Hot Milk
Deborah Levy, 2016
Bloomsbury USA
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781620406694
Summary
I have been sleuthing my mother's symptoms for as long as I can remember. If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, is her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim?
Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother's unexplainable illness. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life.
She and her mother travel to the searing, arid coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant—their very last chance—in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis.
But Dr. Gomez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine, and as the treatment progresses, Sofia's mother's illness becomes increasingly baffling. Sofia's role as detective—tracking her mother's symptoms in an attempt to find the secret motivation for her pain—deepens as she discovers her own desires in this transient desert community.
Hot Milk is a profound exploration of the sting of sexuality, of unspoken female rage, of myth and modernity, the lure of hypochondria and big pharma, and, above all, the value of experimenting with life; of being curious, bewildered, and vitally alive to the world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—South Africa
• Education—Dartington College of Arts
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
Deborah Levy, born in South Africa, is is a British playwright, novelist, and poet. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and she is the author of several novels including, Swimming Home and Hot Milk, both of which were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Life
Levy's father was a member of the African National Congress and an academic and historian. The family emigrated to Wembley Park, in 1968. Her parents divorced in 1974.
Work
Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts, leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, including Pax, Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and others which are published in Levy: Plays 1 (Methuen). She also served as director and writer for Manact Theatre Company in Cardiff, Wales.
Her first novel Beautiful Mutants, came out in 1986; her second, Swallowing Geography, in 1993; and her third, Billy and Girl, in 1996.
Swimming Home, her 2011 novel, was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. It was also shortlisted for the UK Author of the Year prize at the 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards and for the 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.
Levy published a short story collection, Black Vodka, which was shortlisted for the BBC International Short Story Award 2012, and in 2016 she released her fourth novel, Hot Milk, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
She has always written across a number of art forms (including collaborations with visual artists) and was a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989 to 1991. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/24/2014.)
Book Reviews
Deborah Levy's gorgeous new novel, Hot Milk…is a tale of how Sofia uses strength of will, rigorous self-examination and her anthropological skills to understand and begin to repair things that are holding her back.... It's a pleasure to be inside Sofia's insightful, questioning mind…. Ms. Levy has set a seemingly simple story against a backdrop thrumming with low-key menace and sly, dry humor, sometimes in the same paragraph.... As a series of images, the book exerts a seductive, arcane power, rather like a deck of tarot cards, every page seething with lavish, cryptic innuendo. Yet, as a narrative it is wanting.... The symbols here, although entrancing individually, feel at once overdetermined and underpurposed. They never fully cohere into a satisfying web.
Sarah Lyall - New York Times
In Hot Milk—think of mother's milk, the milk of human kindness, spoiled milk, "long-life milk" processed to last in hot climates and the breast-shaped marble dome of the Gomez Clinic—Levy has spun a web of violent beauty and poetical ennui. As a series of images, the book exerts a seductive, arcane power, rather like a deck of tarot cards, every page seething with lavish, cryptic innuendo.
Leah Hager Cohen - New York Times Book Review
Levy’s language is precise. The absurdities of her style seem scattershot at first, but yield a larger pattern: a commentary on debt and personal responsibility, family ties and independence.
Washington Post
A powerful novel of the interior life, which Levy creates with a vividness that recalls Virginia Woolf . . . Transfixing.
Erica Wagner - Guardian (UK)
Exquisite prose.... Hot Milk is perfectly crafted, a dream-narrative so mesmerising that reading it is to be under a spell. Reaching the end is like finding a piece of glass on the beach, shaped into a sphere by the sea, that can be held up and looked into like a glass-eye and kept, in secret, to be looked at again and again.
Suzanne Joinson - Independent (UK)
Among the questions posed in this heady new novel: Is Sofia's mother, Rose, sick or a hypochondriac who's feverish for attention? And more important, can the frustrated Sofia break the chains of familial devotion and live for herself?
Oprah Magazine
Highbrow/Brilliant. [An] intensely interior but highly charged new novel about family, hypochondria, Spain, Greece, and all kinds of sex.
New York Magazine
Hot Milk is a complicated, gorgeous work.
Marie Claire
A superbly crafted novel that is an inherently fascinating and consistently compelling read from beginning to end, Hot Milk clearly reveals author Deborah Levy as an exceptionally gifted storyteller
Midwest Book Review
The author of the elusive, powerful novel Swimming Home has another tale of family dysfunction. In the unforgiving heat of southern Spain, wayward anthropologist Sofia Papastergiadis delivers her mother into the hands of an eccentric doctor whom they hope can diagnose the mysterious illness that has taken over her body.
Elle.com
(Starred review.) it’s Sofia’s frantic, vulnerable voice that makes this novel a singular read. Her offbeat and constantly surprising perspective treats the reader to writing such as “we dressed as though there weren’t a dead snake in the room.”... Levy has crafted a great character in Sofia, and witnessing a pivotal point in her life is a pleasure.
Publishers Weekly
The claustrophobic, all-encompassing dysfunction of Sofia's self-involved circle of friends and family is wrapped in the oppressive heat of Spain and the narrowing possibilities that she can (or wants to) break free. [Hot Milk] draws in readers with beautiful language and unexpected moments of humor and shock. —Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Kinship, gender, Medusas—this rich new novel from a highly regarded British writer dazzles and teases with its many connections while exposing the double-edged sword of mother-daughter love.... In her scintillating, provocative new book, Levy combines intellect and empathy to impressively modern effect.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Hot Milk...then take off on your own:
1. Readers meet Sofia just when she's dropped her laptop: "My laptop has all my life in it,” she says. “If it is broken, so am I." In what way is Sofia broken—and Just how broken is she?
2. How would you describe Sofia's mother Rose? Of course, it's hard to describe her without dissecting the mother/daughter relationship. How would you describe their bond (or perhaps in Sofia's case, bondage)?
3. Sofia observes of herself:
I am living a vague, temporary life in the equivalent of a shed on the fringe of a village. What has stopped me from building a two-story house in the center of the village?
Care to comment on that thought? What has stopped Sofia? Does her imagined "shed" hold any relevance to your life?
4. In what way might both Sofia and her mother be considered unreliable characters? How about Dr. Gomez? Is he unreliable...or simply unorthodox? Perhaps a little of both?
5. Talk about the setting of the story: Almeria, Spain, where the sea is oily and filled with stinging jelly fish, and the land is "wind-beaten and sun-baked,...cracked and dry.” In what way, if at all, does this inhospitable landscape shape the characters and their actions? Did the atmosphere lead to a sense of menace or dread while reading the novel?
6. During her stay in Spain, Sofia is stung, repeatedly, by Medusas. What is the symbolic significance of the Spanish name for jellyfish? What are the connections to Greek mythology?
7. Consider, too, the title and its significance. What might milk suggest...or hot milk at that?
8. What is behind Sofia's often risky behavior: stealing a fish, freeing a dog, smashing a vase, and taking one rather casual lover then another lover?
9. Gradually, Sofia begins to repair her life. Describe the process, or individual steps, that transform her. Consider, for instance, her anthropological skills: how does she put them to use in her life?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Love Warrior: A Memoir
Glennon Doyle, 2016
Flatiron Press
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250128546
Summary
Oprah’s Book Club 2016 Selection
A journey of self-discovery after the implosion of a marriage.
Just when Glennon Doyle was beginning to feel she had it all figured out—three happy children, a doting spouse, and a writing career so successful that her first book catapulted to the top of the New York Times bestseller list—her husband revealed his infidelity and she was forced to realize that nothing was as it seemed.
A recovering alcoholic and bulimic, Glennon found that rock bottom was a familiar place. In the midst of crisis, she knew to hold on to what she discovered in recovery: that her deepest pain has always held within it an invitation to a richer life.
Love Warrior is the story of one marriage, but it is also the story of the healing that is possible for any of us when we refuse to settle for good enough and begin to face pain and love head-on.
This astonishing memoir reveals how our ideals of masculinity and femininity can make it impossible for a man and a woman to truly know one another. It captures the beauty that unfolds when one couple commits to unlearning everything they've been taught so that they can finally, after thirteen years of marriage, commit to living true—true to themselves and to each other.
Love Warrior is a gorgeous and inspiring account of how we are born to be warriors: strong, powerful, and brave; able to confront the pain and claim the love that exists for us all. This chronicle of a beautiful, brutal journey speaks to anyone who yearns for deeper, truer relationships and a more abundant, authentic life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 20, 1976
• Where—Burke, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., James Madison University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Naples, Florida
Glennon Doyle (formerly Doyle Melton) is a New York Times bestselling author of Untamed (2020), Love Warrior (2016), and Carry On, Warrior (2012). She is an activist, philanthropist and the creator of the online community Momastery. She is also president of Together Rising, a non-profit that has raised more than four million dollars for women and children in crisis.
Doyle was born in Burke, Virginia, and comes from a close family that includes one sister, Amanda Doyle. She completed her B.A. at James Madison University in 1998 and became a teacher in Northern Virginia. During her time at James Madison University.
Career
Doye began her online writing career in 2009, with the creation of her blog, Momastery. The funny, conversational and tell-all nature of her writing quickly gained popularity. Viral blog posts beginning with "2011 Lesson #2: Don't Carpe Diem" led to the publication of her memoir, Carry On, Warrior, and the growth of her social media audience.
Her 2016 memoir, Love Warrior, became an Oprah Book Selection. Doyle describes her career and life philosophy like this:
Life is brutal. But it's also beautiful. Brutiful, I call it. Life's brutal and beautiful are woven together so tightly that they can't be separated. Reject the brutal, reject the beauty. So now I embrace both, and I live well and hard and real. My job is to wake up every day, say yes to life's invitation, and let millions of women watch me get up off the floor, walk, stumble, and get back up again.
Glennon is a sought-after public speaker, and her work has been featured on The Today Show, The Talk, OWN, and NPR; in the New York Times, Ladies' Home Journal, Glamour, Family Circle, Parents Magazine, Newsweek,Woman's Day, and The Huffington Post; and in other television and print outlets.
Awards
In 2013, Carry On, Warrior received the Books for a Better Life Best Relationship Award and was a finalist in the Goodreads Choice Awards for "Best Memoir & Autobiography." In 2014, Parents Magazine named Doyle and Momastery the winner of its award for Best All-Around at Social Media. (Author bio adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia Retrieved 9/10/2016.)
Book Reviews
A testament to the power of vulnerability. Glennon shows us the clearest meaning of "To thine own self be true." It's as if she reached into her heart, captured the raw emotions there, and translated them into words that anyone who's ever known pain or shame—in other words, every human on the planet—can relate to. She's bravely put everything on the table for the whole world to see (Oprah's Book Club 2016 selection).
Oprah Winfrey
Glennon Doyle Melton has mastered sharing her emotional life with the world, which she does nearly daily on momastery.com. Now she lays herself bare once again in Love Warrior, chronicling her struggles and the depths of her resilience in the darkest of time. A heroic achievement.
Family Circle
How a marital crisis became a catalyst for a painful but ultimately enlightening journey into the depths of the human heart.... Though the memoir sometimes reads like a self-help book rather than a narrative, it nevertheless tells a compelling story about self-discovery and the nature of mature love. Candid, brave, and generous.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
PART ONE
1. Initially, Glennon assumes her marriage began with her wedding. In what ways do we expect weddings to function as beginnings? When do you think a marriage begins?
2. By the time she graduates high school, Glennon has come to see that there are hidden rules about how to matter as a girl (pages 30 and 187). Glennon later understands how she’s been hurt by the messages our culture sends about what success should look and feel like for a woman. What are those messages? Where do they come from? What "hidden rules" did you follow, or feel pressured to follow, as a child or a teenager? How about now? How has following those rules affected your life? What are the hidden rules for boys? How do you think those rules affect the males in your life?
3. When Glennon runs out of places to go, she drives toward God (page 52). How does her experience with Mary compare to her conversation with the priest? Why do you think she feels safe in the presence of Mary? How could the priest have been more helpful or supportive?
4. At Glennon’s first twelve-step meeting, she is relieved to notice that "there are no representatives in this circle, "just "folks who are ready to quit pretending" (pages 66–67). Discuss a time you felt like you had to show up as your representative instead of your true self. How would it have felt to stop pretending?
5. After Glennon accepts her pregnancy as an invitation to come back to life and Craig proposes, she decides she will be a new person. Have you ever wanted to put your old self in a box and tuck it away? Do you believe it’s possible to be a new person?
PART TWO
1. For years in her marriage, Glennon feels lonely because it seems she and Craig cannot meaningfully connect. She says, "He wants to be inside my body like I want to be inside his mind" (page 99). Why do you think men and women often have different understandings of intimacy?
2. When she discovers pornography on the family computer, Glennon realizes she is "part of a system that agrees women are for being… dominated and filmed and sold and laughed at" (page 121). Although her fury "feels primal, all-encompassing…and general and impersonal enough to burn the whole world," she decides to point her anger "directly at Craig" (page 122). Have you ever felt a similar fury? In what ways is it easier to blame a person than a system?
3. After learning of Craig’s infidelities, Glennon wonders, "if the answers to the question of me are not successful wife and mother, then what answers do I have left?" (page 137). What labels would you feel lost without? How do these roles define who you believe you are?
4. Though she would prefer an easier choice, Glennon vows not to use the security of her relationship to avoid her fear and loneliness. She declares that "self-betrayal is allowing fear to overrule the still, small voice of truth"(page 145). What does self-betrayal mean to you? When have you heard your own still, small voice? What habits or activities do you engage in that help you to access that inner wisdom?
5. People respond in varying ways to the news of Glennon’s separation (pages 146–47). Were the descriptions of Shovers, Comparers, Fixers, Reporters, Victims, and God Reps familiar to you? Discuss a time when some onereacted to your pain. What felt supportive? What didn't?
6. While she’s alone at the beach, Glennon’s mother tells her, "Sand and water have always been home to you" (page169). Learning "one true thing" about herself cements Glennon’s commitment to care fiercely for her soul and to become her strongest, healthiest self. What feels like home to you? What is "one true thing" you know about yourself?
PART THREE
1. Reflecting on a passage from Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, Glennon realizes that pursuing the journey of the warrior means enduring the "hot loneliness" without reaching for what Glennon calls the "easy buttons" (pages201–202). What are some of your go-to easy buttons? What happens when you resist pressing them and choose stillness instead?
2. Glennon says that the poison is not our pain, but the lies we tell about our pain. She writes, "We either allow ourselves to feel the burn of our own pain or someone we love gets burned by it" (page 203). Can you think of a time when you’ve found this statement to be true? How does refusing to experience our own pain hurt others?
3. So many people tell Glennon to breathe that she eventually takes a class on the topic and has a transformative experience (pages 213–20). Have you ever paid close attention to your breath? What do you think your breath can teach you?
4. Reflect on Glennon’s experience during her breathing class. Do you agree that "grace can only be personal if it's also universal" (page 219)? How does this understanding affect Glennon's view of Craig? Do you believe forgiveness can be universal without being personal?
5. Glennon grew up understanding the biblical defnition of "woman" to be "helper." When she questions this, she learns that the original Hebrew word for "woman" has a different translation altogether (page 222). Discuss what Glennon’s discovery that "woman" was created "as a warrior" means to you.
6. When she teaches the children at Sunday school that"they are loved by God—wildly, fiercely, gently, completely,without reservation" and that they have nothing inside of them to be ashamed of, Glennon says she is also speaking to her ten-year-old self (page 232). What would you tell your ten-year-old self?
7. To reunite her body, mind, and spirit, Glennon must learn to tell the story of her insides with her voice, which she does for the first time in the scene with the man and the garbage truck (pages 235–37). Do you think the man intended to hurt Glennon with his behavior? How did her response effectively honor them both? When have you given voice to your inside self? Was that experience comfortable or difficult, and why?
8. What do you think allows for the creation of physical intimacy between Glennon and Craig? Discuss the idea of consent and how voicing needs and concerns can create safety and connection (pages 237, 241, and 249).
9. What do you think it means to be sexy? Revisit Glennon’s previous understanding of sexy (page 248) and the explanation of sexy she gives to her daughters (page 252). Is there anything you would add or change?
10. The ending of Love Warrior is deliberately ambiguous. Why do you think that is? Were you tempted to root for a happily ever after? In what ways does our society equate staying married with success? In what ways can separation or divorce be considered successes?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Today Will Be Different
Maria Semple, 2016
Little, Brown and Co.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316403436
Summary
A day in the life of Eleanor Flood, forced to abandon her small ambitions and awake to a strange, new future.
Eleanor knows she's a mess. But today, she will tackle the little things.
She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won't swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe.
But before she can put her modest plan into action-life happens. Today, it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother's company.
It's also the day Joe has chosen to tell his office—but not Eleanor—that he's on vacation. Just when it seems like things can't go more awry, an encounter with a former colleague produces a graphic memoir whose dramatic tale threatens to reveal a buried family secret.
Today Will Be Different is a hilarious, heart-filled story about reinvention, sisterhood, and how sometimes it takes facing up to our former selves to truly begin living. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June, 1964
• Where—Santa Monica, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington
Maria Keogh Semple is an American novelist and screenwriter. She is the author of three novels. Her television credits include Beverly Hills, 90210, Mad About You, Saturday Night Live, Arrested Development, Suddenly Susan and Ellen.
Early Life
Semple was born in Santa Monica, California. Her family moved to Spain soon after she was born. There her father, the screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr. wrote the pilot for the television series Batman. The family moved to Los Angeles and then to Aspen, Colorado. Semple attended boarding school at Choate Rosemary Hall, then received a BA in English from Barnard College in 1986.
Film
Her first screenwriting job was in 1992, for the television show Beverly Hills, 90210. She was nominated for a Primetime Emmy, Outstanding Television Series, in 1997 for Mad About You. In 2006 and 2007, she was nominated for a Writer's Guild of America award, for Arrested Development. She appeared in the 2004 David O. Russell film I Heart Huckabees.
Novels
Semple's three novels include Today Will Be Different (2016), Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2012), and This One is Mine (2008). Her books center around women who juggle and struggle with contemporary life: work, family, love, and self-esteem. Critics have referred to her writing as witty, funny, inventive, and even "a little bit screwball" (Washington Post).
She is active in the Seattle literary community, and a founding member of Seattle 7 Writers. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker Magazine. She has also taught fiction writing at the Richard Hugo House.
Personal Life
Semple is in a relationship with George Meyer and has one daughter with him, Poppy. They reside in Seattle. In 2007, a newly discovered species of moss frogs from Sri Lanka was named Philautus poppiae after their daughter, a tribute to Meyer's and Semple's dedication to the Global Amphibian Assessment. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/28/12.)
Book Reviews
Let me say upfront: I couldn’t put the thing down. Today Will Be Different shows us a woman all too many readers will feel an immediate kinship with. Her life teeters on the edge of out-of-control, but she is determined to do things differently. That way, she thinks, she’ll end up with a nice, neat, perfectly-ordered life—one that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. READ MORE.
Cara Kless - LitLovers
[F]unny, smart, emotionally reverberant.... The success of this poetic, seriously funny and brainy dream of a novel...has to do with Maria Semple's range of riffs and preoccupations. All kinds of detalis, painful and perverse and deeply droll, cling to her heroine and are appraised and examined and skewered and simply wondered at. If that's considered a trick, readers of Semple's novel will be overjoyed to fall for it.
Meg Wolitzer - New York Times Book Review
Hilarious [and] heartwarming.... The book follows a restless Eleanor, who sets out to reinvigorate her life, only to be shoved astray by a number of chance setbacks
Dana Getz - Entertainment Weekly
[A] sharp, funny read.... Though Eleanor is snarky, her troubles and growing calamities are engaging.... In the end, the novel wraps up too neatly, but the ride is consistently entertaining.
Publishers Weekly
An introspective look, both comedic and tragic, at attempting to be the best one can be: wife, mother, or sibling. While not as laugh-out-loud funny as Where'd You Go, this book will satisfy fans of Semple and satire. —Stephanie Sendaula
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A day in the life of an enchanting and gifted woman who is almost too frazzled to go on... [F]ew will be indifferent to this achingly funny and very dear book. This author is on her way to becoming a national treasure.
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)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko
Scott Stambach, 2016
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250081865
Summary
The Fault In Our Stars meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Seventeen-year-old Ivan Isaenko is a life-long resident of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus.
For the most part, every day is exactly the same for Ivan, which is why he turns everything into a game, manipulating people and events around him for his own amusement.
Until Polina arrives.
She steals his books. She challenges his routine. The nurses like her.
She is exquisite. Soon, he cannot help being drawn to her and the two forge a romance that is tenuous and beautiful and everything they never dared dream of. Before, he survived by being utterly detached from things and people.
Now, Ivan wants something more: Ivan wants Polina to live. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Rochester, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., B.S., State University of New York-Buffalo; M.S., University of
California-San Diego
• Currently—lives in San Diego, California
Scott Stambach is an American author and physics professor. His first novel, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko, was published in 2016 and referred to as an "auspicious, gut-wrenching, wonderful debut" by Kirkus Reviews.
Stambach lives in San Diego where he teaches physics and astronomy at Grossmont and Mesa colleges. He also collaborates with Science for Monks, a group of educators and monastics working to establish science programs in Tibetan Monasteries throughout India. He has written about his experiences working with monks of Sera Jey monastery and has published short fiction in several literary journals including Ecclectica, Stirring, and Convergence. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Scott Stambach’s wonderful debut prods us to question everything—reality, religion, morality, even the value of life itself—and he does it through the voice of 17- year-old Ivan Isaenko. If you’re trapped in a mutated body, but you also happen to be a prodigy—well-versed in Russian literature, say, and astrophysics—how could you not question the very things the rest of us accept as settled wisdom? READ MORE.
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers
[I]mpressive, well-structured debut.... Stambach’s surprising, empathetic novel takes on heavy themes of illness, suffering, religion, patience, and purpose, with a balanced mix of humor and heart.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [S]easoned with humor, wit, and astute observation.... What's more, despite the presence of a corrupt health care bureaucracy, the story highlights the ways random acts of kindness can illuminate individual lives and make the seemingly unbearable tolerable, if not wholly acceptable. An auspicious, gut-wrenching, wonderful debut.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko...then take off on your own:
1. In a confrontation with Nurse Natalya, Ivan says he would rather be mentally "deficient" than mentally cogent living at Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children. Natalya responds that "self-awareness is what makes life worth living." What do you think?
2. Why does Ivan work so hard to learn how to change Max's diaper? Why is the two-year-old so important to him that he takes Polina to see him?
3. What is the state of Ivan's faith? He says he once believed "there was a set amount of bad to be distributed to all people." What made him question, even change, his belief in the fairness of the world? Another time he asks Natalya, "Should I be angry with God?" Natasha says, "God didn't do this to you, Ivan." What would you say to Ivan to answer his doubts?
4. Talk about Nurse Natalya, Ivan says she is the closest person to a mother he has ever had. Why is her kindness so rare? Consider the myriad duties of nurses at the Mazyr Hospital. Does that kind of overloaded schedule sap one's ability to sympathize? Might there be other reasons (of course, the author never develops any of the personalities, but we're allowed to conjecture on our own).
5. The unfairness of Dr. Ridick's ability to cure the "heart-hole" children is a conflicting emotion for Ivan. Talk about his feelings toward them. He paraphrases Nabokov: "the world needs happy endings no matter how unethical." (See quote below.) Why does Ivan draw upon that quotation? How, in his mind, does it apply to the ethics of curing the heart-hole children?
6. What are the Interlopers, and why is Ivan wary of them?
7. Ivan considers Polina an Interloper, at first. Talk about Ivan's initial reactions to her: he hates—and fears—her the very moment he lays eyes on her. Why? He lists his reasons for despising her, one of which is that "she obliterated the edges of my world." What does he mean by that phrase? More to the point: what do the particular reasons for his hatred—to say nothing of the list itself—reveal about Ivan?
8. (Follow-up to Question 7): A few pages later, after he discovers Polina reading Gogol, Ivan says of her:
[S]he was someone who could see my reality and reflect it back to me. She was someone who could make me feel I was not just a ghost haunting the hallways.
What does Ivan mean, and why is it so disturbing to him?
9. The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko has numerous moments of humor, sometimes to the point of hilarity. Consider the episodes with his therapists, particularly with Dr. Moisey Sokolov who he treats as the patient. What other comments, conversations, or observations of Ivan's do you find funny?
10. One of the most poignant chapters of the book concerns Ivan's mother, or the mother he envisions. Talk about his ideal and what it reveals about Ivan's state.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The actual quote is from Nabokov's 1953 novel Pnin: "Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically."
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385542364
Summary
Winner, 2017 Pulitzer Prize-Fiction
Winner, 2016 National Book Awards
A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits.
When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape.
Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven.
But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day.
The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.(From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 6, 1969
• Where—New York City, New York (USA)
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Awards—PEN/Oakland Award; Whiting Writers Award
• Currently—ives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Colson Whitehead is a New York-based novelist and nonfiction works. He was born and raised in New York City, attending attending Trinity, a private prep school, in Manhattan. He graduated from Harvard College in 1991.
Books
After leaving college, Whitehead wrote for The Village Voice and while there began working on his novels. His first, The Institutionalist, published in 1999, concerned intrigue in the Department of Elevator Inspectors, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award.
Next came John Henry Days in 2001. The novel is an investigation of the steel-driving man of American folklore. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The novel received the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
The Colossus of New York followed in 2003. A book of essays about the city, it is a meditation on life in Manhattan in the style of E.B. White's well-known essay "Here Is New York." Colossus became a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Apex Hides the Hurt, released in 2006, centers around a fictional "nomenclature consultant" who gets an assignment to name a town. The book earned Whitehead the PEN/Oakland Award.
Sag Harbor, set in 1985, follows a group of teenagers whose families (like Whitehead's own) spend the summer in Sag Harbor, Long Island. Published in 2009, the novel was a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2010 came Zone One, a post-apocalyptic story set New York City.
In 2014 Whitehead published his second work of nonfiction, this one about the 2011 World Series of Poker—The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky & Death. Two years later, in 2016, his novel The Underground Railroad, was released. Widely acclaimed, many critics agree that it is destined to become an American masterpiece.
In addition to his books, Whitehead's reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper's and Granta, and others.
Teaching and writing
He has taught at Princeton University, New York University, the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, Wesleyan University, and been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming.
In the spring of 2015, he joined The New York Times Magazine to write a column on language.
Honors
He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. (Adapted from the author's website and Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/6/2016.)
Book Reviews
[A] potent, almost hallucinatory novel.... It possesses the chilling matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift…. He has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
[T]ouches on the historical novel and the slave story, but what it does with those genres is striking and imaginative…carefully built and stunningly daring; it is also, both in expected and unexpected ways, dense, substantial and important…. [Whitehead] opens his eyes where the rest of us would rather look away. In this, The Underground Railroad is courageous but never gratuitous.... The Underground Railroad becomes something much more interesting than a historical novel. It doesn't merely tell us about what happened; it also tells us what might have happened. Whitehead's imagination, unconstrained by stubborn facts, takes the novel to new places in the narrative of slavery, or rather to places where it actually has something new to say. If the role of the novel, as Milan Kundera argues in a beautiful essay, is to say what only the novel can say, The Underground Railroad achieves the task by small shifts in perspective: It moves a couple of feet to one side, and suddenly there are strange skyscrapers on the ground of the American South and a railroad running under it, and the novel is taking us somewhere we have never been before.…The Underground Railroad is Whitehead's…attempt at getting things right, not by telling us what we already know but by vindicating the powers of fiction to interpret the world. In its exploration of the foundational sins of America, it is a brave and necessary book.
Juan Gabriel Vasquez - New York Times Book Review
Far and away the most anticipated literary novel of the year, The Underground Railroad marks a new triumph for Whitehead…. [A] book that resonates with deep emotional timbre. The Underground Railroad reanimates the slave narrative, disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era.... The canon of essential novels about America's peculiar institution just grew by one.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
With this novel, Colson Whitehead proves that he belongs on any short list of America's greatest authors—his talent and range are beyond impressive and impossible to ignore. The Underground Railroad is an American masterpiece, as much a searing document of a cruel history as a uniquely brilliant work of fiction.
Michael Schaub - NPR
[T]hink Toni Morrison (Beloved), Alex Haley (Roots); think 12 Years a Slave…[A]n electrifying novel…a great adventure tale, teeming with memorable characters…. Tense, graphic, uplifting and informed, this is a story to share and remember (Book of the Week).
People
(Starred review.) "Each thing had a value... In America the quirk was that people were things." So observes Ajarry, taken from Africa as a girl in the mid-18th century to be sold and resold and sold again.... The story is literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every American citizen.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Whitehead...puts escaped slaves Cora and Caesar on what is literally an underground railroad, using such brief magical realist touches to enhance our understanding of the African American experience.... [He] continues ratcheting up both imagery and tension.... [A] work that raises the bar for fiction addressing slavery. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller's deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass' grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft's rococo fantasies…and that's when you begin to understand how startlingly original this book is.... [Whitehead] is now assuredly a writer of the first rank.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How does the depiction of slavery in The Underground Railroad compare to other depictions in literature and film?
2. The scenes on Randall’s plantation are horrific—how did the writing affect you as a reader?
3. In North Carolina, institutions like doctor’s offices and museums that were supposed to help "black uplift" were corrupt and unethical. How do Cora’s challenges in North Carolina mirror what America is still struggling with today?
4. Cora constructs elaborate daydreams about her life as a free woman and dedicates herself to reading and expanding her education. What role do you think stories play for Cora and other travelers using the underground railroad?
5. "The treasure, of course, was the underground railroad…. Some might call freedom the dearest currency of all." How does this quote shape the story for you?
6. How does Ethel’s backstory, her relationship with slavery, and Cora’s use of her home affect you?
7. What are your impressions of John Valentine’s vision for the farm?
8. When speaking of Valentine’s Farm, Cora explains "Even if the adults were free of the shackles that held them fast, bondage had stolen too much time. Only the children could take full advantage of their dreaming. If the white men let them." What makes this so impactful both in the novel and today?
9. What do you think about Terrance Randall’s fate?
10. How do you feel about Cora’s mother’s decision to run away? How does your opinion of Cora’s mother change once you’ve learned about her fate?
11. Whitehead creates emotional instability for the reader: if things are going well, you get comfortable before a sudden tragedy. What does this sense of fear do to you as you’re reading?
12. Who do you connect with most in the novel and why?
13. How does the state-by-state structure impact your reading process? Does it remind you of any other works of literature?
14. The book emphasizes how slaves were treated as property and reduced to objects. Do you feel that you now have a better understanding of what slavery was like?
15. Why do you think the author chose to portray a literal railroad? How did this aspect of magical realism impact your concept of how the real underground railroad worked?
16. Does The Underground Railroad change the way you look at the history of America, especially in the time of slavery and abolitionism?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)