Swimming
Joanna Hershon, 2002
Random House
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345442765
Summary
What happened the weekend that Aaron Wheeler brought his girlfriend Suzanne home to meet his family for the first time would change things forever.
In this remarkable, lyrically written debut novel, Joanna Hershon captures the ever-evolving aftermath of one tragic summer weekend for the Wheeler family in New Hampshire.
Swimming unfolds with uncommon power and a rich, interior narrative force. It is a gripping family story, a heartbreaking coming of age journey, and a suspenseful psychological investigation into the meanings of identity, fidelity, and intimacy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Joanna Hershon received a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from Columbia University in 1999. She has been a Breadloaf Working Scholar, an Edward Albee Writing Fellow, and a twice produced playwright in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband. Swimming is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Brother kills brother, and a younger sister makes their story her own in this lush but unsteady modern-day Cain and Abel tale by first-timer Hershon. On a beautiful summer weekend, Aaron Wheeler brings his college girlfriend, Suzanne, home to meet his family in New Hampshire. Golden boy Aaron is a few years older than his volatile, difficult brother, Jack; their little sister, Lila, is eight. The visit is pleasant if tense, as Suzanne finds herself drawn to Jack against her better judgment. Late one night after a party, Suzanne and Jack end up swimming alone together at the lake behind the house. As Jack makes it back to shore, naked, Aaron is waiting for him. Jack's death is made to look like an accident—it is said that he fell on the rocks—and Aaron disappears, dropping out of college. When Hershon picks up the narrative 10 years later, the story is resumed from Lila's point of view. Now living in New York City and teaching private English classes, she stumbles through her daily life, glimpsing Aaron or Jack in all the men she sees. A chance encounter with Suzanne focuses her determination to discover what really happened that night in New Hampshire and to find Aaron again. Hershon's carefully worked prose aspires to hothouse perfection, but overworked metaphors and forced turns of phrase undermine its effectiveness. At moments, the narrative invites readers to sink beneath its surface, but Hershon fails to sustain the dark, atmospheric morass she cultivates.
Publishers Weekly
Memory and desire—these two words sum up this immersive novel. Memory of a summer night, a lake, an accident. Desire of Aaron for Suzanne, of Suzanne for Jack. Lila's memories of her brothers and her desire to make sense of the past. Hershon wraps you in her spell, intimately creating fine details—the prickliness of wet skin drying in the dark, the sound of a pale green porcelain teacup breaking, the smell of a dingy hotel room. Like Jane Hamilton or Sue Miller, she has an eye for place, an ear for dialog, and true feeling for character. While the details serve to propel the plot forward, the dialog brings to life characters so real that they breathe behind you. Marred only by two coincidences used to advance the story, this is a work of real feeling, talent, and great beauty. Buy a copy and dive in. —Yvette Olson, City Univ. Lib., Renton, WA
Library Journal
Hershon's first novel is an engrossing tale of love, redemption, and second chances. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
Unrealized or discarded possibility are both the subject and nature of this earnest debut, a story reminiscent of the family-centered fiction of Sue Miller and Jane Hamilton. It begins in 1966, when Jeb Wheeler meets Vivian Silver and impulsively brings her to his house in the New Hampshire woods. The action then fast-forwards to 1987: the Wheelers' eldest son Aaron, 21 years later, has brought his gorgeous girlfriend Suzanne Wolfe for a visit. His parents are barely glimpsed presences (as they remain in fact), but Hershon focuses close attention on Aaron's mercurial eight-year-old sister Lila and especially his brother Jack, a vaguely sinister, sardonic misfit to whom Suzanne finds herself helplessly attracted. A midnight swim following a chaotic party at a friend's house shatters the Wheelers' already precarious solidarity, ends Aaron's relationship with Lila, sends him into self-imposed exile—and leads to a long final sequence dominated by the heretofore peripheral figure of Lila. Another decade has passed: she's now a student and part-time tutor in New York City, and she directly engages the ghosts of the Wheelers' past upon reencountering (now married) Suzanne and laboriously extracting the truth about her family's losses and Aaron's whereabouts. In a scarcely credible series of scenes, Lila finds Aaron (who doesn't recognize her), acknowledges in herself the tortuous complex of motives and emotions experienced by the people whom she's been quick to blame, and achieves a muted reconciliation. Much of Swimming absorbs and satisfies, because Hershon writes lucid, stinging dialogue and movingly conveys the sense of hollowness and waste that overpowers the lives of the people. The characterizations are sketchy, however, making for both an intermittently static and overlong read. A flawed if interesting debut by a more than capable writer who'll surely give us better.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What does the title suggest, and what varieties of "swimming" are involved in the action? How does the swim at the story's start contrast with the plunge at the end?
2. Do the three epigraphs (from Marilynne Robinson, Emily Dickinson, and Martin Buber) constitute a kind of progression for the three parts? How does Dickinson's phrase—"The truth must dazzle gradually"—describe the story line?
3. Twenty-one years elapse between the action of the Prologue and Part One, and ten years elapse between Part One and Two. Parts Two and Three, however, are directly sequential. What is the author telling us about the presence of the past and the healing passage of time?
4. Can you come up with reasons for the brothers' sibling rivalry? Why are they so angry with each other, and is Suzanne a kind of lightning rod for the trouble that erupts between them, or is she the trouble itself?
5. What motivates Pria's behavior? In what ways does she change between the first and second time we meet her, and do you feel she's trying to atone for her actions at the party and on the night of Jack's death?
6. The same question could well be asked of Suzanne. How sympathetic is the author to this character/seductress? Why is it, do you think, that she's willing to acknowledge Lila during that first meeting in New York?
7. Both Lila and Aaron have the habit of calling their parents and then hanging up. What does this tell us about the nature of communication in the Wheeler clan?
8. We know what's under Sylvie's bed and what the red box contains. What would Aaron (as David Silver) have of hers under his own bed?
9. In what ways is this a time-bound piece (describing the nature of the counter-culture in the 1980s, the drug culture in the 1990s, etc.), and in what ways does the family dynamic exist outside of a specific time and place?
10. Imagine Swimming as a set of linked short stories or as a movie or play. What would be gained and what lost?
11. Why does Lila disguise herself as Abby in her brother's house? What causes her to come out of hiding and reveal herself at last?
12. Is it realistic that a brother would not know his sister after a decade of growth? And why should Lila recognize a woman she's seen only once, when she herself was eight years old at the time, and who now has spent ten years thereafter in New York City?
13. Describe a day in 1967 in which Jeb and Vivian Wheeler are alone in the house he has built and to which she moves when they're first married. Describe the same day in 1997 when they are alone in the house once more—with one of their three children dead and the other two away.
14. Imagine the visit to Portsmouth from Ben's point of view. Why does he get so angry at Lila when she says she needs to run an errand by herself?
15. Imagine the scene when Suzanne returns to her husband after she tells Lila what happened on the fateful night in 1987. What does she tell Richard and how does he respond?
16. If this novel had been told in the first person, who would be its likely narrator and why?
17. In what ways does the scene of the party at the lake outside Ann Arbor (Part Three) repeat what happened at the party in the Wheelers' pond (Part One)? Look for variations on the theme and what those changes might mean.
18. "The water was blue and the sky was pink and the trees flourishing green. 'Are you okay?' she said. He said he was full of awe." This climactic moment at the end of Chapter Twenty-five is a scene of rebirth and redemption, clearly. To what extent is it also, in the formal sense, religious? Is Aaron's time in Israel and his shelf of Biblical texts directly relevant here?
19. What will happen when Aaron goes home and arrives at the house once again?
20. These were nineteen questions. Formulate twenty more.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
__________________
Some readers find the publisher's questions (above) too difficult. You might find these LitLovers "talking points" more helpful—at least to get a discussion off the ground:
1. Talk about the two brothers, Aaron and Jack. How would you describe their relationship? In what ways are they different from one another?
2. What draws Suzanne to Jack? What is her role in (or her responsibility for) what follows? What do you think of Suzanne —at the time we first meet her and, again, 10 years later?
3. What does Lila know—or believe she knows—about the tragedy at the pond? In what way does it affect her, both in the immediate aftermath and when we meet her 10 years later? How would you describe her state of mental health in the second half of the novel?
4. What do you think about the two coincidences in the book? Are they credible? Do they ruin the book for you, or do you accept them as necessary to further the plot?
5. Talk about what happens when Lila finds Aaron? Is he different from his younger self (in the first half of the book)? Do you find it believable that Aaron doesn't recognize his sister? Why does Lila play along, choosing not to reveal her identify until later?
6. Ultimately, what does Lila come to understand by the end of the novel? How is she changed by what she learns? (Keep in mind, here, that what a character learns by the end of a book is usually one of the central themes an author has been exploring throughtout the course of the novel.)
7. Are you pleased with how the book ends?
8. Overall, do you find Swimming a satisfying read? Why or Why not? Do you feel Hershon gives too much detailed description...or is it her attention to detail appropriate and well-rendered? What about Hershon's characters: are they fully-developed as complex human beings...or rather flat and under developed?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Hotel World
Ali Smith, 2001
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385722100
Summary
Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.
Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Inverness, Scotland, UK
• Eduation—University of Abderdeen; Cambridge University
• Awards—Whitbread Award
•Currently—lives in Cambridge, England
Ali Smith is a Scottish writer who won the Whitbread Award in 2005 for her novel, The Accidental. To date, she has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times and the Orange Prize twice.
She was born to working-class parents, raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD that she never finished.
She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She then became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, Scotsman, and Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Cambridge, England, with her partner filmmaker Sarah Wood.
Works
Smith is the author of several works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World (2001), which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize in 2001. She won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. ♦ The Accidental (2007) won the Whitbread Award and was also short-listed for both the Man Booker and Orange Prize. ♦ Her 2011 novel, There But For The, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and named as a Best Book of the Year by both the Washington Post and Boston Globe. ♦ How to Be Both (2014) was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Her story collections include Free Love, which won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Whole Story and Other Stories.
In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 2009, she donated the short story "Last" (previously published in the Manchester Review Online) to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the "Fire" collection. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/20/2014.)
Book Reviews
In this voice from beyond the grave Ali Smith has created the perfect literary ghost...imbued with a powerful sense of wonder at the minutiae of everyday sensuality...and her beautiful, vivid descriptions are reinforced by a sharp, unsentimental tongue.
Times (London)
Where British reviewers see ambition, subtlety and wild imagination, all I can detect are leaden whimsy and mechanistic storytelling. Hotel World turns out to be a thin piece of work, one that fails to deliver on the promise implicit in its title—for, rather than explore the entire world of a hotel, with its broad array of guests, staff and casual visitors, Smith concentrates on a handful of characters who seem hostile to the very notion of professional hospitality.
Michael Upchurch - New York Times
To her considerable credit as a writer, Smith manages to have her characters approach these grim subjects in moods of humor and unselfconscious bumbling, which makes Hotel World a greatly appealing read.
Chris Lehmann - Washington Post
The heart of Scottish writer Ali Smith may belong to good old-fashioned metaphysics—to truth and beauty and love beyond the grave—but her stylistic sensibility owes its punch to the Modernists. She's street-savy and poignant at once, with a brutal sense of irony and a wonderful feel for literary economy. There's a kind of stainless-steel clarity at the center of her fiction.
Boston Globe
Hotel World is compelling...precisely because it suggests shifting yet coherent perspectives rather than simplifying lives into rigid, inert realities. Most impressively, Smith has mastered sophisticated literary techniques, which never intrude or bog down a delectable narrative of human perception and rumination. Apart from establishing Ali Smith as a novelist with the skills of a Martin Amis and Samuel Beckett combined, Hotel World is a damn good read
San Francisco Chronicle
[In] Smith's hands, this slender plot serves as an excuse for a delightfully inventive, exuberant, fierce novel of which the real star is not the dead Sara, or any of the living characters, but the author's vivid, fluent, highly readable prose. Hotel World was a well-deserved finalist last year for two prestigious British prizes: the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize.... I can't begin to paraphrase all that this dazzling book conveys about humanity and mortality.
Margot Livesey - Newsday
Featured are five women whose lives (and a death) overlap at the Global Hotel, a generic establishment in an unnamed city in England.... Smith's narrative style varies with each character and is generally exciting and quite successful, although some readers will find the acrobatics tiring. The connections she makes between the characters across class lines and even across the line between life and death are driven home in a beautifully lyrical coda.
Publishers Weekly
A heartfelt and introspective ghost story, Hotel World begins at the end and works backward and then meanders some in between.... [C]haracters come together in a tender, moving story of innocence, love, and kindness. Highly recommended. —Lisa Nussbaum, Dauphin Cty. Lib. Syst., Harrisburg, PA
Library Journal
A...verbally high-speed tale of a girl's death that may touch some but will seem mainly airy to others..... The pieces do finally come together, yet all remains oddly mechanical, no matter how many words and pages accumulate, and accumulate, and accumulate. One feels as though Smith were taking as long as possible on as little as possible to make things seem as important as possible.
Kirkus Reviews
Book Club 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 Hotel World:
1. What is this book about? Start by asking what major issues Ali Smith examines. Be sure to consider the title. (Actually, this is a question you might want to return to later on.)
2. Follow-up to Question #1: Why does Smith center her novel around the ghost of a dead girl? Why death...and why ghost? What is Smith exploring?
3. What does Sara hope for when she remarks...
What I want more than anything in the world is to have a stone in my shoe...so that it jags into different parts of the sole and hurts just enough to be pleasure.
Or when she says, "A mouthful of dust would be something." How does Sara's yearning suggest the novel's thematic concerns? (Notice the homophone, sole/soul.)
4. Speaking of homophones—Smith peppers her text with clever wordplay. Go through the novel and pick out some examples, such as Else's "rebegot" and Lisa's "rebiggot." Can you find others?
5. Follow-up to Question #4: Reviewers have commented on Smith's remarkable facility with words, her wit and playfulness. Yet questions have also been raised as to whether her style is all surface gloss...or whether she mines deeper issues. What's your opinion?
6. Presumably Sara's death is accidental, stemming from a dare with a young porter. Yet there is also a hint of suicide. What do you think? And if it is suicide, would it make a difference in how you think about the novel?
7. What is Lise's illness all about? Why does she invite Else to spend a night at the hotel? (Don't overlook the wordplay in the two names—Lise/Else.)
8. Why is Lise so enraged about both the hotel and Penny? What do they represent to her? Are they deserving of Lise's hostility?
9. Consider Else as a character. What does her watching TV through other peoples' windows suggest about her (thematically or otherwise)? What about her elisions—was it heard for you to understand her speech? Did you find it humorous or irritating? What do we come to learn, or suspect, about Else's past?
10. Why does Smith set the novel in a hotel? How does the setting work as the book's central metaphor? Think of people checking in...and out of a hotel...every hour, every day. What else does a hotel suggest?
11. Follow-up to Question #10: Think about the hotel as a specific corporate entity. What does the "Global Hotel" suggest about the values and practices of contemporary society? In what way, then, is this novel a social critique?
12. Talk about the ways in which Claire reacts to Sara's death? Why does she collect her dust and trophies, dress up in her uniform, and try to work out how many seconds it took for her to fall to her death. Is Clare's reaction normal or obsessive? Do you find her presence in the novel morbid or endearing...or what?
13. Think about how Clare forms the link between the other characters. Is this story really hers? In what way is she instrumental in the novel's achieving a sort of stasis at the end?
14. Talk about the section titles and their meaning: Past, Present Historic, Future Conditional, Perfect, Future in the Past, and Present. Clearly these are references to time. Where else is time mentioned? What is its importance to the novel?
15. Trace the stages of grief in the novel, particularly as represented through the characters.
16. As a postmodernist, Ali Smith has sprinkled her "text" with postmodern theory: indeterminacy of words; fragmentation of consciousness and experience; impermanence; tenuousness of cause-and-affect...and of life in general. Can you locate those ideas in Hotel World?
17. Finally, do you like this book? Did you enjoy reading it?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Syringa Tree
Pamela Gien, 2006
Random House
254 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375759109
Summary
In this heartrending and inspiring novel set against the gorgeous, vast landscape of South Africa under apartheid, award-winning playwright Pamela Gien tells the story of two families—one black, one white—separated by racism, connected by love.
Even at the age of six, lively, inquisitive Elizabeth Grace senses she’s a child of privilege, “a lucky fish.” Soothing her worries by raiding the sugar box, she scampers up into the sheltering arms of the lilac-blooming syringa tree growing behind the family’s suburban Johannesburg home.
Lizzie’s closest ally and greatest love is her Xhosa nanny, Salamina. Deeper and more elemental than any traditional friendship, their fierce devotion to each other is charged and complicated by Lizzie’s mother, who suffers from creeping melancholy, by the stresses of her father’s medical practice, which is segregated by law, and by the violence, injustice, and intoxicating beauty of their country.
In the social and racial upheavals of the 1960s, Lizzie’s eyes open to the terror and inhumanity that paralyze all the nation’s cultures—Xhosa, Zulu, Jew, English, Boer. Pass laws requiring blacks to carry permission papers for white areas and stringent curfews have briefly created an orderly state—but an anxious one. Yet Lizzie’s home harbors its own set of rules, with hushed midnight gatherings, clandestine transactions, and the girl’s special task of protecting Salamina’s newborn child—a secret that, because of the new rules, must never be mentioned outside the walls of the house.
As the months pass, the contagious spirit of changesends those once underground into the streets to challenge the ruling authority. And when this unrest reaches a social and personal climax, the unthinkable will happen and forever change Lizzie’s view of the world.
When The Syringa Tree opened off-Broadway in 2001, theater critics and audiences alike embraced the play, and it won many awards. Pamela Gien has superbly deepened the story in this new novel, giving a personal voice to the horrors and hopes of her homeland. Written with lyricism, passion, and life-affirming redemption, this compelling story shows the healing of the heart of a young woman and the soul of a sundered nation. (From the publisher.)
The Syringa Tree has also been adapted to TV film in 2002.
Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—Johannesburg, South Africa
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Obie Award for Best Play and Performance; Drama
Desk Award for Performance; Outer Circle Award for
Performance; Drama League Honor—all for 2001 for the
stage version of Syringa.
• Currently—lives in California
Pamela Gien was born and raised in South Africa. She is the recipient of the Obie Award for Best Play 2001. She currently lives in the United States. The Syringa Tree is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
More
The Syringa Tree had its world premiere at ACT in Seattle, followed by a two-year run in New York. Gien has since travelled around the world, including London and Cape Town, performing the play, astonishing audiences with her adept portrayal of such diverse characters, and moving them deeply through the raw emotions and profound insights contained within the story.
As both a writer and performer of The Syringa Tree, Pamela Gien won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, a Drama League Honor, a nomination for the John Gassner Playwriting Award, and the Obie for both Performance and Best Play 2001. She shares these awards and her deepest gratitude with Matt Salinger, her producer and Larry Moss, her director.
She has also appeared in film in Men Seeking Women with Will Ferrell, and The Last Supper starring Bill Paxton, Jason Alexander, Charles Durning, and Ron Perlman.
Book Reviews
Novels can be large, hardy vehicles, capable of surviving lackluster maintenance and neglected fine-tuning while still carrying readers to someplace worth visiting. This version of The Syringa Tree conveys, as pale fire, some of the brightness generated by Gien’s stage performances. Her original concept—to illustrate the breathtaking cruelty and lunacy of apartheid by detailing its effects on a small number of black and white characters—remains effective. A child’s bewildered response to the injustices inflicted on people she knows and loves seems entirely appropriate; only adults could have believed that apartheid made any practical or moral sense.
Paul Gray - New York Times Book Review
A spare, yet poetic account that steadily works its magic on the reader as both a portrait of individuals, and a country, in the tumultuous time of apartheid.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
A gorgeous, hopeful, heartrending novel.... This uncommonly moving, deeply humane novel nearly dances in a reader's hands with the rhythms and the colors, the complicatedness and the inimitability of southern Africa.
O, The Oprah Magazine
(Based on the one-woman stage production.) South African writer and actress Pamela Gien's new one-woman play, The Syringa Tree, is the tragic story of two South African families—one black, one white— and the complex love they share, even as race stands between them. While this isn't unexplored territory, what makes this production a standout is Gien's impressive performance in creating 28 fully realized characters on a sparsely decorated stage. Through her expressive movements and creative vocalizations— most startlingly in rapid-fire exchanges between six-year old Elizabeth and her redoubtable, deep-voiced South African caretaker—Gien single-handedly fills the stage with the people, music and verdant countryside of South Africa.
Gien's dazzling performance only enhances the simple emotional power of the tale. What we see through the eyes of six-year-old Elizabeth, her black caretaker and the others who populate this story is that apartheid was not only fought in the frontline political struggle broadcast around the world, but also in the closely knit circles of families, in the intimacies of individual relationships and in the quiet but fierce struggles of personal conscience.
Time Magazine
Six-year-old Lizzie Grace sits in the syringa tree in her South African backyard whenever she's troubled. From there, she watches her Afrikaner neighbors and the black workers her part-Jewish family employs. Although her parents an always-busy doctor father and a depressed mother have tried to insulate themselves and their staff, it is impossible to shield Lizzie from the racism that permeates daily life. Indeed, as the meaning of apartheid unfolds, Lizzie struggles to understand racial laws that force her nanny to carry work papers and hide from the police. Through her eyes, readers see South African townships and experience the indignities that provoked underground resistance movements. Although the protagonist is occasionally cloying, this is part of the book's charm. Nonetheless, there are spots where the child's perspective weakens the text and leaves the reader hungry for more. For example, Lizzie's grandfather is murdered by a Rhodesian rebel, but the reason for this political crime remains unclear. South African-born Gien, who created this novel from her Obie Award-winning play of the same name, here illuminates a shameful history of a country by highlighting the juxtaposition of race, anti-Semitism, and class privilege. Highly recommended. —Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY.
Library Journal
(Adult/High School) Six-year-old Lizzy is present when her doctor father secretly delivers the baby of her nurse, Salamina, in a white suburb of South Africa in 1963. It becomes Lizzy's special responsibility to keep the infant hidden from the police as well as from the Afrikaner neighbors. As the irrepressible child grows, it becomes more and more difficult to keep Moliseng hidden, and she is sent to the slums of Soweto to live with her grandmother. At the age of 14, she is killed by police as she leads other children in a final defiant and heartrending gesture, proclaiming her freedom. The narrative is told from the point of view of Lizzy, who grapples with the conflicting social, political, and religious values of the times and with her mother's depression. She finds comfort, if not answers, in the distracted attention of her father, the unconditional love of her nurse, and her own Syringa tree with its sweet-smelling blossoms. Readers will be carried away by lyrical descriptions of the sensual beauty of the veld and will experience the heartache of the characters as their lives are torn apart by the violence of the period. The story is as compelling and enlightening as Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, and the writing is evocative of that classic work. —Jackie Gropman, Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA
School Library Review
Discussion Questions
1. The novel is set in South Africa during the time leading up to apartheid. The story is told from the point of view of a six-year-old girl for most of the novel. How does this affect the way you perceive the situation in South Africa?
2. Lizzy thinks, even before Moliseng is born, that it is her dire responsibility to protect and save her loved ones. She literally thinks her mother is “kept alive by her exceedingly good behaviour.” Why has she come to believe that her actions and thoughts will direct the fates of others?
3. Both Eugenie and Salamina are maternal with Lizzy. How are Lizzy’s relationships with them similar, and how are they different?
4. Family is a major force in Pamela Gien’s story. How does Lizzy understand and how does she feel about her mother, her father, and her grandfather? How does she understand/feel about Salamina and Moliseng? Does Lizzy perceive them to be equal members of the family? Is she aware of any differences?
5. Lizzy is raised by an atheist parent. How do you think this helps or hinders her in her chaotic environment? What of her credo: “Oh no nothing will happen God won’t let anything happen”?
6. Compare Lizzy’s two ‘siblings.’ Moliseng plays a large role at the beginning while John comes to fruition as a character much later in the story. Why do you think this is? Is it significant that she refers to Moliseng as “the speck” and to John by his real name?
7. Why do Lizzy’s parents choose to risk so much by allowing “the speck” to stay at their house?
8. What is the role of Moliseng’s character in the story? Think about her relationship to Lizzy, her social position, and her status in the world. What about Loeska? What is her role in the story? Do Moliseng and Loeska symbolize anything beyond their individual characters?
9. Why does Lizzy want to be friends with Loeska so desperately?
10. Why is the book named after a tree in the Grace family’s back yard? Think about its description in the novel, physical and otherwise, and about trees as symbols in general. Think about what goes on in and around this tree, and the spirituality it evokes.
11. Dr. Milton Bird tells Dr. Isaac Grace that Eugenie’s depression is “unrelated to circumstance.” Do you agree?
12. Why does Lizzy bludgeon the chameleon in her backyard?
13. Why was Grandpa George murdered? Why did the murderer steal Grandpa George’s medals?
14. Why do you think Salamina leaves? Why does she do it secretly, in the night, and not say goodbye?
15. Why does Lizzy finally return to Africa?
16. How does the book’s tone change throughout the novel? What factors provoke the change?
17. The themes of displacement and disappearance surface over and over again in the novel, both on personal and cultural levels. Who really is lost and who is gone? Who is trying to forget and who is forgotten?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Pearl of China
Anchee Min, 2010
Bloomsbury USA
278 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781596916975
Summary
In the small southern China town of Chin-kiang, in the last days of the nineteenth century, two young girls bump heads and become thick as thieves. Willow is the only child of a destitute family. Pearl is the headstrong daughter of Christian missionaries—and will grow up to become Pearl S. Buck, Nobel Prize-winning writer and activist.
This unlikely pair becomes lifelong friends, confiding their beliefs and dreams, experiencing love and motherhood, and eventually facing civil war and exile. Pearl of China brings new color to the remarkable life of Pearl S. Buck, illuminated by the sweep of history and an intimate, unforgettable friendship. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 14, 1957
• Where—Shanghai, China
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California, USA
Anchee Min is a Chinese-born painter, photographer, musician, and author. Born in Shanghai in 1957, at seventeen she was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao's Shanghai Film Studio recruited her to work as a movie actress.
She came to the United States in 1984 with the help of actress Joan Chen. Her memoir, Red Azalea, was named one of the New York Times Notable Books of 1994 and was an inter-national bestseller, with rights sold in twenty countries. Her novels Becoming Madame Mao and Empress Orchid were published to critical acclaim and were national bestsellers. Her two other novels, Katherine and Wild Ginger, were published to wonderful reviews and impressive foreign sales. Min is married to author Lloyd Lofthouse. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
As a girl in Maoist China, Min (Red Azalea) was ordered to denounce Pearl S. Buck; now she offers a thin sketch of the Nobel laureate’s life from the point of view of fictional Willow Yee, a fiercely loyal friend. A lifelong friendship begins in Chin-kiang when Willow meets Pearl, whose missionary father converts Willow’s educated but impoverished father. Under threat from hostilities toward foreigners, Pearl departs for the safety of Shanghai, and, later, to America for college, but she returns for her wedding to find that Willow is the satisfied founder of a newspaper and a very unhappy wife. While a changing China swirls around them, their friendship is tested as they both fall in love with the same poet. As the 1949 revolution looms, Pearl flees China, and Willow’s husband becomes Mao’s right-hand man, leading to a fateful showdown with Madam Mao when Willow refuses to denounce her lifelong friend. Though the setting and revolutionary backdrop are inherently dramatic, Min’s account of an epic friendship is curiously low-key, with some sections reading more like a treatment than a narrative.
Publishers Weekly
Min opens her latest with guilty sobs recalling her "brainwashed" teenaged self in 1970s China, when she was forced to denounce Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning writer Pearl S. Buck to Madame Mao. That guilt clearly drove Min (Red Azalea) to write this "based on the life of Pearl S. Buck" novel about a fictional friendship between Buck and her Chinese best friend, Willow. Unfortunately, by book's end readers are left with little more than caricatures of a Chinese Saint Pearl and her long-suffering sidekick, both ultimately victims of the easily vilified Madame Mao. Buck and Willow bond as turn-of-the-century girls, and Min uses their lifelong relationship to chart China's tumultuous history. Verdict: A novel about Buck could have been interesting, but this one is marred by insipid dialog (Buck's husband should be more understanding because of his Cornell degree, her would-be lover wants to know if she "love[s] like a Chinese woman"), jolting gaps (Buck's adopted daughter, Janice, disappears after one mention), and apocryphal pronouncements (Buck apologizes via Voice of America for casting Western actors in Hollywood's whitewashed version of The Good Earth). Buck's story deserves better. With two autobiographies and 80-plus titles to choose from, readers can easily access Buck directly. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, Washington, DC
Library Journal
Min (The Last Empress, 2007) offers an adoring fictional biography of Pearl S. Buck. Narrator Willow Yee grows up in Chin-Kiang at the turn of the century. She lives with her impoverished grandmother and father, a coolie and seasonal farmhand despite his education and literary aspirations. Portrayed with intriguing moral ambiguity, Mr. Yee is a conniver, his motives both self-serving and earnest as he brings converts to zealous missionary Absalom Sydenstricker, Pearl's father. As Pearl jokes, "My father is a nut and your father is a crook." Soon Willow and Pearl become inseparable. The early scenes of their childhood, before history gets in the way, are filled with natural lyricism and engaging drama. But once the Boxer Rebellion rears its head and Pearl moves on to missionary school in Shanghai, the novel loses steam. Min gives Willow the skeleton of a story: She is forced into marriage with an opium addict, escapes and becomes a newspaper editor in Nanking, marries a Communist Party member, is denounced and imprisoned, meets Nixon during his visit to Pearl's childhood home in Chin-Kiang. Willow's character isn't fleshed out; her only purpose seems to be to provide a secondhand, sketchy account of Pearl's life, some of it through dry letters. Pearl attends college in America but longs to return to China. She marries Lossing Buck, who wants to enact Chinese agrarian reform, but the marriage sours by the time their mentally retarded daughter is born. Pearl's love affair with the poet Hsu Chih-mo is depicted as the life-changing event in Pearl's creative life, although historians have only circumstantial proof the two were lovers. After Pearl returns to America in middle age, the novel slogs on bloodlessly. A straightforward biography would have served better than this flat, hagiographic narrative.
Kirkus Review
Discussion Questions
1. Pearl of China opens with a quotation from Pearl S. Buck: “I was never deceived by Chinese women, not even by the flower-like lovely girls. They are the strongest women in the world.” Discuss how two strong-willed characters in Pearl of China, Willow and Madame Mao, display the fortitude that Buck describes. How are these two women’s strengths similar and different? Who benefits—and who suffers—from these two women’s powers?
2. Describe the changing fortune of Willow’s family. When we first meet Willow, how is her family coping with poverty? How do their fortunes change over the course of the novel? How does Willow’s peasant background eventually become an advantage?
3. Although Pearl is American, “beneath her skin, she was Chinese.” (263) What Chinese qualities does Pearl exhibit in childhood and in adulthood? What American characteristics does she have? How is Pearl able to reconcile her Chinese heritage and her Western birth?
4. Compare the relationships Pearl and Willow have with their fathers. What troubles does each girl have with her father? How does the relationship between Pearl and Absalom change over the course of the novel, and what difficulties between them are never resolved?
5. Absalom’s church in Chin-kiang weathers many changes. How do Papa and Carpenter Chan attempt to reconcile Christian and Chinese traditions? What strategies seem most successful in attracting new members to the church? How does Absalom react to these changes? How does the church endure and evolve after Absalom’s death?
6. Willow loves two musical works: the Chinese opera The Butterfly Lovers and the Christian hymn “Amazing Grace.” When does she first encounter each work? What impact does each have upon her life?
7. Discuss the love triangle of Willow, Pearl, and Hsu Chih-mo. How does the poet come between the two women friends? How does Willow react to Pearl and Hsu Chi-Mo’s affair at first? Does she seem to fully recover from this heartbreak after Hsu Chih-mo’s death? Why or why not?
8. Both Papa and Willow are subjected to torture due to their friendships with Absalom and Pearl. Why does Papa betray Absalom when Bumpkin Emperor and the Nationalists torture him? How does Willow withstand Madame Mao’s imprisonment?
9. Marital problems plague many characters in Pearl of China. Consider the following troubled couples: Absalom and Carie, Pearl and Lossing, Willow and Dick. What do these marriages have in common, and how are they different? What better models of love and coupling exist within the novel?
10. Discuss the theme of forgiveness in Pearl of China. When are Papa, Dick, and Bumpkin Emperor forgiven, and why? What friendships and values are strengthened through forgiveness? Which characters have difficulty forgiving others’ transgressions, and why?
11. As she begins to write novels, Pearl tells Willow, “The character must believe in himself, and he must have the stamina to endure.” (113) Does Willow display the courage that Pearl describes? What hardships is Willow able to endure? At which moments is her belief in herself especially challenged?
12. Willow reminisces, “Without Pearl and Hsu Chih-mo in my life, I never would have been the person I am today.... Although I published and impressed others as a writer, it was never my air and rice, as it was for Pearl and Hsu Chih-mo.” (155–56) How does writing serve as “air and rice” for Pearl and Hsu Chih-mo? How do Pearl and Willow maintain their connection to Hsu Chih-mo after his death?
13. Describe Dick’s relationship with Mao and Communism. How does Dick demonstrate his loyalty to Mao’s cause? When is Dick’s loyalty challenged, and how does he react? Why does Mao decline to protect Dick from Madame Mao? What regrets does Dick express on his deathbed, and how does Willow react to these confessions?
14. On her voyage to America, Willow pictures Pearl’s American home: “I imagined the rooms filled with tasteful furniture and decorated with Western art. Pearl would have a library, for she had always been a lover of books. I also imagined that she would have a garden. She had inherited Carie’s passion for nature. The garden would be filled with plants whose names I wouldn’t know, but it would be beautiful.” (261–62) What surprises does Willow discover when she finally sees Pearl’s home and garden? How do Pearl’s home, garden, and grave meet her expectations, and how do they defy her imagination?
15. If you have read The Good Earth, discuss similarities and differences between Buck’s novel and Min’s Pearl of China. How does each author portray the people, land, and troubles of rural China?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Painter from Shanghai
Jennfier Cody Epstein, 2007
W.W. Norton & Co.
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393335316
Summary
Reminiscent of Memoirs of a Geisha, a re-imagining of the life of Pan Yuliang and her transformation from prostitute to post-Impressionist.
Down the muddy waters of the Yangtze River and into the seedy backrooms of "The Hall of Eternal Splendor," through the raucous glamour of prewar Shanghai and the bohemian splendor of 1920s Paris, and back to a China ripped apart by civil war and teetering on the brink of revolution: this novel tells the story of Pan Yuliang, one of the most talented—and provocative—Chinese artists of the twentieth century.
Jennifer Cody Epstein's epic brings to life the woman behind the lush, Cezannesque nude self-portraits, capturing with lavish detail her life in the brothel and then as a concubine to a Republican official who would ultimately help her find her way as an artist. Moving with the tide of historical events, The Painter from Shanghai celebrates a singularly daring painting style—one that led to fame, notoriety, and, ultimately, a devastating choice: between Pan's art and the one great love of her life. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
Based in New York, Jennifer Cody Epstein has written for Self, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. She has published short fiction in several journals and was a finalist in a Glimmer Train fiction contest. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
In this age of memoir and thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, writers who take high dives into deeply imagined waters have become increasingly rare—and valuable. What a pleasure, then, to discover that Jennifer Cody Epstein, whose luminous first novel, The Painter from Shanghai, is based on the actual life of Pan Yuliang, a former child prostitute turned celebrated painter, also happens to be one such writer.... In an epigraph, Epstein quotes the English painter John Sloane, who wrote that "though a living cannot be made at art, art makes life worth living. It makes starving, living." In the end, this is precisely what Epstein illustrates in her moving characterization of Pan Yuliang.
Sarah Towers - New York Times
Epstein's spotless pace, vivid characterizations, and often breathtaking descriptions elevate the novel.... The book's intimacy is spellbinding, not because of the courtesan era when Yuliang "feels like a peach without its skin," but because Epstein's true achievement in resurrecting such a passionate woman who pursued a life of her own despite intrinsic barriers.
Chicago Tribune
A refreshing telling...non-Chinese-speaking Epstein writes about historical China and the Chinese in a surprisingly authentic way. Her descriptions of brothel life and the landscape of Shanghai, and her rendering of traditional weddings, funerals and foot bindings, make the book feel like a cross between Zhang Yimou's movies and Chen Yifei's oil paintings.
South China Morning Post
Epstein's sweeping debut novel, set in early 20th-century China, fictionalizes the life of Chinese painter Pan Yuliang. Born Xiuquing, she is orphaned at a young age and later sold into prostitution by her uncle, who needs the money to support his opium habit. Renamed Yuliang, she becomes the brothel's top girl and soon snags the attention of customs inspector Pan Zanhua, who makes her his concubine. Zanhua sets her up in Shanghai, where she enrolls in the Shanghai Art Academy and early on struggles with life study, unable to separate the nude's monetary value from its value in the "currency of beauty." She eventually succeeds, winning a scholarship to study in Europe. But when she returns to China, itself inching toward revolution, the conservative establishment is critical of Yuliang, balking as she adopts Western-style dress and becomes known for her nudes (one newspaper deems her work pornography). Simmering resentments hit a flashpoint at a disastrous Shanghai retrospective exhibit, and the fallout nearly destroys Yuliang's artistic ambition. Convincing historic detail is woven throughout and nicely captures the plight of women in the era. Epstein's take on Yuliang's life is captivating to the last line.
Publishers Weekly
Journalist Epstein's first novel showcases two turbulent decades in Chinese history (1913-37) as experienced by prostitute-turned-painter Pan Yuliang. This fictionalized account of real-life artist Madame Pan reveals the woman who created some of China's most provocative post-impressionist paintings. Sold into slavery by her opium-addicted uncle, Yuliang survives life in a brothel, rises from maid to top girl, and eventually achieves quasirespectability by becoming a concubine (second wife) to an honorable civil servant, Pan Zanhua. He teaches her to read and write and helps her gain admission to the Shanghai Arts Academy. Throughout her career, Yuliang is criticized for painting nude self-portraits that reflect a Western sensibility. Her modern artistic and political convictions take a toll on her husband's career, and he allows her to follow her own destiny and supports her when she leaves China to study first in Paris and later in Rome. When Yuliang returns to China, she finds her country torn by political factions. Fans of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha and Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan will enjoy this engrossing story of a woman forced to choose between following her heart and pursuing her art. Recommended for public libraries. —Loralyn Whitney, Edinboro Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib.
Library Journal
Fictional portrait of Pan Yuliang, a real-life 20th-century Chinese prostitute turned successful artist. In the mold of Memoirs of a Geisha, Epstein's debut devotes itself to the exotic life of a woman whose early years were spent in the service of men. Orphaned Yuliang is 14 in 1913 when her opium-addicted uncle sells her into a brothel. Beatings are routine, and escapees are caught and murdered. Having learned to please clients, Yuliang rises to "top girl" and has the good fortune to meet a modern-thinking customs inspector, Pan Zanhua, who buys her freedom, "marries" her (he already has a wife and child) and moves her to Shanghai. There she develops an interest in drawing and becomes one of very few women admitted to the Art Academy. Epstein touches on the shifting political background as Yuliang travels to France and Rome and develops her controversial work, which sometimes uses her own naked body as subject matter. Later she returns to Shanghai and Nanjing where, in 1936, an exhibition of her "Western-style" art is vandalized. In 1937 she abandons Zanhua and leaves once more for France, as war with Japan looms. She dies in 1977, only "modestly successful in the commercial sense," but with awards to her name and a body of some 4,000 works of art. The enlivening spark flickers only intermittently in this professional account of an unusual life.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What happened to Yuliang's mother and father? How are Yuliang's experiences of family and intimacy shaped by her Uncle Wu and, later, her life in the brothel?
2. In rendering Yuliang's years working as a prostitute, Epstein depicts the intersection of the sexual economy, the business elite, and political leadership. How do the intrigues of the brothel affect the economy and government in Wuhu?
3. How does poetry play a role in Yuliang and Zanhua's relationship? How does their shared appreciation for poetry stand in contrast to their feelings about visual art?
4. Yuliang's budding talent for sketching is not revealed until chapter sixteen. Do earlier chapters contain any hints of her artistic abilities?
5. How is Shanghai different than Wuhu? How does Yuliang's life change after she moves to Shanghai?
6. What results from Yuliang's confrontation with the women in the bathhouse in chapter twenty-four? What does this scene reveal about Chinese female society—and what does it reveal about Yuliang?
7. Teacher Hong instructs Yuliang to "see the skin as more than simply skin." Jingling, as she mentors Yuliang in the brothel, advises her protégée to remember that "it's just skin." Whose advice does Yuliang follow, and why? Why is painting nude figures important for Yuliang?
8. How does politics play a role in the story? To what extent is Yuliang a political person?
9. Both Xudun and Zanhua have strong feelings about politics and government in China. What two ideologies do these men represent? Are they entirely opposed?
10. In the 1920s and '30s Shanghai was often called "the Paris of the East." As depicted in the novel, how does Shanghai compare with the French capital? Both cities are cosmopolitan, but in different ways. How do you see those differences?
11. Why does Yuliang demand an abortion? Do you think she comes to regret that decision?
12. How does the course of Yuliang's personal and artistic career compare with that of her mentor, Xu Beihong?
13. In chapter thirty-three, when Xudun takes Yuliang to the top of Notre Dame Cathedral—in what seems to be one of the most exciting and romantic moments of Yuliang's life—her thoughts return to her uncle, who sold her into prostitution. Yuliang, however, frequently professes a desire to stay "rooted in the present." To what extent is she able to do that? How do the wounds of her past manifest themselves later in Yuliang's life? How do they affect her art?
14. After she moves to Nanjing—after years in Paris and Rome and a stint as an outspoken teacher at the Shanghai Art Academy—why does Yuliang submit to acting as "the second woman" to Guanyin in Zanhua's household? Why does Yuliang feel sympathy for Zanhua's first wife? Do you think Guanyin deserves sympathy?
15. "It is hard to find heroes in times such as these," says Qihua, referring to Zanhua. After all that is revealed about him later in the book, does Zanhua emerge as a hero in this story? Does Xudun? Had Xudun lived, do you think Yuliang would have chosen him over her husband? Would you want her to?
16. In moving back to Paris, Yuliang chooses a life of free artistic expression over a more traditional life of marriage. The last chronological scene in the novel is the prologue. Based on that opening scene, how do you think Yuliang views her life's choices? How do you view them? Having finished the book, how has your feeling about her life and character changed? Why do you think Epstein chose to begin the novel with this scene?
17. At the end of her life, Pan Yuliang had become known in her Paris circle as the "Woman of Three 'No's" for her steadfast refusal to work with dealers, take French citizenship, or enter into love affairs. Why do you think she was so firmly against each of these things? Are they in keeping with the image of her you've formed from reading The Painter of Shanghai.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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