Stern Men
Elizabeth Gilbert, 2000
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000; Penguin Groups USA 2009
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143114697
Summary
In this big, wise, funny first novel from a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, a resilient young woman brings an end to an age-old fishing feud...
On two remote islands off the coast of Maine, the local lobstermen have fought savagely for generations over the fishing rights to the ocean waters between them. Young Ruth Thomas is born into this feud, a daughter of Fort Niles destined to be at war with the men of Courne Haven.
Eighteen years old, smart as a whip, irredeemably unromantic, Ruth returns home from boarding school determined to throw her education overboard and join the "stern men" who work the lobster boats. She is certain of one thing: she will not surrender control of her life to the wealthy Ellis family, which has always had a sinister hold over the island. On her side are Fort Niles's eccentric residents: the lovable Mrs. Pommeroy and her various deadbeat sons; sweet old Senator Simon, on a mission to dig up shipwreck treasure; and Simon's twin brother, Angus Addams, the most ruthless lobsterman alive.
The feud between the islands escalates daily—until Ruth gets a glimpse of Owney Wishnell, a silent young Courne Haven Adonis with a prenatural gift for catching lobsters. Their passion is fast, furious, and forbidden. Their only hope is an unlikely truce.
For readers who love the work of John Irving, Stern Men is a comedy that is as smart and finely crafted as it is entertaining. Stern Men captures a particular American spirit with on-the-mark dialogue and a fine funny touch that pierces our notions of commerce and class. This is a large-canvas novel with a heroine destined for greatness in spite of herself. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 18, 1969
• Raised—Litchfield, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., New York University
• Awards—Pushcart Prize
• Currently—Frenchtown, New Jersey
Elizabeth M. Gilbert is an American author, essayist, short story writer, biographer, novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which spent 200 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and was also made into a film by the same name in 2010.
Gilbert was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. Her father was a chemical engineer, her mother a nurse. Along with her only sister, novelist Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Gilbert grew up on a small family Christmas tree farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. The family lived in the country with no neighbors, and they didn’t own a TV or even a record player. Consequently, they all read a great deal, and Gilbert and her sister entertained themselves by writing little books and plays.
Gilbert earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from New York University in 1991, after which she worked as a cook, a waitress, and a magazine employee. She wrote of her experience as a cook on a dude ranch in short stories, and also briefly in her book The Last American Man (2002).
Journalism
Esquire published Gilbert's short story "Pilgrims" in 1993, under the headline, "The Debut of an American Writer." She was the first unpublished short story writer to debut in Esquire since Norman Mailer. This led to steady—and well paying—work as a journalist for a variety of national magazines, including SPIN, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Allure, Real Simple, and Travel + Leisure.
Her 1997 GQ article, "The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon", a memoir of Gilbert's time as a bartender at the very first Coyote Ugly table dancing bar located in the East Village section of New York City, was the basis for the feature film Coyote Ugly (2000). She adapted her 1998 GQ article, "The Last American Man: Eustace Conway is Not Like Any Man You've Ever Met," into a biography of the modern naturalist, The Last American Man, which received a nomination for the National Book Award in non-fiction. "The Ghost," a profile of Hank Williams III published by GQ in 2000, was included in Best American Magazine Writing 2001.
Early books
Gilbert's first book Pilgrims (1997), a collection of short stories, received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. This was followed by her novel Stern Men (2000), selected as a New York Times "Notable Book." In 2002 she published The Last American Man (2002), a biography of Eustace Conway, a modern woodsman and naturalist, which was nominated for National Book Award.
Eat, Pray, Love
In 2006, Gilbert published Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (Viking), a chronicle of her year of "spiritual and personal exploration" spent traveling abroad. She financed her world travel for the book with a $200,000 publisher's advance.
The memoir was on the New York Times Best Seller List of non-fiction in the spring of 2006, and in October 2008, after 88 weeks, the book was still on the list at number 2. Gilbert appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007, and has reappeared on the show to further discuss the book and her philosophy, and to discuss the film. She was named by Time as among the 100 most influential people in the world. The film version was released in 2010 with Julia Roberts starring as Gilbert.
After EPL
Gilbert's fifth book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, was released in 2010. The book is somewhat of a sequel to Eat, Pray, Love in that it takes up Gilbert's life story where her bestseller left off. Committed also reveals Gilbert's decision to marry Felipe, the Brazilian man she met in Indonesia as recounted in the final section of EPL. The book is an examination of the institution of marriage from several historical and modern perspectives—including those of people, particularly women, reluctant to marry. In the book, Gilbert also includes perspectives on same-sex marriage and compares this to interracial marriage prior to the 1970s. Gilbert and Felipe are still married and operate a story called Two Buttons.
In 2012, she republished At Home on the Range, a 1947 cookbook written by her great-grandmother, the food columnist Margaret Yardley Potter.
Gilbert returned to fiction in 2013 with The Signature of All Things, a sprawling 19th-century style novel following the life of a young female botonist. The book brings together that century's fascination with botany, botanical drawing, spiritual inquiry, exploration, and evolution. Kirkus Reviews called it "a brilliant exercise of intellect and imagination," and Booklist a "must read."
Literary influences
In an interview, Gilbert mentioned The Wizard of Oz with nostalgia, adding, "I am a writer today because I learned to love reading as a child—and mostly on account of the Oz books..." She is especially vocal about the importance of Charles Dickens to her, mentioning his stylistic influence on her writing in many interviews. She lists Marcus Aurelius' Meditations as her favorite book on philosophy. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/16/2013.)
Book Reviews
Her metaphoric writing flashes with welcome brillance...[Stern Men] makes its mark through vividness and toughness.
New York Times
A wonderful first novel about life, love and lobster fishing...Stern Men is high entertainment.
USA Today
Set on two fictitious islands in northern Maine during the 1970s, this first novel by the author of a sparkling story collection, Pilgrims, begins slowly but warms up with smart, sassy humor. Isolated from the mainland by 20 miles of sea, but separated from each other only by a small channel, the islands of Fort Niles and Courne Haven should be natural allies, sharing the local lobster industry. Instead, the two communities are old enemies, torn apart by centuries of hostile, occasionally violent competition among their territorial lobstermen. Ruth Thomas, daughter of one of Fort Niles's most cutthroat lobstermen, has returned home after four years at a private girls' school, determined both to resist her rich grandfather's plans to send her to college and to find her place among the island's rough-spoken personalities. Both propositions prove more difficult than the headstrong romantic expects. As Gilbert charts Ruth's attempts to decide her future, she introduces a strong dose of lobster lore and a large cast of sly villains and oddball characters. Her prose is as light-hearted and amusing as ever, though some narrative twists lack the emotional resonance of her previous work and several characters seem hemmed in as caricatures. Ruth's meeting with her estranged mother is smoothed over in an anticlimactic fashion, blunting the power of the scene, and her offbeat coming-of-age story gets going only a third of the way through the book. Nonetheless, Gilbert's comic timing grows sharper in the second half, and her gift for lively, authentic dialogue and atmospheric settings continually lights up this entertaining, and surprisingly thought-provoking, romp.
Publishers Weekly
This is the first novel by Gilbert, whose collection of short stories, Pilgrims, was published to critical acclaim. The novel takes place on the remote Maine island of Fort Niles and its neighboring twin, Courne Haven. For years, the residents of these islands have been lobster fishermen constantly at war with one another for control of the waters. Ruth Thomas is born into this community, but she is not quite of it. Her father's family has fished here for generations. Her mother was raised as a servant, the illegitimate child of an adopted daughter of the influential Ellis family, who summer on the island where they once ran a quarry. Ruth's task is to find her own way in the world, despite the Ellis family's attempts to control her and the opinion of many that a smart girl like her would be better off moving to the mainland. This is a beautiful novel, funny and moving at the same time and populated by some quite memorable characters. Highly recommended for public and academic fiction collections. —Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll. Lib.
Library Journal
A sly picaresque about a young woman who single-handedly ends a generations-long feud between two remote islands off the coast of Maine. Ruth Thomass parentsher lobsterman father and New England sort-of aristocrat motherseparated when she was a child. Largely ignored but adored by her gruff father, Ruth is sent off to boarding school, but she still spends her summers and vacations happily adrift among the oddball characters of Fort Niles Island. She virtually lives with her neighborsa widow with five inbred sonsand cusses as heatedly and colorfully as the most ruthless lobstermen (whom she alone seems able to befriend). But Ruth is not just your run-of-the-mill tomboy: she also has strong ties to her mother, who lives as a glorified maid/half-sister in the wealthy and powerful Ellis family, and Ruth thus has the typical (if slightly more hard-boiled) romantic yearnings of every teenage girl. Part offbeat social history of lobstermen and their environment and partyeslove story, Gilbert's debut (after a particularly arresting set of stories called Pilgrims, 1997) is a surprisingly satisfying combination of ideas: that a young woman can be tough and still be a girl, that even in a masculine culture, a smart and crafty woman can take charge and end decades of feuding, that sleeping with the enemy can be a good idea. Theres romance here, but little sentimentality and, mercifully (considering that this is a first novel by a young urban woman), no trendy psychologizing. In fact, while the story is more or less contemporary, it has the time-out-of-time quality typical of the best fiction and it has a heroine who owes more to Voltaire than to Helen Fielding. Sophisticated yet ribald, comic yet serious: an exceptional debut from a writer to watch.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. “As humans, after all, we become that which we seek. Dairy farming makes men steady and reliable and temperate; deer hunting makes men quiet and fast and sensitive; lobster fishing makes men suspicious and wily and ruthless” (p. 5). Can you think of other occupations to which this statement could apply?
2. The men of Fort Niles and Courne Haven have historically hated one another. How do you think the women felt?
3. Do you think Ruth would have grown up to be more or less the same person without Mrs. Pommeroy’s influence? What are the benefits for a woman to have a same-sex role model and/or confidante?
4. Ruth stubbornly declares a love of lobster fishing and island life when, in fact, she finds them both rather boring. Can you think of a situation in your own life when you loved the idea of something more than the truth of it?
5. In assembling the collection for his projected museum, Senator Simon tells Ruth, “It’s the common objects...that become rare” (p. 77). What are some everyday objects that you think should become tomorrow’s artifacts and why?
6. How are the mudflats where Senator Simon and Webster search for the elephant’s tusk a metaphor for Ruth’s predicament? What does the tusk represent to Webster? Ruth?
7. Do you think Jane Smith-Ellis’s death was a suicide? Are there clues in the text that lead the reader to that conclusion? What are they?
8. Where do you think Ruth’s mother ought to live? To whom does she owe her greatest allegiance? What about Ruth?
9. Lanford Ellis sent Ruth away to school in order for her to eventually save the islands. Why did he think it was necessary for her to be educated so far away from Fort Niles?
10. How would the outcome of the novel change if Ruth had been born a boy?
11. What literary heroines does Ruth remind you of? Why is a headstrong young girl such an appealing protagonist in a novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Night Train to Lisbon
Pascal Mercier, 2004 (Trans., 2008)
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
438 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802143976
Summary
Raimund Gregorius teaches classical languages at a Swiss lycée, and lives a life governed by routine. One day, a chance encounter with an enigmatic Portuguese woman inspires him to question his life—and leads him to an extraordinary book that will open the possibility of changing his existence.
He takes the train to Lisbon that same night, and with him the words of Amadeu de Prado, a doctor whose practice and principles led him into confrontation with Salazar’s dictatorship, and a man whose intelligence and magnetism left a mark on everyone who met him.
As Gregorius becomes fascinated with unlocking the mystery of who Prado was—meeting, among others, Prado’s eighty-year-old sister, who keeps the man’s house like a musem, an elderly torture survivor now confined to a nursing home, and Prado’s childhood friend and eventual partner in the resistance movement—an extraordinary tale takes shape, centered on a group of people working in utmost secrecy to fight dictatorship, and the betrayals that threaten to expose them.
A haunting tale of repression, resistance, and the universal human struggle to connect, Night Train to Lisbon is richly layered, wonderfully told, and inexorably propelled by the mystery at its heart.
Recalling Bernhard Schlink and Nicole Krauss in its affirmation of the power of literature, will, and the individual, Night Train to Lisbon is a book of sensual beauty and artistic excellence, one that will be remembered for its soul and wit as well as its universality and great intellectual depth.
A huge international best seller, Night Train to Lisbon was published in hardcover in January with a modest first printing. It has been hailed by booksellers and critics, and embraced by readers. As this catalog goes to press, the hardcover has gone into its fourth printing, and appeared on best-seller lists across the country. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Peter Bieri
• Birth—June 23, 1944
• Where—Bern, Switzerland
• Education—Ph. D., University of Heidelberg
• Currently—N/A
Peter Bieri, is a Swiss writer and professor of philosophy, who writes under the pseudonym Pascal Mercier. Night Train to Lisbon is his third novel.
Bieri studied philosophy, English studies and Indian studies in both London and Heidelberg. From there he was awarded a doctoral degree for his work on the philosophy of time. After the conferral of his doctorate, Bieri worked as a scientific assistant at the Philosophical Seminar at University of Heidelberg.
Bieri co-founded the research unit "Cognition and Brain" at the German Research Foundation. The focuses of his research were the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. From 1990 through 1993, he was a professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Marburg; from 1993 he taught philosophy at the Free University of Berlin while holding the chair of philology, succeeding his mentor, Ernst Tugendhat. (From Barnes & Noble and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
All of which is interesting enough, but in a rather clinical way. One problem with Night Train to Lisbon is that its plot, if plot is the word for it, consists almost entirely of talk—talk, talk, talk—about people and events in the past. The effect of this endless conversation is numbing rather than stimulating. The subject of seeking a new life is rich, as innumerable American novels have made plain, but it's never really clear here whether the central story belongs to Gregorius or to Prado, and there's scarcely a hint of dramatic tension as Gregorius stumbles his way toward what he learns about Prado. Possibly, Mercier's American publisher thinks that his fiction offers the kind of intellectual puzzles and trickery that many readers love in the work of Umberto Eco, but there are no such pleasures to be found here. Night Train to Lisbon never engages the reader, in particular never makes the reader care about Gregorius. It's an intelligent book, all right, but there's barely a breath of life in it.
Washington Post
Celebrates the beauty and allure of language.... Adroitly addresses concepts of sacrifice, secrets, memory, loneliness, infatuation, tyranny, and translation. It highlights how little we know about others.
Tony Miksanek - Chicago Sun-Times
The text of Amadeu’s writing is filled not with mere nuggets of wisdom but with a mother lode of insight, introspection, and an honest, self-conscious person’s illuminations of all the dark corners of his own soul.... Mercier has captured a time in history—one of time times—when men must take a stand.
Valerie Ryan - Seattle Times
Dreamlike.... A meditative, deliberate exploration of loneliness, language and the human condition.... The reader is transported and, like Gregorius, better for having taken the journey.
Debra Ginsberg - San Diego Union-Tribune
Might call to mind the magical realism of Jorge Amado or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.... Allusive and thought-provoking, intellectually curious and yet heartbreakingly jaded.... Its lyricism and aura of the mysterious only enhance the tale’s clear-sighted confrontation with the enduring questions.
Tony Lewis - Providence Journal
Rich, dense, star-spangled.... The novels of Robert Stone come to mind, and Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe, and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map, not to mention Marcus Aurelius and Wittgenstein.... [But] what Night Train to Lisbon really suggests is Roads to Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre’s breathless trilogy about identity-making.
John Leonard - Harpers
In Swiss novelist Mercier's U.S. debut, Raimund Gregorius is a gifted but dull 57-year-old high school classical languages teacher in Switzerland. After a chance meeting with a Portuguese woman in the rain, he discovers the work of a Portuguese poet and doctor, Amadeu de Prado, persecuted under Salazar's regime. Transfixed by the work, Gregorius boards a train for Lisbon, bent on discovering Prado's fate and on uncovering more of his work. He returns to the sites of Prado's life and interviews the major players—Prado's sisters, lovers, fellow resistors and estranged best friend—and begins to lose himself. The artful unspooling of Prado's fraught life is richly detailed: full of surprises and paradoxes, it incorporates a vivid rendering of the Portuguese resistance to Salazar. The novel, Mercier's third in Europe, was a blockbuster there. Long philosophical interludes in Prado's voice may not play as well in the U.S., but the book comes through on the enigmas of trying to live and write under fascism.
Publishers Weekly
Raimund Gregorius, a Swiss professor of classical languages, is crossing a rainy bridge in Bern when a mysterious woman writes a phone number on his forehead and utters a single word in Portuguese. Later that day, he wanders into a bookstore and finds himself drawn to a Portuguese book titled A Goldsmith of Words, self-published in Lisbon 30 years earlier. These unexplained and seemingly unrelated events conspire to tear myopic bookworm Gregorius out of his solitary and unvarying existence and send him to Lisbon in search of both the woman and Amadeu de Prado, the book's (fictional) author. This third novel by the pseudonymous Mercier caused a sensation in Europe and spent 140 weeks on the German best-sellers lists, feats unlikely to be duplicated in the United States because of the book's slow pacing. Patient readers will be rewarded, however, by the involving, unpredictable, and well-constructed plot and Mercier's virtuosic orchestration of a large and memorable cast of characters. As the stories of Gregorius and de Prado draw together, this becomes a moving meditation on the defining moments in our lives, the "silent explosions that change everything." Recommended for all fiction collections.
Forest Turner - Library Journal
An elegant meditative book teaches a painfully ironic life lesson in German-Swiss author Mercier's searching 2004 novel, a critically acclaimed international bestseller being published in the United States for the first time. He who learns the lesson is 50ish Raimund Gregorius, a philologist who teaches Latin, Greek and Hebrew at a Swiss high school-until an unknown woman excites the scholar's interest in an obscure book of philosophical observations penned by an equally unknown Portuguese author. Impulsively abandoning his academic responsibilities, Gregorius acquires the rare volume, ponders its contents and travels to Lisbon to research the life of its "vanished" author. He discovers that Amadeu de Prado, a would-be priest who became a renowned physician, had led an even more complex life as a member of the resistance movement opposing Portugal's notorious dictator Antonio Salazar. The story emerges from Gregorius's meetings: with Prado's aged sister Adriana, the stoical though not uncritical preserver of his memory; a contemplative priest with whom the nonbelieving doctor had often debated theology; the brilliant and beautiful colleague Estefania, who may have been Prado's true soul mate; and the Resistance comrade V'tor Coutinho, who discloses the "evil" act (saving the life of a vicious secret police official) that motivated Prado to forsake the life of the mind for that of a man of violent action. The nearer Gregorius comes to the truth of Prado's passionate commitment, the more insistent becomes the question he asks himself: "Had he perhaps missed a possible life, one he could easily have lived with his abilities and knowledge?" It's the age-old intellectual's dilemma, considered in a compelling blend of suspenseful narrative and discursive commentary (quoted from Prado's text). An intriguing fiction only occasionally diluted by redundancy and by Mercier's overuse of the metaphor of a train journey.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In the first chapter we meet Raimund Gregorius, aka Mundus, aka Papyrus and learn about his essential habits. Now that you have finished the book, as the story progressed, and in light of what you learned about him, throughout, how are his nicknames appropriate? “That was the moment that decided everything,” (p. 5). What do you think was decided?
2. After he leaves his classroom what makes Mundus head for the bookstore? Why does he have such an instinctive reaction to the book Um Ourives das Palavras by Amadeu Inácio de Almeida Prado? Cite some passages from A Goldsmith of Words to support your view.
3. Why did the woman on the bridge, strange as their interaction was, have such a lasting effect on Gregorius? What incident in Gregorius’s past makes the consequences less surprising?
4. “That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it enigmatic and it had never stopped impressing him.” (p. 42). Why is this small piece essential to our understanding of the puzzle that is Gregorius? How is his métier, teaching ancient languages, involved with everything he thinks? What is the importance of books in the life of Gregorius and Prado? How do books connect the two?
5. In Lisbon Mundus has an accidental collision with a rollerblader. Are there other fortuitous “collisions”? Because his glasses were broken by the rollerblader, he gets new lenses prescribed by Mariana Eça. “With the new glasses the world was bigger and for the first time, space really had three dimensions where things could extend unhindered.” (p. 88). Discuss Gregorius and his eyesight. Concern with his vision has led him to some very important links. Connect some of these links to make a chain encircling Amadeu Prado. What other physical changes besides new glasses does Gregorius make? Discuss chance vs. choice.
6. Mundus interacts with three different physicians, Doxiades, his Greek doctor and friend in Bern, Eça, his Portuguese ophthalmologist, and of course, Amadeu Prado the man he encounters only through his writing. Why is a man of the mind drawn to medical practitioners concerned with the body?
7. Only six days pass between the moment that Gregorius leaves his old life in Bern to the moment when he first encounters Prado’s sister, Adriana, at the casa azul, “As if my whole future were behind this door,” (p. 97). In this short time he has become immersed in another man’s life, a life that was ended by an aneurysm thirty-one years before. How does time and memory have an effect on what he learns inside the house?
8. What is the nature of Adriana’s relationship with her brother, before and after his death? What are the important events that formed their bond? Why does she always wear the black ribbon around her neck? Is she a reliable source?
9. Mundus wishes to meet Mariana’s uncle João Eça because he knows that he had been in the resistance movement as had Prado. Mariana sets him up with an errand to deliver a recording of Schubert’s sonatas. Prado and Eça had first met on a train during Amadeu and Fatima’s honeymoon in England. Senhor Eça, as well as train journeys, in addition to the sonatas all take their place in the unraveling of some of the mysteries of Prado’s life. Is it all serendipity or is something else at work here? “Was he still Mundus, the myopic bookworm, who had gotten scared only because a few snowflakes had fallen in Bern?” (p.114). Was he?
10. Once trust is established between João Eça and Gregorius he learns a great deal from the older man. What part does the game of chess play in their relationship? In what other personal associations does chess figure?
11. Prado appears to have had a very different relationship with his sister Rita/Melodie than with his sister Adriana. After his wife, Fatima’s death, he writes a long letter to Melodie from Oxford in which he speaks of an Irishman with a red soccer ball. “No meeting of minds?” I asked. “What?” he shouted and howled with laughter. “What?” And then he shot the soccer ball he had been carrying the whole time onto the sidewalk. I would like to have been the Irishman, an Irishman, who dared to appear in All Souls College for the evening lecture with a bright red soccer ball.” (p. 137). What is Amadeu trying to communicate to his sister? Why does he want to be like the Irishman? How would his life have been different if he had been?
12. In order to find out more about Prado’s early days, Gregorius visits Father Bartolomeu, now in his nineties, who had been a teacher at the Liceu. Father Bartolomeu speaks of Prado’s funeral. “Two people, a man and a young woman, of restrained beauty came toward each other from each end of the path to the grave. Each had to cover an equally long way to the grave and they seemed to adapt the speed of their steps precisely to one another, so they arrived at the same time. Their eyes did not meet one single time on the way but were aimed toward the ground. To this day, I don’t know what kind of secret bound the two people or what it had to do with Amadeu” (p. 160). Who were these people and what was their secret, and what did it have to do with Prado?
13. Father Bartolomeu gives Gregorius an envelope containing Amadeu Prado’s “blasphemous” graduation speech. “I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need the luster of their windows, their cool stillness, their imperious silence. I need the deluge of the organ and the sacred devotion of praying people” (p. 171). What does the speech reveal about Prado? Why was he sometimes called the “priest of truth”?
14. What does the note written by Prado about saving Mendes, “the doctor of death,” reveal? “Here what experience always kept teaching me is confirmed, quite against the original temperament of my thought: that the body is less corrupt than the mind” (p. 193). Does Prado think of himself primarily as a doctor? The question of sacrificing one life for many arises once again in the case of Estafânia Espinhosa. Do you think that there is a consistency between the two instances? What is ironic about Estâfania? Did you find Prado’s behavior inevitable?
15. Prado’s close friendship with Jorge O’Kelly, would be pianist, Lisbon pharmacist, former resistance fighter, and accomplished chess player, began when they were boys and flourished even though they differed in significant ways. In order to understand Prado, Gregorius must understand O’Kelly. In what ways were they different? What drew them to each other? “All the blood had drained out of his face. In this one single second, I realized that the most horrible thing had happened: our lifelong affection had turned into hate. That was the moment, the dreadful moment, when we lost each other” (p. 335). What split them apart?
16. Gregorius tracks down another close friend of Prado’s from his school days, Maria João Ávila. “If there was anybody who knew all his secrets, it was Maria Joao. In a certain sense, she, only she, knew who he was.” (p. 337). What does Gregorius perceive about her? How did this relationship develop? Was there any similarity to Prado’s other liaisons with women?
17. Gregorius eventually leaves his hotel in Lisbon to live in the apartment of a man, Senhor Da Silveira, whom he had met and befriended on the night train. What are the parallels in the friendship between these two and Prado/O’Kelly? What else has changed about Gregorius besides his address? What are the parallels between Raimundo Gregorius and Amadeu Prado? Cite some specific events in the narrative to sustain your views.
18. Many letters are quoted in this book. Gregorius reads one of these from the father, Judge Prado, to his son Amadeu and from the son, Doctor Prado to his father. “It was crazy, thought Gregorius: both men, father and son, had lived on opposite hills of the city like opposing actors in an ancient drama, linked in an archaic fear of each other and in an affection they didn’t find the words for, and had written letters to each other that they didn’t trust themselves to send. Clasped in muteness neither understood, and blind to the fact that one muteness produced the other.” (p. 291). What do the letters contain, and what is learned from them? What is the nature of the father-son relationship?
19. “And there’s something else about the intricate way you created me according to your will-like a wanton sculptress of an alien soul: the names you gave me Amadeu Inacio. Most people don’t think anything of it, now and then somebody says something about the melody. But I know better, for I have the sound of your voice in my ear, a sound full of conceited devotion. I was to be a genius. I was to possess godlike grace. And at the same time-the same time!-I was to embody the murderous rigidity of the holy Ignacio and his abilities to perform as a priestly general” (p. 312). What kind of a woman was Senhora Prado? What was the nature of the mother-son relationship?
20. “He had disappointed all expectations and broken all taboos, and that was his bliss. In the end, he was at peace with the bent judging father, the soft dictatorship of the ambitious mother, and the lifelong stifling gratitude of the sister.” (p. 379). Gregorius sees this image of Prado late in the story when he himself may be facing death. When the bookseller from the Spanish bookstore asks him if the book kept its promise, Gregorius says that it did, absolutely. How have the memories of the doctor/poet’s life helped him to bring together his own life and to find his own peace?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Strangers
Anita Brookner, 2009
Random House
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 780307472601
Summary
Literary master Anita Brookner’s elegant style is manifest on every page of her brilliant new novel. Beautifully crafted and emotionally evocative, Strangers portrays the magic and depth of real life, telling the rich story of an ordinary man whose unexpected longings, doubts, and fears are universal.
Paul Sturgis is resigned to his bachelorhood and the quietude of his London flat. He occasionally pays obliging visits to his nearest living relative, Helena, his cousin’s widow and a doyenne of decorum who, like Paul, bears a tacit loneliness. To avoid the impolite complications of turning down Helena’s Christmas invitation, Paul sets off for a holiday in Venice, where he meets Mrs. Vicky Gardner. Younger than Paul by several decades, the intriguing and lovely woman is in the midst of a divorce and at a crossroads in her life. Upon his return to England, a former girlfriend, Sarah, reenters Paul’s life. These two women reroute Paul’s introspections and spark a transformation within him.
Paul’s steady and preferred isolation now conflicts with the stark realization of his aloneness and his need for companionship in even the smallest degree. This awareness brings with it a torrent of feelings—reassessing his Venetian journey, desiring change, and fearing death. Ultimately, his discoveries about himself will lead Paul to make a shocking decision about his life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 16, 1928
• Where—Herne Hill (outside London), UK
• Education—B.A., Kings College; Ph.D. Courtauld Institute of
Art (London)
• Awards—Booker Prize, 1984
• Currently—lives in the UK
Anita Brookner is the author of twenty beautifully crafted novels, including Falling Slowly, Undue Influence, and Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize. An international authority on eighteenth-century painting, she became the first female Slade Professor at Cambride University. She lives in London.
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Anita Brookner is an English novelist and art historian. Her father, Newson Bruckner, was a Polish immigrant, and her mother, Maude Schiska, was a singer whose father had emigrated from Poland and founded a tobacco factory. Maude changed the family's surname to Brookner owing to anti-German sentiment in England. Anita Brookner had a lonely childhood, although her grandmother and uncle lived with the family, and her parents, secular Jews, opened their house to Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution during the 1930s and World War II. Brookner, an only child, has never married and took care of her parents as they aged.
Brookner was educated at James Allen's Girls' School. She received a BA in History from King's College London in 1949, and a doctorate in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1953. In 1967 she became the first woman to hold the Slade professorship at Cambridge University. She was promoted to Reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1977, where she worked until her retirement in 1988. Brookner was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 1990. She is a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge.
Brookner published her first novel, A Start In Life, in 1981 at the age of 53. Since then she has published approximately a novel every year; her fourth book, Hotel Du Lac, published in 1984, won the Booker Prize.
Brookner is highly regarded as a stylist. Her fiction, which has been heavily influenced by her own life experiences, explores themes of isolation, emotional loss and difficulties associated with 'fitting in' in English society. Her novels typically depict intellectual, middle-class women, who suffer isolation, emotional loss and disappointments in love. Many of Brookner's characters are the children of European immigrants who experience difficulties with fitting into English life; a number of characters appear to be of Jewish descent. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Any reader who has visited the worlds of Brookner's two dozen novels knows that most of the action takes place beneath the surface of everyday activity.... A familiar complaint about Brookner is that she tells the same story over and over. Not true at all, as I see it, except for her uniform interest in exploring interior states of being. Strangers provides a good example of how distinctive her fiction can be, without sacrificing any of her usual depth.
Donna Rifkind - Washington Post
Few novelists can stand with Anita Brookner when it comes to the interior revelations of the human heart.... Every page has a felicity of wording that makes you want to...underline passages that you don’t want to forget.
Seattle Times
As Brookner delicately parses the harsh diminishments of age, and the terrible fear that one will end one’s life at the mercy of strangers, she expresses exquisite psychological understand-ing and philosophical grace, dry-sherry humor, and the coy hope that forbearance can in the long run deliver liberation. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Brookner's 24th book is an often monotonous meditation on an elderly man's solitary existence. Much of the first several chapters are dedicated to 72-year-old Paul Sturgis's stuffy reflections on his attitudes toward life and loneliness. The narrative shows some promise when Sturgis meets recently divorced Vicky Gardner on a trip to Venice, but their ensuing relationship—in Venice and later, when they both return to London—is mired in a painfully polite restraint. As if in a parody of English manners, Vicky and Sturgis labor over countless afternoon teas without forming anything resembling human contact. Vicky often approaches moments of vulnerable honesty, only to act appalled if he shows any interest in these rare glimpses of humanity. Sturgis's interactions with his ex-lover Sarah, meanwhile, are slightly more candid, but these merely highlight Sturgis's painfully apparent dull formality. (They also give him more material to pontificate over.) While the novel happens in the current day, the occasional mobile phone feels as out of place as it would in, say, one of the Henry James novels that could be the inspiration for this tedious exercise in drawing-room politesse.
Publishers Weekly
Paul Sturgis is another solitary Brookner protagonist who bears his loneliness with a patient stoicism while also puzzling over how his life has come to such a desultory pass. A retired banker, Paul fills his quiet days rereading Henry James, walking through his London neighborhood, and paying semi-regular visits to his only relative, the widow of a cousin. His past associations with women, who considered him "too nice," were short-lived and unsuccessful. So it comes as a welcome surprise when two women enter his uneventful life. First, Vicki Gardner sits beside him on a Christmas trip to Venice, where both are planning to escape the lonely holiday; thus they launch a quasi-friendship. Upon his return home, Paul runs into Sarah, a former girlfriend, who is lately widowed and suffering from poor health. Verdict: What tension this novel possesses revolves around whether Paul will take up with either Vicki or Sarah, both unsuitable for him. Strictly for those readers who still appreciate the simple gentility of Brookner's novels.
Barbara Love - Library Journal
Brookner tells the story of bookish retiree Paul Sturgis. Most of the novel takes place within Paul's mind, which is also where most of Paul's life takes place. Since leaving his job and the comfort of routine, Paul finds himself with only one ritual—occasional visits with Helena, the widow of his cousin and thus a distant relative, but apparently his only living one. Neither of them seems to enjoy the visits much, though they provide human connection in a world otherwise filled with strangers. Two chance encounters promise to enliven Paul's existence, or threaten to complicate it. On a trip to Venice to avoid Helena's annual Christmas invitation, he meets Vicky Gardner, a vivacious woman some 20 years younger. "Women, after pursuit on his part, had found him disappointing in a way that he had never fully understood," muses Paul, yet Vicky doesn't. Or maybe he doesn't give her the chance. Or maybe she's so engulfed by the complications of her life—her recent divorce, her rootlessness bordering on homelessness—that she simply doesn't realize how disappointing a relationship with Paul might be. They continue to meet back home in London, complicating Paul's life in a way that he occasionally finds stimulating but more often uncomfortable. Another chance encounter offers another complication, when he runs into Sarah, one of the women who had found him disappointing, and still does. Yet Sarah was one of only two girlfriends he had ever been serious about. He feels torn between his past with Sarah and whatever future he might have with Vicky, while recognizing that "a life lived purely in the mind, as he seemed to have lived his own, would seem not only without interest but bizarre, unnatural. Free to do nothing, a retiree bores himself and others, including the reader.
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 Strangers:
1. Just how dull is Paul Sturgis? Why do women feel disappointed in him once they come to know him? What is it he lacks—is it some inherent personality trait? Finally, is it possible to be too nice?
2. How does Paul view his bachelorhood and reclusiveness? Is he lonely, does he realize he is lonely, or does he take pleasure in his quietude? In fact, in reference to Question 1, does living a solitary existence, or a life of the mind, make one dull?
3. Talk about Paul's visits to the widowed Helena—how do the two relate, or not relate, to one another? To what degree does an insistence on decorum interfere in their relationship? Can etiquette and manners be sort of a protective shield for some people?
4. Talk about Vicky Garnder. In what ways does she challenge Paul or complicate his life? Is she a suitable companion for him, long-term or short-term?
5. How does meeting Sarah after so many years affect Paul?
6. What is Paul's attitude toward aging and his own eventual (sooner than later) death? Does Brookner do a good job of explicating what it feels like to age? You might talk here about the thematic significance of the book's title.
7. In what way, if any, is Paul changed by the end of the story? What does he come to realize?
8. What was your experience reading this novel? Did you find its interiority overly tedious? Or did you find it penetrating and insightful. Does Brookner make you care for her characters?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Vagrants
Yiyun Li, 2009
Random House
349 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812973341
Summary
In luminous prose, award-winning author Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of unforgettable characters who are forced to make moral choices, and choices for survival, in China in the late 1970s.
As morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River, a spirited young woman, Gu Shan, once a devoted follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. While Gu Shan’s distraught mother makes bold decisions, her father begins to retreat into memories. Neither of them imagines that their daughter’s death will have profound and far-reaching effects, in Muddy River and beyond.
Among the characters affected are Kai, a beautiful radio announcer who is married to a man from a powerful family; Tong, a lonely seven-year-old boy; and Nini, a hungry young girl. Beijing is being rocked by the Democratic Wall Movement, an anti-Communist groundswell designed to move the country toward a more enlightened and open society, but the government backlash will be severe.
In this spellbinding novel, the brilliant Yiyun Li gives us a powerful and beautiful portrait of human courage and despair in dramatic times. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Raised—Beijing, China;
• Education—B.S. Peking University; M.F.A., University of
Iowa; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—Whiting Writers' Award; Frank O'Connor Int'l. Short
Story Award; PEN/Hemingway Award
• Currently—lives in Oakland, California, USA
Yiyun Li is a Chinese American writer. She was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow. She is an editor of Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.
Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China, and moved to the United States after she got B.S. from Peking University in 1996. She received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Two of the stories from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers were adapted into films: The Princess of Nebraska and the title story, which Li adapted herself. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Somewhere along the way from a childhood in China...to her present-day life in Oakland, Calif., Ms. Li honed two valuable aspects of her writing talent. She is a keen observer of even the cruelest workaday details...[and] Ms. Li's second gift is for soap-operatic plotting of the sort that has given down-home emotional impetus to ostensibly exotic best sellers like Memoirs of a Geisha. She puts this talent to highly effective use in The Vagrants. Though this novel is at heart a collection of overlapping separate stories, Ms. Li links them with touches of melodrama and well-timed accidents of fate.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Li pans across this field of suffering with quiet, undistracted patience, assembling, in effect, an anthology of horror stories. Her interest is not in the system itself, but in the costs and consequences of a society gone mad, one in which capitulation is regarded as the highest virtue and compassion is treated as a vice. Everything in this world is compromised or corrupted by politics, so that no act is without larger implications. Though Li's fleshing out of the details of life in her home country might sound like "One Season in the Life of Ivan Denisovich's Chinese Comrades," the book's texture is more akin to neorealist films like The Bicycle Thief or to unrelieved portraits of daily life in a dictatorship like the recent Romanian movie 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
Pico Iyer - New York Times Book Review
a powerful and thoughtful novel…[Li's] become a terrific writer. She doesn't condemn or condescend to a single soul here, just makes us see how nerve-racking and soul-killing it must be to live in a despotic nation run by a lot of very high-strung people. For readers who love complex novels about worlds we scarcely understand, The Vagrants will be a revelation.
Carolyn See - Washington Post
Li offers both a bleak view of a historical moment when "people were the most dangerous animals in the world" and a meditation on the act of martyrdom, which is presented both as a duty and as a "luxury that few could afford."
The New Yorker
Li's magnificent and jaw-droppingly grim novel centers on the 1979 execution of a Chinese counterrevolutionary in the provincial town of Muddy River and spirals outward into a scathing indictment of Communist China. Former Red Guard leader Shan Gu is scheduled to be executed after a denunciation ceremony presided over by Kai, the city's radio announcer. At the ceremony, Shan doesn't speak (her vocal chords have been severed), and before she's shot, her kidneys are extracted-by Kai's favor-currying husband-for transplant to a high regional official. After Shan's execution, Kwen, a local sadist, and Bashi, a 19-year-old with pedophile leanings, bury Shan, but not before further mutilating the body. While Shan's parents are bereft, others celebrate, including the family of 12-year-old Nini, born deformed after militant Shan kicked Nini's mother in her pregnant belly. Nini dreams of falling in love and-in the novel's intricate overlapping of fates-hooks up with Bashi, providing the one relatively positive moment in this panorama of cruelty and betrayal. Li records these events dispassionately and with such a magisterial sense of direction that the reader can't help being drawn into the novel, like a sleeper trapped in an anxiety dream.
Publishers Weekly
Following her short story collection Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Li's debut novel interestingly details life in the town of Muddy River, China, in 1979. Assorted characters are gradually introduced as stories unfold and revolve around the denunciation ceremony, execution, and attempted retribution for Shan, the daughter of retired Teacher Gu and his wife. Here, Li's central character, 19-year-old Bashi, intermingles with Old Kwen, a 56-year-old bachelor, as well as that of a young boy named Tong and an outcast 12-year-old girl named Nini. One of six sisters, Nini is plagued with severe birth deformities, but she and Bashi soon develop a friendship and tender bond that eventually leads Bashi to ask Nini to become his child bride. Added to this story are darker moments, like the sexual mutilation of Shan's body by Old Kwen, which Bashi tries to expose. Limited passages detailing particular scenes are not for the squeamish but are likely no worse than those found in gritty crime novels. Like other works set during this period in China, the novel is realistically filled with elements of inequality and despair. Content aside, Li's writing can be likened to that of Ha Jin, as she is a talented storyteller who is able to juggle multiple story lines and lead the reader through numerous highs and lows in this character-driven work. Well written and recommended for larger fiction collections, particularly public and academic libraries strong in Asian literature.
Shirley N. Quan - Library Journal
(Starred review.) In her staggering first novel, [Li] extends her inquiry into China’s particular brand of soul-killing tyranny...the public denunciation ceremonies preceding an execution.... Unflinching and mesmerizing, Li traces the contagion of evil with stunning precision and compassion in this tragic and beautiful novel of conscience. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Gu Shan is a member of the generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution. How do characters who are part of older generations—such as the Huas and Teacher and Mrs. Gu—act and react toward the revolution and then the later counterrevolution?
2. Among the many characters we meet in Muddy River, there are several distinct family groups, including Nini, her parents, and her five sisters; Bashi and his grandmother; Kai, her husband, baby, and in-laws; and Teacher Gu and his wife and daughter. What do these different family units tell the reader about family life in China since the revolution? What traditions have been upheld?
3. Teacher Gu reminds his wife of an ancient poem: “Seeing is not as good as staying blind” (page 103). What is he trying to tell her? Which characters experience incidents or confront issues of sight versus blindness? How does the message of this line relate to The Vagrants as a whole?
4. What does this novel tell us about being an insider versus being an outsider? How do characters who are clearly outsiders—such as Tong, who was raised in a village, and Bashi, who does not have a work unit—fare in Muddy River? How are they viewed by regular workers and schoolchildren, and how do they interact with such characters?
5. Gu Shan’s denunciation brings together residents from all parts of Muddy River society, yet the reader does not know her as well as many other characters in the book. What can you infer about her character, beliefs, and behavior from theother characters? Is she guilty? Is she innocent?
6. Certain characters, such as Kai, outwardly appear to be agents of the state and disseminate state propaganda. In which instances do characters unwittingly act as agents of the state? What do these examples show us about oppressive governments and societies?
7. Ghosts, such as those of Gu Shan or Bashi’s grandmother, are invoked at different points throughout the novel. What role do ghosts play in the minds of the characters? In the larger story? What does the juxtaposition of modern government propaganda with traditional beliefs such as the belief in ghosts illustrate?
8. When Han fears a reversal of his good fortune, he reminds Kai of the saying that "the one who robs and succeeds will become the king, and the one who tries and fails will be called a criminal" (page 208). He is clearly referring to his own political future, but to which other characters and situations in The Vagrants can this saying be applied? Do some of these situations recur in literature and history? Compare these external examples to the ones in the novel.
9. Though the events in the novel are complex, they represent only one relatively small, provincial city in the vastness of China. Stepping back, do you think that the circumstances in Muddy River were similar to, or differ from, circumstances in other cities in China? Beijing? How do the characters view Beijing?
10. The stark and vivid images in this novel are unique. Can you point out a few effective images that helped the novel come alive for you as a reader?
11. Discuss some of the most universal themes of The Vagrants. What makes them universal? In what ways do Yiyun Li’s distinctive style and use of language contribute to, or reinforce, these themes?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Story Sisters
Alice Hoffman, 2009
Crown Publishing
325 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307405968
Summary
Alice Hoffman's new novel, The Story Sisters, charts the lives of three sisters—Elv, Claire, and Meg. Each has a fate she must meet alone: one on a country road, one in the streets of Paris, and one in the corridors of her own imagination.
Inhabiting their world are a charismatic man who cannot tell the truth, a neighbor who is not who he appears to be, a clumsy boy in Paris who falls in love and stays there, a detective who finds his heart’s desire, and a demon who will not let go.
What does a mother do when one of her children goes astray? How does she save one daughter without sacrificing the others? How deep can love go, and how far can it take you? These are the questions this luminous novel asks. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 16, 1952
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Adelphi Univ.; M.A., Stanford Univ.
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts
Born in the 1950s to college-educated parents who divorced when she was young, Alice Hoffman was raised by her single, working mother in a blue-collar Long Island neighborhood. Although she felt like an outsider growing up, she discovered that these feelings of not quite belonging positioned her uniquely to observe people from a distance. Later, she would hone this viewpoint in stories that captured the full intensity of the human experience.
After high school, Hoffman went to work for the Doubleday factory in Garden City. But the eight-hour, supervised workday was not for her, and she quit before lunch on her first day! She enrolled in night school at Adelphi University, graduating in 1971 with a degree in English. She went on to attend Stanford University's Creative Writing Center on a Mirrellees Fellowship. Her mentor at Stanford, the great teacher and novelist Albert Guerard, helped to get her first story published in the literary magazine Fiction. The story attracted the attention of legendary editor Ted Solotaroff, who asked if she had written any longer fiction. She hadn't — but immediately set to work. In 1977, when Hoffman was 25, her first novel, Property Of, was published to great fanfare.
Since that remarkable debut, Hoffman has carved herself a unique niche in American fiction. A favorite with teens as well as adults, she renders life's deepest mysteries immediately understandable in stories suffused with magic realism and a dreamy, fairy-tale sensibility. (In a 1994 article for the New York Times, interviewer Ruth Reichl described the magic in Hoffman's books as a casual, regular occurrence — "...so offhand that even the most skeptical reader can accept it.") Her characters' lives are transformed by uncontrollable forces — love and loss, sorrow and bliss, danger and death.
Hoffman's 1997 novel Here on Earth was selected as an Oprah Book Club pick, but even without Winfrey's powerful endorsement, her books have become huge bestsellers — including three that have been adapted for the movies: Practical Magic (1995), The River King (2000), and her YA fable Aquamarine (2001).
Hoffman is a breast cancer survivor; and like many people who consider themselves blessed with luck, she believes strongly in giving back. For this reason, she donated her advance from her 1999 short story collection Local Girls to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Hoffman has written a number of children's books, including Fireflies: A Winter's Tale (1999), Horsefly (2000), and Moondog (2004).
• Aquamarine was written for Hoffman's best friend, Jo Ann, who dreamed of the freedom of mermaids as she battled brain cancer.
• Here on Earth is a modern version of Hoffman's favorite novel, Wuthering Heights.
• Hoffman has been honored with the Massachusetts Book Award for her teen novel Incantation.
• When asked what books most influenced her life or career, here's what she said:
Edward Eager's brilliant series of suburban magic: Half Magic, Magic by the Lake, Magic or Not, Knight's Castle, The Time Garden, Seven-Day Magic, The Well Wishers. Anything by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, J. D. Salinger, Grace Paley. My favorite book: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Hoffman has a child's dreamy eye, in the best possible sense. To her, the stuff grown-ups don't see anymore looms huge and important—insects banging on windowpanes, thunderstorms, a chestnut tree with a door to the "otherworld." She invents a realm where that sense of the fictive doesn't go away, where imagination and reality bleed together.... In the end, The Story Sisters, for all its magic realism, is about a family navigating through motherhood, sisterhood, daughterhood. It's Little Women on mushrooms.
Chelsea Cain - New York Times Book Review
It's a rare year that doesn't bring a novel from Alice Hoffman, and those who follow this maddeningly uneven writer have learned to cast a wary eye on each new offering. Will it be Good Alice, poser of uncomfortable moral dilemmas and marvelously rich portraitist of family life (Blue Diary, Skylight Confessions)? Or will it be Bad Alice, blatantly careless plotter and outrageous overdoer of the magic-beneath-the-surface-of-our-lives shtick (The Probable Future, The Third Angel)? The Story Sisters, actually, is In-Between Alice: excessive and over-determined but ultimately so moving that it overwhelms these faults.... [A] radiant finale reminds us what a satisfying novelist Alice Hoffman can be, when she feels like it.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post Book World
At once a coming-of-age tale, a family saga, and a love story of erotic longing, The Story Sisters sifts through the miraculous and the mundane as the girls become women and their choices haunt them, change them and, finally, redeem them. It confirms Alice Hoffman’s reputation as "a writer whose keen ear for the measure struck by the beat of the human heart is unparalleled.
Chicago Tribune
(Starred review.) The always dazzling Hoffman has outdone herself in this bewitching weave of psychologically astute fantasy and shattering realism, encompassing rape, drug addiction, disease, and fatal accidents. Her alluring characters are soulful, their suffering mythic, and though the sorrows are many and the body count high, this is an entrancing and romantic drama shot through with radiant beauty and belief in human resilience and transformation. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Lyrical but atypically monotonous, bestseller Hoffman's (The Third Angel) latest follows the dark family saga of Elv, Megan and Claire Story, sisters plagued by uncommon sadness. As a child, Elv spun fairy tales of a magical world for her sisters, but a period of savage sexual abuse-information about which slowly leaks out—sends her spiraling into years of drug addiction and painful self-abuse. Elv's story is unrelentingly grim, and without Hoffman's characteristic magic realism, its simple downward spiral becomes exhausting. Tragedy after tragedy befalls the family—Elv's commitment to a juvenile rehab facility, a deadly accident, a fatal illness and betrayal after betrayal. When the last third of the book turns to focus on Claire, who has been so damaged by the family crises that she refuses to speak, the slight glimmers of hope and goodness are too little, too late. Hoffman's prose is as lovely as ever: the imagined and real worlds of the Story sisters are rich and clear, but Elv's troubles and the Story family's nonstop catastrophes are wearying.
Publishers Weekly
Once upon a time on Long Island, there were three Story sisters: Elv, Meg, and Claire. Aged 12 to 15, they were all beautiful and well behaved, with long, dark hair and pale eyes. They lived in magical harmony, speaking a private, shared language. Their parents were divorced, and the sisters visited their grandparents in Paris every spring. But their mother, Annie, feels increasingly left out of her daughters' lives. Indeed, darkness is soon to fall. Elv's belief in a secret underworld spins out of control, and she begins using drugs and stealing. Sent away to reform school, she falls in love with a man who is a heroin addict. There are betrayals and accidents, Annie falls ill, and the Story family disintegrates before our eyes. This is one of Hoffman's darkest novels yet, and some of Hoffman's readers may find it too dark. But name recognition advises purchase of multiple copies for libraries, and hope for the family's healing keeps readers, heartbroken yet spellbound, turning the pages.
Library Journal
An act of child abuse has lasting consequences in Hoffman's painfully moving novel (The Third Angel, 2008, etc.). The summer Claire Story was 8 and her sister Elv was 11, a man tried to abduct Claire in his car; Elv jumped in, told Claire to jump out, and it was hours before she returned. They never told their mother Annie or middle sister Meg-their father walked out that same summer-and neither girl was ever the same. As the main narrative opens, when Elv is 15, she's becoming an out-of-control adolescent increasingly at odds with careful, rule-following Meg. Racked with guilt over the unknown horrors her sister endured in her place, Claire tries to be loyal, but as Elv's drug use and promiscuity escalate, she backs away. The desperate Annie finally takes Elv to a rehab facility, enlisting the reluctant support of her selfish ex-husband, who insists it's all her fault. At the facility, Elv meets Lorry, a thief and addict who introduces her to heroin, but who also really loves her. The chronology speeds up after Elv comes home and a dreadful accident seals her alienation from her family. Hoffman paints wrenching scenes of tentative efforts at reconciliation that just barely fail, as Elv becomes pregnant and cleans up, but loses Lorry to his "fatal flaw." A kindly detective brings late-life happiness to Annie and metes out delayed justice to Elv's abuser, but the disasters keep coming. Two sisters grow into adulthood, dreadfully damaged by the losses they've endured and their punishing self-blame for the mistakes they made. Hoffman's habitual allusions to mysterious supernatural forces are very jarring in this context, as is the endless interpolation of memories from the terrible abduction; she could have trusted her readers to get the point with out constant prodding. A radiant denouement shows love redeeming the surviving sisters, and there are beautiful moments throughout, but they don't entirely compensate for Hoffman's excesses of plot and tone. A near-miss from this uneven but always compelling writer.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When Elv and Claire set out to rescue the horse at the beginning of the novel, what do you learn about the family dynamics and the personalities of the three sisters? How do they relate to one another and to their mother, Annie? Which sister is most like Annie? What does Annie mean when she says,“People who said daughters were easy had never had girls of their own” [p. 4]?
2. The importance of storytelling is a central theme of this novel. What purpose do stories serve—for the individual and for society? Do you see any parallels between the Story sisters and other literary sisters, such as the Brontë sisters or the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women? Can imagined worlds be both positive and destructive? What is the thin line between storytelling and deception/ denial, and how does it come into play in the novel?
3. After her abduction, Elv begins to invent the world of Arnelle. It’s a way for her to escape reality, but her fairy-tale world becomes a trap of its own. Discuss the otherworld that Elv creates and how it functions. What are the rules of Arnelle and how do they relate to Elv’s abduction? Why does Elv later decide to change the story by “going over to the other side” [p. 69] and joining with the “demon world”? Can you understand and have compassion for her when she turns her back on the “human world”?
4. Fairy tales typically include common mythic elements, including the battle between good and evil, the idea of “the quest,” and the notion that sacrifices must be made in order for an individual to earn wisdom and faith. How are the qualities of fairy tales incorporated into the novel?
5. Each chapter begins with a “fairy tale” from Elv’s Black Book of Fairy Tales, the stories she tells to her sisters. If you read them in order, what do they tell you about Elv’s inner life? Are fairy tales often a psychological map, a way to get to truth via mythic and symbolic references? If so, how?
6. On the day of Elv’s abduction Meg is reading the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations. Why is this significant? Meg also reads Oliver Twist and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Why might these novels appeal to her? Which author does Claire read in Paris, and why do you think this novelist would appeal to her considering her unique vision of the world? Are there novels that you feel affected you greatly at certain points in your life? If so, which ones and why?
7. Why does Elv keep her abduction a secret? Whom is she trying to protect? Why does Claire go along with her decision? Is keeping another person’s secret a sign of loyalty or does it—as Meg asserts—make you an accomplice? How did your vision of Elv change as you learned more details about her abduction?
8. When Elv’s family brings her to Westfield, she feels betrayed. Why does Elv place such a high premium on loyalty, and how do you think she defines it? How does each family member react to the intervention? Are there situations where it’s necessary to deceive loved ones in order to save them? Have you ever faced such a situation with a loved one?
9. First at the Westfield School and later in prison, Elv strongly identifies with Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. What parallels do you see between Elv and Hester? In what ways does Elv imagine herself to be “marked” and set apart from others? Have you known people who have made a youthful mistake that has haunted them?
10. What stories does Lorry tell Elv about his past, and how do they mirror her own tales of Arnelle? Why doesn’t she feel betrayed when she learns that Lorry’s “true-life” stories about living below Penn Station with the mole people are in fact fiction? What is the distinction between a story and a lie? Do you think Lorry gave Elv what she wanted or needed? How do you view the love they had for each other?
11. When Annie hires Pete to track down Elv, the two strike up a friendship that leads to romance. What do you make of Pete’s decision to stay with Annie and pursue a relationship with her even though he knows he doesn’t have much time left with her? What does that decision say about his character?
12. After Meg dies, her sisters are emotionally lost, shattered by the tragic circumstance of her death. Elv disappears and Claire withdraws deep inside herself, refusing to speak or relate to others. Why does Elv run away from the scene of the accident? Does she want to be found? Who does Claire blame for Meg’s death and why? Why does it take an outsider such as Pete to understand and try to assuage the sisters’ guilt?
13. While in prison, Elv works with abused and abandoned dogs and later takes a job with an animal shelter. After Meg dies, Claire’s constant companion is her dog, Shiloh. Lorry’s stories revolve around a heroic dog as well. How does the relationship between human and dog relate to the theme of loyalty? What impact do the dogs have on the sisters and why?
14. As a detective, Pete is in the business of uncovering secrets. But he is also a keeper of secrets when he feels it’s necessary to protect those he loves. Why does he pose as an author when he visits the man who abused Elv? Is this man correct when he says people are unknowable and that “everyone has their secrets” [p. 286)? Do you feel Pete has made a moral decision when he frames the man who is responsible for so much of the damage in the Story sisters’ lives?
15. In Paris, Claire leads a solitary life and speaks only when necessary. She avoids love and relationships and suffers from intense guilt. What does Claire mean when she says that “she and Elv were two of a kind” [p. 227]? Do you see the similarities between the sisters, even though their lives take such different arcs? What role does art play in reconnecting Claire to the world?
16. How does motherhood change Elv, and what does she discover about the nature of maternal love? Do you think we often understand our parents best only after we ourselves become parents? What stories does Elv pass down to Mimi? How does the telling of family stories help Elv and connect her to the past? What role does Mimi play in bringing Elv and Claire together again? Do you see a future for the Story sisters? If you were to write the next five years in the sisters’ lives, how do you imagine Claire and Elv’s relationship will progress? Would you agree that the major theme of The Story Sisters is the possibility of redemption and forgiveness? (Questions from the author's website.)
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