The Imperfectionists
Tom Rachman, 2010
Random House
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385343664
Summary
Set against the gorgeous backdrop of Rome, Tom Rachman’s wry, vibrant debut follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters, editors, and executives of an international English language newspaper as they struggle to keep it—and themselves—afloat.
Fifty years and many changes have ensued since the paper was founded by an enigmatic millionaire, and now, amid the stained carpeting and dingy office furniture, the staff’s personal dramas seem far more important than the daily headlines.
Kathleen, the imperious editor in chief, is smarting from a betrayal in her open marriage; Arthur, the lazy obituary writer, is transformed by a personal tragedy; Abby, the embattled financial officer, discovers that her job cuts and her love life are intertwined in a most unexpected way.
Out in the field, a veteran Paris freelancer goes to desperate lengths for his next byline, while the new Cairo stringer is mercilessly manipulated by an outrageous war correspondent with an outsize ego.
And in the shadows is the isolated young publisher who pays more attention to his prized basset hound, Schopenhauer, than to the fate of his family’s quirky newspaper.
As the era of print news gives way to the Internet age and this imperfect crew stumbles toward an uncertain future, the paper’s rich history is revealed, including the surprising truth about its founder’s intentions.
Spirited, moving, and highly original, The Imperfectionists will establish Tom Rachman as one of our most perceptive, assured literary talents. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Where—London, England, UK
• Raised—Vancouver, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto; M.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in London
Tom Rachman was born in London and raised in Vancouver, Canada. A graduate of the University of Toronto and the Columbia School of Journalism, he has been a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, stationed in Rome. From 2006 to 2008, he worked as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He lives in London.
The Imperfectionsists (2010) is his first novel; The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (2014) his second, followed by The Italian Teacher (2018). (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/09/2014.)
Book Reviews
Mr. Rachman, a former journalist, knows and loves the myopia of his old profession, the gallows humor of its practitioners and the precariousness of the business to which they devote their lives. Armed with this knowledge and somehow free of the fashionable diffidence that too often plagues fiction about the workplace, he has written a rich, thrilling book that is both love letter to and epitaph for the newspaper world.... The Imperfectionists is a splendid original, filled with wit and structured so ingeniously that figuring out where the author is headed is half the reader's fun. The other half comes from his sparkling descriptions not only of newspaper office denizens but of the tricks of their trade, presented in language that is smartly satirical yet brimming with affection.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
This first novel by Tom Rachman, a London-born journalist who has lived and worked all over the world, is so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off. I still haven't answered that question, nor do I know how someone so young...could have acquired such a precocious grasp of human foibles. The novel is alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching, and it's assembled like a Rubik's Cube. I almost feel sorry for Rachman, because a debut of this order sets the bar so high.
Christopher Buckley - New York Times Book Review
The Imperfectionists is about what happens when professionals realize that their craft no longer has meaning in the world's eyes…and that the only people who really understand them are on the same foundering ship, and that, come to think of it, they really loved that damn ship for all it made their lives hell.... Rachman is a fine observer and a funny writer—and a writer who knows how to be funny in character.
Louis Bayard - Washington Post
(Starred review.) In his zinger of a debut, Rachman deftly applies his experience as foreign correspondent and editor to chart the goings-on at a scrappy English-language newspaper in Rome.... As the ragtag staff faces down the implications of the paper's tilt into oblivion, there are more than enough sublime moments, unexpected turns and sheer inky wretchedness to warrant putting this on the shelf next to other great newspaper novels
Publishers Weekly
With its evocative Italian setting and its timely handling of an industry in flux, this polished, sophisticated debut can be relished in one sitting or read piecemeal as a satisfying series of vignettes linked by historical references to the Ott family empire. Buy it, read it, talk it up. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL
Library Journal
Characters range from a kid just out of college who learns the hard way that he doesn't want to be a reporter, to an Italian diplomat's widow. Some are instantly sympathetic, others hard to like. Each is vivid and compelling in his or her own way. The individual stories work well independently, even better as the author skillfully weaves them together.... [A] very strong debut. Funny, humane and artful.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Imperfectionists:
1. The book is a series of vignettes about 11 people in the newsroom of an unnamed paper. Yet The Imperfectionists is more than collection of short stories. How are the chapters connected? How does the book manage to cohere as a novel? Or does it? Perhaps you found it difficult to jump from one character to another—did you?
2. We find out at the end of the book why Cyrus Ott began the newspaper in 1953. Did you have suspicions all along...or were you caught by surprise?
3. Talk about how the headline for each chapter ties in with the fate of the character involved—particularly, say, the seemingly unrelated headline for Lloyd Burko: "Bush Slumps to New Low in the Polls."
4. Who are your favorite characters, the ones with whom you most sympathize—Kathleen Solson or Herman Cohen, perhaps? Who is the saddest—perhaps Ruby Zaga? What about your least favorite? Overall, does Rachman do a good job of fleshing out his characters—creating them as fully developed human beings? Do you come to care about any of them...some more than others?
5. What happens to Arthur Gopal at the end of the story? Why does he suddenly begin to perform beyond expectations? Why does he abandon his wife?
6. Why does Hardy never confront her boyfriend? Why does she let him get away with the theft of her belongings? What accounts for her attraction to him...in fact, is she in love with him?
7. Is Dave Bellig's behavior justifiable...or not? Was it fair that he was let go...which makes the CFO fair game?
8. Then there's Winston Cheung. Does he learn a valuable life lesson...or is he simply duped by a talented con-man? Do you find the story humorous...or irritating?
9. What is the significance of the title?
10. The fictional newspaper in this work serves as a metaphor for the press in general. Talk about the fate of newspapers— their future survival. What do you think will happen to them and why? What will be the impact of their possible demise? How important is a well-trained, professional press corp to democracy? Is the egalitarianism of news reporting on the Internet a good thing...or not?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Next Thing on My List
Jill Smolinski, 2007
Crown Publishers
204 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307351296
Summary
Meet June Parker. She works for L.A. Rideshare, adores her rent-stabilized apartment in Santa Monica, and struggles with losing a few pesky pounds.
But June’s life is about to change.
After a dark turn of events involving Weight Watchers, a chili recipe, and a car accident in which her passenger, Marissa, dies, June finds herself in possession of a list Marissa has written, “20 Things to Do By My 25th Birthday.” Even though they barely knew each other, June is compelled by both guilt and a desire to set things right and finish the list for Marissa.
The tasks before her range from inspiring (Run a 5K), to daring (Go braless), to near-impossible (Change someone’s life), and as June races to achieve each goal before the deadline, she learns more about her own life than she ever bargained for.
Funny, engaging, and heartwarming, The Next Thing on My List features a loveable, relatable heroine and a story with plenty of humor and heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—in Troy, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A., Central Michigan University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California, area
Jill Smolinski is the author of the novels The Next Thing on My List and Flip-Flopped, as well as nine non-fiction titles on subjects including origami, travel games and supermodels. Her work has appeared in major women's magazines, as well as in an anthology of short stories, American Girls About Town. A transplanted midwesterner, she now lives in Los Angeles with her son (From the publishers.)
Extras
• At six years of age, Jill was invited to participate in a young authors conference because of a short story she wrote. From then on, she wanted to be a writer.
• She actually works, as June does, for a non-profit group that promotes carpooling or bus-riding. "Over the years, I've become somewhat of a rideshare expert—I can rattle off statistics and facts about carpooling in California so extensively...that I'm rarely invited to dinner parties anymore." (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Fresh and fun to read.... The details of [June’s] life are set out with a deft, light touch.
Boston Globe
Smolinski follows up her debut, Flip-Flopped, with an airy, hit and mostly-miss novel about one rudderless woman's accidental journey of self-discovery. After a Weight Watchers meeting, narrator June Parker offers a ride home to newly svelte Marissa Jones, and the two hit it off until Marissa dies in a nasty one-car accident. When June runs into Marissa's hot brother at the cemetery six months after the crash, she makes a rash promise to carry out the dead girl's list of 20 things to do before she turned 25 (even though June is 34). The challenges that follow—running a 5K, kissing a stranger, "dare to go braless"—serve less to improve June's life than to highlight how unfortunate it is that she's taken up a stranger's goals instead of her own. Smolinski's Los Angeles is a well-executed set—June tilts at windmills as a writer for a ride-sharing nonprofit—but the most human characters in it are June's tyrannical and calculating boss and her secretly sensitive, underused brother. Though completing the list is a transformative experience for June, the leadup fizzles.
Publishers Weekly
After June Parker offers a ride to Marissa, a virtual stranger, her passenger dies in a freak accident. Filled with guilt, June compares her own lackluster life as a mid-level L.A. Rideshare employee to the promise of Marissa, who had just lost 100 pounds and bought her first pair of sexy shoes. June knows this because she salvaged Marissa's list of "20 Things To Do by My 25th Birthday" from the crash, and those were the only two items crossed off. When June runs into Marissa's very attractive brother, she panics, telling him that she is finishing the list herself in Marissa's honor. At this point, of course, she must give up her procrastinating ways. She has six month to complete the tasks, and the challenge teaches her to embrace life and brings her closer to her friends, family, and coworkers. While the plot may sound like a recipe for unbridled sentimentality, in Smolinski's (Flip-Flopped) talented hands, June's odyssey is funny, charming, and moving. This well-paced novel with carefully crafted characters may appeal to readers of Merrill Markoe and Laura Zigman. Highly recommended.
Library Journal
June Parker's life is meandering along until a freak car accident leaves Marissa, her 24-year-old passenger, dead and June wracked with guilt. June discovers a list Marissa had been keeping.... Clever and winning, Smolinski's novel will have readers rooting for June as they eagerly turn the pages to keep up with her progress on the list. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
Smolinski's follow-up to Flip-Flopped (2002) offers a surprisingly un-morbid account of an underachieving young woman who decides to live out another's unrealized dreams after a tragic car accident. Technically, a piece of furniture toppling off a truck caused the crash that killed 24-year-old Marissa Jones. But June Parker can't help but feel responsible, since she had given Marissa a lift home from a Weight Watchers meeting. The guilt amplifies when June discovers a list in Marissa's purse detailing the 20 things she wanted to do before her 25th birthday. Throwing herself with gusto into completing tasks that range from silly ("go braless") to heartbreaking ("change someone's life"), June finds that they give her lackluster life a focus it has been missing. She mentors an inner city "little sister," trains for and finishes a 5K race, even finds a way for her childless brother and his wife to adopt a baby. Along the way, she grows closer to Marissa's older brother Troy, a helicopter traffic reporter with surfer-boy good looks. He not only helps June check off certain items, such as taking Marissa's mom and grandmother to Las Vegas to see Wayne Newton, but his high-flying job inspires her to do something that just might revolutionize her stalled career. As she powers through Marissa's list, June realizes that her own dreams need tending and tries to break some patterns that have held her back for far too long. Smolinski crafts a believable heroine, and her chipper carpe-diem message may have readers devising their own Top 20s. Sweet, though not particularly memorable.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Marissa died soon after she lost 100 pounds. Was the timing of this was significant to the story, and if so, in what way?
2. Why do you think the author had June complete someone else’s life list and not write it as a woman completing her own?
3. Which items on the list were most challenging to June? Which would you have the hardest time completing? Did any appeal to you?
4. Have you ever written a “life list?” If so, what sort of items were on it, and have you completed any of them? If you haven’t, why not?
5. Life lists aim to help people live more dynamically by doing things—how does fit in with your philosophy of what makes a person’s life important?
6. After the accident, June says that there are two types of horrible events: the type that make you grab life by the throat and never take it for granted, and the type that make you watch a lot of reality TV. Was her reaction realistic? How would you feel if a passenger died when you were driving?
7. What did you think about the relationship between June and Deedee? How would June’s experience have been different if she’d been given the type of “Little Sister” she’d been
expecting?
8. At Sebastian’s party, guests who learn about the list assume that Marissa must have been unhappy if she was fat. Were they being, as one woman put it, “size-ist?” or it is impossible to be overweight and happy in this society?
9. What characteristics attracted June to Troy? Do you think she would have been drawn to him if he wasn’t a traffic reporter? If he wasn’t Marissa’s brother?
10. Several of the items on the list were open to interpretation—do you think June did it in a way Marissa would have liked? What other ways might she have completed some of the tasks on the list?
11. If someone you loved died (or has died), what dream of his or hers would you most want to see fulfilled? What dream of yours do you fear might never happen if you died suddenly?
12. By the end of the book, June feels that she’s changed. What do you think had the biggest impact on her transformation?
(Questions from the author's website.)
Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn
Margaret Campbell Barnes, 1949
Sourcebooks
382 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781402211751
Summary
The enigmatic Anne Boleyn comes to life in this charming, brilliant portrayal by acclaimed British novelist Margaret Campbell Barnes.
The infamous love of King Henry VIII and the mother of Queen Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn undertook a rocky journey from innocent courtier to powerful Queen of England. A meticulous researcher, Margaret Campbell Barnes immerses readers in this intrigue and in the lush, glittery world of the Tudor Court.
The beauty and charms of Anne Boleyn bewitched the most powerful man in the world, King Henry VIII, but her resourcefulness and cleverness were not enough to stop the malice of her enemies. Her swift rise to power quickly became her own undoing.
The author brings to light Boleyn's humanity and courage, giving an intimate look at a young woman struggling to find her own way in a world dominated by men and adversaries. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1892
• Where—Sussex, England, UK
• Death—April 1, 1962
• Where—Isle of Wight, UK
• Education—small private schools
Margaret Campbell Barnes lived from 1891 to 1962. She was the youngest of ten children born into a happy, loving family in Victorian England. She grew up in the Sussex countryside, and was educated at small private schools in London and Paris.
Margaret was already a published writer when she married Peter, a furniture salesman, in 1917. Over the next twenty years a steady stream of short stories and verse appeared over her name (and several noms de plume) in leading English periodicals of the time, Windsor, London, Quiver, and others. Later, Margaret's agents, Curtis Brown Ltd, encouraged her to try her hand at historical novels. Between 1944 and 1962 Margaret wrote ten historical novels. Many of these were bestsellers, book club selections, and translated into foreign editions.
Between World Wars I and II Margaret and Peter brought up two sons, Michael and John. In August 1944, Michael, a lieutenant in the Royal Armoured Corps, was killed in his tank, in the Allied advance from Caen to Falaise in Normandy. Margaret and Peter grieved terribly the rest of their lives. Glimpses of Michael shine through in each of Margaret's later novels.
In 1945 Margaret bought a small thatched cottage on the Isle of Wight, off England's south coast. It had at one time been a smuggler's cottage. But to Margaret it was a special place in which to recover the spirit and carry on writing. And write she did. All together, over two million copies of Margaret Campbell Barnes's historical novels have been sold worldwide. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Barnes gives us a sympathetic version of Anne—an alluring beauty who dazzles two European courts, French and English, with her lively wit, keen intelligence and remarkable grace. Imperious and a schemer, to be sure, but not the grasping monster of Philippa Gregory's book. (Read more...)
A LitLovers LitPick (Sept. '10)
The current Tudormania makes Barnes' historical fiction (My Lady of Cleves, etc.) as welcome today as in 1949, when this novel first appeared. Barnes lucidly envisions the well-documented events of Henry VIII's second wife's brilliant short-lived career: her education in manners, dress and dance at the French court; her tutoring in political scheming by powerful relatives who wish to be more powerful still; her determination not to end up a discarded royal mistress like her older sister. She offers credible interpretations of undocumented aspects of the Boleyn legend (such as Anne's sixth finger) and convincingly depicts Anne as she manipulates Henry to divorce Katherine, break with his chief advisor Cardinal Wolsley and abandon the Catholic Church. She's less good on Anne's relationship with poet-ambassador Thomas Wyatt, and on her loss of Henry's affection: in Barnes's old-school retelling of the journey from courtship to queenship to execution, sexual innuendo stops at innuendo. But she vividly depicts Anne's hopes and fears in an age where royal marriages were brokered like a cattle fair, and beheading could befall even a Queen.
Publishers Weekly
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 Brief Gaudy Hour:
1. Talk about the way in which women in this era, including the two Boleyn daughters, were used as tokens to advance the status and fortunes of families.
2. Aside from her beauty (which was not considered as great as her sister Mary's), what makes Anne Boleyn so appealing to men? What attracts the King?
3. What drives Anne's desire to bring down Cardinal Wolsey? How does she manipulate his downfall?
4. How—and why—does Anne manage to keep the King at bay and out of her bed? What logic does she use upon Henry that makes him agree with her? What do you think might have happened had she agreed to sexual relations before marriage?
5. What are Anne's feelings toward Henry? Does she love him? Why is she so determined to marry him...and attain the title of Queen?
6. Follow-up on Question #5: Perhaps the more significant question is what drives Anne? Is she merely grasping and ambitious, or frightened? In what way is her security/safety bound up with her advancement?
7 What does Anne discover during her visit with Harry Percy six years after they are parted?
8. Talk about Anne's treatment of Catherine of Aragon and her daughter Princess Mary? What possesses Anne to dispense with mourning and celebrate Catherine's death? Why is Henry so angry with her when he interrupts the masque?
9. What affect does the incident of Princess Mary's curtsey on the balcony have on Anne as she and Henry are leaving after visiting to their daughter Elizabeth? Why doesn't Henry pay a visit to Mary?
10. What does Anne finally come to realize about herself...what self-awareness does she gain?
11. Was Anne victim...or a "tragic" figure, who succumbed as a result of an inner flaw?
12. How does this Anne compare with more recent treatments of her in historical fiction, especially in Philippa Gregory's account in The Other Boleyn Girl ... or in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Great House
Nicole Krauss, 2010
W.W. Norton & Co.
289 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393079982
Summary
For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet’s daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer’s life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944.
Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared.
Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change?
Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Reared —Old Westbury, Long Island, USA
• Education—Stanford University; Oxford University
• Awards—William Saroyan Int'l. Prize; Prix du Meilleur Livre
Etranger (France); Edward Lewis Wallant Award
• Currently—Brooklyn, New York
Nicole Krauss is an American author of several novels: Forest Dark (2017), Great House (2010), The History of Love (2005), and Man Walks into a Room (2002). Her work has achieved wide acclaim, with The New York Times referring to her as "one of America's most important authors."
Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories (2003 and 2008). Her novels have been translated into thirty-five languages.
Krauss was born in New York City to an English mother and an American father who grew up partly in Israel. Krauss's maternal grandparents were born in Germany and Ukraine and later emigrated to London. Her paternal grandparents were born in Hungary and Slonim, Belarus, met in Israel, and later emigrated to New York. Many of these places are central to Krauss's 2005 novel, The History of Love, and the book is dedicated to her grandparents.
At the age of 14 Krauss became serious about writing. Until she began her first novel in 2002, Krauss wrote and published mainly poetry.
Education
Krauss enrolled in Stanford University in 1992, and that fall she met Joseph Brodsky who worked closely with her on her poetry over the next three years. He also introduced her to such writers as Italo Calvino and Zbigniew Herbert, who would have a lasting influence.
In 1999, three years after Brodsky died, Krauss produced a documentary about his work for BBC Radio 3, traveling to St. Petersburg where she stood in the "room and a half" where he grew up, made famous by his essay of that title. Krauss majored in English and graduated with Honors, winning a number of undergraduate prizes for her poetry as well as the Dean's Award for academic achievement. She also curated a reading series (with Fiona Maazel) at the Russian Samovar, a NYC restaurant co-founded by Brodsky.
In 1996, she was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and enrolled in a Masters program at Oxford University where she wrote her thesis about the American artist Joseph Cornell. During the second year of her scholarship she attended the Courtauld Institute in London, where she received a Masters in Art History, specializing in seventeenth-century Dutch art, and writing a thesis on Rembrandt.
In 2004, Krauss married the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. They live in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, and have two children. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
An elegiac novel...achieved through exquisitely chosen sensory details that reverberate with emotional intensity. Here [Krauss] gives us her tragic vision pure. It is a high-wire performance, only the wire has been replaced by an exposed nerve, and you hold your breath, and she does not fall.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein - New York Times Book Review
To me the most resonant sections of Nicole Krauss' widely anticipated third novel, Great House, are those narrated by Aaron, an aging Israeli who still hasn't figured out how to relate to one of his adult sons.... The two chapters he narrates pulse with his hot-blooded heartbeat; the drama of his family rises to the level of the epic because he makes it so. As for the rest of the novel, it's well done enough, nicely written and full of cogent insights, but compared with Aaron, it feels as if it's taking place behind a sheet of glass.
David L. Ulin - Los Angeles Times
Nicole Krauss' latest novel, Great House, is precisely the kind of work of art for which the phrase "oddly compelling" was invented. Like her celebrated best-seller, The History of Love, this new novel contemplates love, loss and the oppressive weight of memory on those left behind. The plot here, though, is even murkier than it was in The History of Love.... I'm not sure what it all adds up to; I'm not even sure that Great House has one cohesive theme. But I'm willing to tolerate this confusion because of the isolated moments of psychological illumination that Krauss provides through her startling language. Reading Great House is like being lost in a pitch black room (an image that Krauss gives us more than once here) and then suddenly having a dusty corner of that room brilliantly lit up and exposed.
Maurreen Corrigan - National Public Radio
The most heartbreaking part of Great House is having to finish it.... As the mysteries of this beautifully written novel come spooling out, you’ll marvel at how profoundly one brilliantly crafted extended metaphor involving a mute wooden artifact can remind us what it means to be alive.
Elle
This stunning work showcases Krauss's consistent talent. The novel consists of four stories divided among eight chapters, all touching on themes of loss and recovery, and anchored to a massive writing desk that resurfaces among numerous households, much to the bewilderment and existential tension of those in its orbit, among them a lonely American novelist clinging to the memory of a poet who has mysteriously vanished in Chile, an old man in Israel facing the imminent death of his wife of 51 years, and an esteemed antiques dealer tracking down the things stolen from his father by the Nazis. Much like in Krauss's The History of Love, the sharply etched characters seem at first arbitrarily linked across time and space, but Krauss pulls together the disparate elements, settings, characters, and fragile connective tissue to form a formidable and haunting mosaic of loss and profound sorrow.
Publishers Weekly
In this latest from Krauss (The History of Love), a huge old desk with many drawers becomes the symbol of love and loss for a host of characters from different countries and time periods. There is the New York woman who has written all her novels at the desk, which she was keeping for a Chilean poet who has since disappeared. Then there are the poet's daughter, who comes back years later to claim the desk; the antiques dealer who tracks down meaningful items from people's pasts; the brother and sister who live isolated in a Jerusalem home filled with other people's furniture; the elderly couple in England who live with the desk and a horrible secret; and the dictatorial father who desperately tries to understand his creative son. Verdict: While each character's story is engrossing, the connection among them is at times impossible to follow. Still, Krauss deals with heavyweight themes—the Holocaust, the different ways people cope with suffering, the special cruelty of fathers, the costs of creativity—with meditative, insightful prose that makes for an intense and memorable reading experience. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Krauss’ masterful rendition of character is breathtaking, compelling.... This tour de force of fiction writing will deeply satisfy fans of the author’s first two books and bring her legions more. —Ellen Loughran
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Great House:
1. What is this book about? How does the desk—and its 19 drawers—serve as a metaphor? A metaphor...for what?
2. The book explores the burden of memory and loss. In what way are Krauss's characters trapped by their past? What, in fact, does it mean to become a prisoner of the past? Apply that thought/question to your own life.
3. Spend time talking about each of the stories: narrators and characters. How are they related to the desk—what is the desk's importance to each?
4. Which of the narrators or characters are most sympathetic? Which ones are least sympathetic? Which story do you find most engaging? Least engaging?
5. Who is "Your Honor"—the judge whom Nadia addresses? What is the question that Nadia is pursuing in Israel? What epiphany does Nadia finally attain?
6. Recall Arthur's meditation on life's impermanence: he saw his life as...
a giant empty field where every day a circus erected and dismantled itself...from top to bottom, but never the same circus, so what hope did we really have of ever making sense of ourselves, let alone another?
What does he mean? Does his observation resonate with you? How is that observation played out over and over throughout this book?
7. Talk about Lotte's secret—and why she never shared it with her husband. Why had she never shared her secret with Arthur? Why did she do what she did? Why at the end does Arthur do what he does with the scrap of paper?
8. Why Aaron and his story about Dov included as a narrator in this work? What is the significance of the chapter title his narration, "True Kindness"? What do you think will happen when he arrives at the hospital?
9. What is the thematic significance of George Weisz's observation about his role in locating goods looted by the Nazis:
My business has always been to listen.... Like a doctor, I listen without saying a word. But there's one difference: when all of the talking is through, I provide a solution. It's true, I can't bring the dead back to life. But I can bring back the chair they once sat in, the bed where they slept.
10. What power does Weisz have over his Yoav and Leah? Why do they behave so submissively toward him? Why does Leah withhold the location of the desk from her father?
11. How do you understand the last sentences of the book. Disappointment...and relief—for what...and why?
11. Does the desk work as an organizing principle for this novel? Or does it make for a structually clumsy and confusing story?
12. What is the significance of the title, "Great House"?
13. In a New Yorker magazine interview (June 14, 2010), Krauss says that good fiction has the "ability to remind us of ourselves, of who we are in our essence, and at the same instant to deliver a revelation." Does Great House fulfill that goal for you?
14. Maureen Corrigan (NPR review) refers to Krauss as a "fiction pioneer...giving us readers the thrill of seeing the novel stretched into amorphous new shapes." Do you agree that Krauss is a "pioneer"—does this novel break new ground? Why...or why not?
15. Is this book too cerebral—too intellectually driven—to hold your attention? Do you wish it had a stronger plot? Or do you find Krauss's philosophical explorations compelling?
16. If you've read Krauss's previous book, The History of Love, how do the two novels compare with each other? What similarities do they share?
17. Nicole Krauss is married to Jonathan Safran Foer. Is that cool, or what?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Coup
John Updike, 1978
Random House
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449242599
Summary
In his freewheeling satire, Updike dissects government disfunction in Kush, a fictionalized, modern African state. He also skewers America's hapless compulsion to dispense its largesse.
Narrated tongue-in-cheek by Kush's exiled president, Colonel Felix Ellellou, Updike proves he is an equal opportunity employer when it comes to slicing up hypocrisy, whether black or white, first world or third. He that concerns in the fictional African nation of Kush, as well as America's compulsion. (Adapted from the publishers and Answers.com.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 18, 1932
• Where—Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
• Death—January 27, 2009
• Where—Danvers, Massachusetts
• Education—A.B., Harvard University; also studied at the
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England
• Awards—National Book Award for The Centaur, 1964;
Pulitzer Prizer, National Book Critics Circle Award, and
National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich, 1982; Pulitzer Prize
and National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit at Rest,
1990
With an uncommonly varied oeuvre that includes poetry, criticism, essays, short stories, and novels, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike has helped to change the face of late-20th-century American literature.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. Following a year of study in England, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, establishing a relationship with the magazine that continues to this day. Since 1957, he has lived in two small towns in Massachusetts that have inspired the settings for several of his stories.
In 1958, Updike's first collection of poetry was published. A year later, he made his fiction debut with The Poorhouse Fair. But it was his second novel, 1960's Rabbit, Run, that forged his reputation and introduced one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. Former small-town basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom struck a responsive chord with readers and critics alike and catapulted Updike into the literary stratosphere.
Updike would revisit Angstrom in 1971, 1981, and 1990, chronicling his hapless protagonist's jittery journey into undistinguished middle age in three melancholy bestsellers: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. A concluding novella, "Rabbit Remembered," appears in the 2001 story collection Licks of Love.
Although autobiographical elements appear in the Rabbit books, Updike's true literary alter ego is not Harry Angstrom but Harry Bech, a famously unproductive Jewish-American writer who stars in his own story cycle. In between—indeed, far beyond—his successful series, Updike has gone on to produce an astonishingly diverse string of novels. In addition, his criticism and short fiction remain popular staples of distinguished literary publications.
Extras
• Updike first became entranced by reading when he was a young boy growing up on an isolated farm in Pennsylvania. Afflicted with psoriasis and a stammer, he escaped from his into mystery novels.
• He decided to attend Harvard University because he was a big fan of the school's humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon.
• Updike has basically won every major literary prize in America, including the Guggenheim Fellow, the Rosenthal Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the O. Henry Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the National Medal of the Arts. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
The narator of The Coup is Colonel Ellellou, dictator of Kush, and this may be the first mistake. It isnecessary for Mr. Updike to disarticulate himself, to renounce his redoubtable sytle, in order to let the colonel speak. As is often the case in such conceptions, the author splits the difference. Sometimes the colonel sounds like Mr. Updike and sometimes he sounds like nothing in this world. His habit of speaking in the first and the third person, often on the same page, is not one of the author's happier innovations.... Mr. Updike is swamped by distractions.
Anatole Broyard - New York Times
[The Coup] views with ... humor current African tensions between tradition and modernity. Updike's American-educated Marxist dictator of a small Sahelian satrapy sounds remarkably like the author himself at his best and worst—and his four wives embody, variously, the earthy virtues and ornery independence of vintage Updike women.... The resulting depiction of cultural mésalliance is a comic delight.
Jennifer Seymour Whitaker, Foreign Affairs
Updike is one of the most exquisite masters of prose style produced by 20th century America. Yet, his novels have been faulted for lacking any sense of action or character development. It appears at times that his ability to spin lovely phrases of delicate beauty and nuance overwhelm his desire to tell a simple, important story in the lives of his characters. Updike's novels raise the question of whether beauty of expression, the lyrical telling of a captured moment of human time is, itself, enough to justify a great work of art.
In contrast, his short stories are seen by many as masterful in every respect, both for their prose style that approaches poetic expression and for the stories they convey. Some critics believe that had Updike produced only short stories and poems, his role in American letters would be even more celebrated. But it is Updike's novels that have brought him the greatest fame and attention and which resulted in his appearance on the covers of Time magazine two times during his career.
Wikipedia
Discussion Questions
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