The Jewel in the Crown has at its heart the confrontation between Hari Kumar, the young, English-public-school educated Indian liberal, and the grammar-school scholarship-boy turned police superintendent Ronald Merrick who both hates and is attracted to Kumar and seeks to destroy him after Daphne Manners, the English girl who is in love with Kumar and has been courted by Merrick, is raped.
Critics have seen this conflict as one fundamentally influenced by Scott’s own deeply-divided bisexual nature, with Kumar representing everything young, bright, and forward-looking that had been brutally crushed in Scott’s own youth. At the same time Merrick, probably (but not absolutely certainly) a repressed homosexual, with authoritarian leanings and an arrogant sense of his own racial standing, is partly a self-portrait in which Scott confronted his own and his compatriots' defensive impulse to racial and personal self-aggrandisement, and to moral and political pretence. The result is widely seen as a substantial, and to date definitive, fictional exploration both of the underbelly and of the moral workings of the Raj in India.
In 1980, Granada Television filmed Staying On, with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson as Tusker Smalley and his wife Lucy, famously advertised at the time as "Reunited for the first time since Brief Encounter". The success of its first showing on British television in December 1980 encouraged Granada Television to embark on the much greater project of making "The Raj Quartet" into a major fourteen-part television series known as The Jewel in the Crown, first broadcast in the UK in early 1984 and subsequently in the US and many Commonwealth countries. It was rebroadcast in the UK in 1997 as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of Indian independence, and in 2001 the British Film Institute voted it as 22nd in the all time best British television programmes. It has also been adapted as a nine-part BBC Radio 4 dramatisation under its original title in 2005. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Staying On provides a sort of postscript to [Scott's] deservedly acclaimed "The Raj Quartet".... He has, as it were, summoned up the Raj's ghost in Staying On.... It is the story of the living death, in retirement, and the final end of a walk-on character from the quartet.... Scott has completed the task of covering in the form of a fictional narrative the events leading up to India's partition and the achievement of independence in 1947. It is, on any showing, a creditable achievement.
Malcolm Muggeridge - New York Times Book Review
Scott's vision is both precise and painterly. Like an engraver cross-hatching in the illusion of fullness, he selects nuances that will make his characters take on depth and poignancy.
Jean G. Zorn - New York Times Book Review
Staying On far transcends the events of its central action... [The work] should help win for Scot...the reputation he deserves—as one of the best novelists to emerge from Britain's silver age.
Robert Towers - Newsweek
A graceful comic coda to the earlier song of India.... No one writing knows or can evoke an Anglo-Indian setting better than Scott.
Paul Gray - Time
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 Staying On:
1. Why do the Smalleys not return to England after Indian independence? Might their decision have been different in the England that is today?
2. As Tusker says, "I still think we were right to stay on, though I don't think of it any longer as staying on, but just as hanging on." What does he mean...and do you think he was "right to stay on"? Does staying on suggest passivity and weakness...or strength and endurance...or what?
3. What effect does Tusker's death at the onset of the book have on the way you read the work? Why would Scott have started the novel with his death? When you revisit his death at the end of the book, has your perspective changed?
4. Talk about the irony of the Smalleys' stature in the newly independent India—their place in the economic-social hierarchy Lucy, for instance, feels she has become "a black sheep in reverse exposure"—what does she mean? For the Smalleys and others who stayed on, are they receiving their "just deserts"? Or not.
5. Discuss how Scott limns the portraits of his characters, particularly Tusker and Lucy. Do his portrayals capture their emotional and psychological complexity? In other words, does he create real people?
6. How would you describe the Smalleys' relationship? What is it (or who is it) that makes the marriage so difficult? In what way did they sacrifice their happiness—was it circumstance... or habit...or what? Is one more to blame than the other—do you sympathize with one more than the other?
6. Talk about how Lucy views her situation? What makes her plight so precarious?
7. Scott uses varying perspectives—Smalleys, Ibrahim, and Mr. Bhoolabhoy—to tell his story. How does each of the characters' reflections reveal the fading days of the Raj and the new society which took its place?
8. Talk about Mr. Bhoolabhoy and his wife. Funny or maddening? In what way was Frank Bhoolabhoy shaped by the Raj—and perhaps left stranded, as much as the Smalleys? What does that say about the effects of colonialism?
9. Talk about Mr. Bhoolabhoy's reaction to the arrival of the new Anglican priest, from south India. How does the priest revitalize the community—and what might this suggest about the possibility of blending cultures?
9. Have you read any novel of the "Raj Quartet," perhaps The Jewel in the Crown (or seen the 1984 BBC series)? If so, in what way might Staying On be considered an epilogue to the Quartet?
10. What is the thematic significance of The newer Shiraz overshadowing Smith's Hotel...and Tusker's dying hand clutching the notice of Mrs. Bhoolabhoy's sale of Smith's?
11. Consider watching Granada TV's 1980 adaptation of Staying On with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. Does the film reveal new insights? Is it a faithful adaptation?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Saturday Wife
Naomi Ragen, 2007
St. Martin's Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312352394
Summary
With more than half a million copies of her novels sold, Naomi Ragen has connected with the hearts of readers as well as reviewers who have met her work with unanimous praise. In The Saturday Wife, Ragen utilizes her fluid writing style—rich with charm and detail—to break new ground as she harnesses satire to expose a world filled with contradiction.
Beautiful, blonde, materialistc Delilah Levy steps into a life she could have never imagined when in a moment of panic she decides to marry a sincere Rabbinical student. But the reality of becoming a paragon of virtue for a demanding and hypocritical congregation leads sexy Delilah into a vortex of shocking choices which spiral out of comtrol into a catastrophe which is as sadly believeable as it is wildly amusing.
Told with immense warmth, fascinating insight, and wicked humor, The Saturday Wife depicts the pitched and often losing battle of all of us as we struggle to hold on to our faith and our values amid the often delicious temptations of the modern world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 10, 1949
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Brooklyn College; M.A., Hebrew University
of Jerusalem
• Currently—lives in Jerusalme, Israel
Naomi Ragen is the author of seven novels, including several international bestsellers, and her weekly email columns on life in the Middle East are read and distributed by thousands of subscribers worldwide. An American, she has lived in Jerusalem for the past thirty-nine years and was recently voted one of the three most popular authors in Israel. (From the publisher.)
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Ragen’s first three novels, which described the lives of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in Israel and the United States, dealt with themes that had not previously been addressed in that society's literature: wife-abuse (Jephte’s Daughter: 1989), adultery (Sotah: 1992) and rape (The Sacrifice of Tamar: 1995). Reaction to these novels in the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities was mixed. Some hailed her as a pioneer who for the first time exposed and opened to public discussion problems which the communities had preferred to pretend did not exist, while others criticized her for “hanging out the dirty laundry” for everyone to see, thus embarrassing the rabbis who were believed by many to be effectively dealing with these problems “behind the scenes” and also putting “ammunition in the hands of the anti-Semites.”
Her next novel (The Ghost of Hannah Mendes: 1998) told the story of a Sephardic family brought back from the abyss of assimilation by the spirit of their ancestor Gracia Mendes (a true historical figure), a 16th century Portuguese crypto-Jew who risked her life and her considerable fortune to practice her religion in secret.
Chains Around the Grass (2002) is a semi-autobiographical novel of the author’s childhood which dealt with the failure of the American dream for her parents.
In The Covenant (2004) Ragen dealt with the contemporary theme of an ordinary family sucked into the horror of Islamic terrorism.
The Saturday Wife (2007), the story of a rabbi's wayward wife, is loosely based on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and is a satire of modern Jewish Orthodoxy.
Ragen is also known as a playwright. Her 2001 drama, Women’s Minyan, tells the story of an ultra-Orthodox woman who, upon fleeing from her adulterous and abusive husband, finds that he has manipulated the rabbinical courts to deprive her of the right to see or speak to her twelve children. The story is based on a true incident. Women’s Minyan ran for six years in Israel's National Theatre and has been staged in the United States, Canada and Argentina. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Review
Like Emma Bovary, Delilah Goldgrab longs for a better life. A Queens yeshiva girl, Delilah is prayerfully remorseful after fornicating with young, opportunistic Yitzie Polinsky, and quickly marries mediocre rabbinical student Chaim Levi, who is unable to provide her with a house, much less the glossy upper-middle-class life she longs for. When Chaim accepts a position as the rabbi of an affluent Connecticut congregation, Delilah has the opportunity to indulge her ideas about happiness as the congregation's rebbitzin, with deliciously disastrous consequences. It's hard to like selfish, clueless Delilah or anyone else here: the pleasure of this novel is in its mercilessness, with Ragen (The Covenant) raising the stakes until the very end.
Publishers Weekly
The adventures of Delilah and Chaim provide a cautionary tale about the difficulties faced by those attempting to maintain traditional values while struggling with the temptations of the outside world. Ragen tells this story with insight and humor, vividly illustrating the consequences of lashon hara (gossip). This is Jewish chick lit with a message. —Barbara Bibe
Booklist
Conniving rebbitzin topples a wealthy Jewish community. Delilah Goldgrab is as acquisitive as they come. As a young girl, she sets her sights on living in a Woodmere Tudor mansion with a large household staff. When she fails to ensnare a wealthy husband from Bernstein Rabbinical College, Delilah settles for the noble dullard, Chaim Levi. Chaim's grandfather is a prominent Rabbi in the Bronx, and Chaim is heir to a tiny synagogue. When Delilah senses she's getting locked into a lower-class life, she tramples on Chaim's unsuspecting congregants and begins her mad grab at affluence. Doltish Chaim refuses to acknowledge Delilah's sins. Instead, he surrenders to her prodding and applies for a position at the notorious Swallow Lake temple. Swallow Lake's members are fabulously wealthy and famously divided in their faith. Chaim knows he's signing on for an impossible task when he accepts the Rabbi position, but he's helpless. Delilah, now pregnant, calls all the shots in this family. The community quickly sours on Delilah's lackadaisical piety. Delilah tries to distract her critics by luring a fabulously wealthy Russian Jew and his wife into the fold and succeeds in dismantling the congregation. Ragen (The Covenant, 2004, etc.) does an apt job illustrating the numerous demands upon a rabbi and his wife (the rebbitzin). But she fails to make the job appear to be an unbearable burden—these guys are the equivalent to middle management in a large corporation. The book would be far more entertaining if Delilah possessed admirable traits; alas, she is bland in her depravity. Endowed with blonde hair, a voluptuous figure, the first name of a "wicked whore" and a surname that is synonymous with money grubbing, she does not come across as a morally upstanding member of the shul. For the non-Orthodox crowd, the scandals will seem tame, but the culture exotic. For those enmeshed in Ragen's culture, this book may stir up some controversy: Have rabbis become too beholden to their benefactors? Revealing, if long-winded, examination of contemporary Orthodox Judaism.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Saturday Wife:
1. What's to like about Delilah...anything? How would you describe her? If you can't identify with the heroine, is it possible to enjoy a book? If so, how? Or...do you actually like Delilah?
2. What about the good rabbi? Some find it difficult to sympathize with his passivity in the face of his wife. What do you think?
3. How do Delilah's high school experiences affect her ethical and spiritual development? Think about those experiences in light of the social pressures many teenage girls face.
4. Talk about how Orthodox Judaism views the role of women? Do those attitudes and practices explain, perhaps even excuse, Delilah's actions?
5. Why was the Swallow Lake synagogue blacklisted from the Orthodox community? What does that banishment say about the congregants...or about the tenets of Orthodox Judaism?
6. What is Ragen getting at in this book? What aspects of the Jewish faith is she satirizing? How, for instance, has the author used names in the novel to further her satire?
7. Talk about the Shammanovs and their over-the-top bar mitzvah. At what point did your sham-o-meter kick in...when did you become suspicious? Or did you?
8. Do you agree with this excerpt from the book's end?
Fences just gave certain people the urge to climb over or crawl under. FORBIDDEN, KEEP OUT! was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. If you thought you might get away with it... then fences simply become a welcome challenge.
9. Does Delilah learn anything by the end of the novel?
10. Did you learn anything—or gain insights into Orthodox Judaism? What did you find most interesting, surprising, or disturbing?
11. Talk about parts of the book you found funny.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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