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Summary  |  Author  |  Book Reviews  |  Discussion Questions

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2666 
Roberto Bolano, trans., Natasha Wimmer, 2004
Macmillan Picador
912 pp.
ISBN-13:  9780312429218

In Brief 
Winner, 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolano’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared (From the publisher.)

More
Roberto Bolano is a master of digression. Among the countless stories that he tells in 2666, his 900-page cinderblock of a novel, there is not one that feels incomplete. (Considering that Bolano died in 2003 before he finished the final book of the five-part sequence, that’s quite a feat.) In his hands, narrative tangents, followed to their logical (or illogical, as the case may be) conclusions, fill in the spaces opened up by the boundlessly layered story lines.

To call 2666 ambitious is to understate its scale. Comprising five almost autonomous books, the novel is a chronicle of the 20th century, unafraid to confront its more gruesome turns in its sweep across history. The binding link, insofar as there is one, is the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, modeled on Ciudad Juárez, where for the better part of the 1990s there were hundreds of brutal murders, with the bodies of young women turning up in dumps and deserts at the city’s margin. The fourth, and longest, of the books takes up the matter of the murders directly, taking readers sequentially through each of the killings, along with the sexual abuse, mutilation, and police incompetence that accompanied them. They vary in their specifics, but the broad template is the same. Bolano writes with the blank neutrality of a police report:

In September, the body of Ana Muñoz Sanjuán was found behind some trash cans on Calle Javier Paredes, between Colonia Félix Gómez and Colonia Centro. The body was completely naked and showed evidence of strangulation and rape, which would later be confirmed by the medical examiner.

(From Barnes & Noble Review.)

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About the Author 

• Birth—April 28, 1953
• Where—Santiago, Chile
• Reared—in Chile and Mexico City, Mexico
• Died—July 15, 2003
• Where—Blanes, Spain
• Awards—Herralde Prize, Romulo Gallegos Prize (both for
  Savage Detectives, 1998)

Bolano was born in Chile and raised in Mexico. He later emigrated to Spain, where he died aged 50. His early years were spent in southern and coastal Chile; by his own account he was a skinny, nearsighted and bookish but unpromising child. He suffered from dyslexia as a child, and was often bullied at school, where he felt an outsider. As a teenager, though, he moved with his family to Mexico, dropped out of school, worked as a journalist and became active in left-wing political causes.

He returned to Chile just before the 1973 coup that installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet in power, and, like many others of his age and background, was jailed.

For most of his youth, Bolano was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain, where he finally settled down in the early 1980s in the small Catalan beach town of Blanes.

Bolano was a heroin addict in his youth and died of chronic hepatitis, caused by Hepatitis C, with which he was infected as a result of sharing needles during his "mainlining" days. He had suffered from liver failure and was on a transplant list.

He was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland." (In his last interview, published by the Mexican edition of Playboy magazine, Bolano said he regarded himself as a Latin American, adding that "my only country is my two children and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me.") Bolano named his only son Lautaro, after the Mapuche leader Lautaro, who resisted the Spanish conquest of Chile, as related in the sixteenth-century epic La araucana.

A key episode in Bolano's life, mentioned in different forms in several of his works, occurred in 1973, when he left Mexico for Chile to "help build the revolution." After Augusto Pinochet's coup against Salvador Allende, Bolano was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and spent eight days in custody. He was rescued by two former classmates who had become prison guards. Bolano describes his experience in the story "Dance Card." According to the version of events he provides in this story, he was neither tortured nor killed, as he had expected, but...

In the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas.... I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Angeles.

In the 1970s, Bolano became a Trotskyist and a founding member of infrarrealismo, a minor poetic movement. Although deep down he always felt like a poet, in the vein of his beloved Nicanor Parra, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections.

After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, Bolano returned to Mexico, living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible—a professional provocateur feared at all the publishing houses even though he was a nobody, bursting into literary presentations and readings, his editor, Jorge Herralde, recalled. His erratic behaviour had as much to do with his leftist ideology as with his chaotic, heroin-addicted lifestyle.

Bolano finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector—working during the day and writing at night.

In an interview Bolano stated that his decision to shift to fiction at the age of 40 was because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. He continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a 20-year collection of his verse was published in 2000 under the title The Romantic Dogs.

As regards his native country, which he visited just once after going into exile, Bolano had conflicted feelings. He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment. "He didn't fit into Chile, and the rejection that he experienced left him free to say whatever he wanted, which can be a good thing for a writer," said the Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman.

Six weeks before he died, Bolano's fellow Latin American novelists hailed him as the most important figure of his generation at an international conference he attended in Seville. He counted among his closest friends novelists Rodrigo Fresan and Enrique Vila-Matas. According to Fresan:

Roberto emerged as a writer at a time when Latin America no longer believed in utopias, when paradise had become hell, and that sense of monstrousness and waking nightmares and constant flight from something horrid permeates 2666 and all his work. His books are political, but in a way that is more personal than militant or demagogic, that is closer to the mystique of the beatniks than the Boom.

Bolano was extraordinarily prolific, but Jorge Herralde reports that not much remains unpublished: a volume of poetry tentatively called The Unknown University and one more collection of short stories.

Bolano joked about the "posthumous", saying the word "sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, one who is undefeated", and he would no doubt be amused to see how his stock has risen now that he is dead.

Rodrigo Fresan has observed that "Roberto was one of a kind, a writer who worked without a net, who went all out, with no brakes, and in doing so, created a new way to be a great Latin American writer."

Although Bolano espoused the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and enfant terrible writer all his life, he only began publishing fiction regularly in the late 1990s, after he quit his addiction to heroin. He immediately became a widely respected figure in Spanish and Latin American letters. In rapid succession, he published a widely acclaimed series of works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night in Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes. (From Wikipedia.)

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Critics Say . . . 
Make no mistake, 2666 is a work of huge importance ... a complex literary experience, in which the author seeks to set down his nightmares while he feels time running out. Bolano inspires passion, even when his material, his era, and his volume seem overwhelming. This could only be published in a single volume, and it can only be read as one.
El Mundo

Think of David Lynch, Marcel Duchamp (both explicitly invoked here) and the Bob Dylan of "Highway 61 Revisited," all at the peak of their lucid yet hallucinatory powers. Bolano's references were sufficiently global to encompass all that, and to interweave both stuffy academia and tawdry gumshoe fiction into this book's monumentally inclusive mix.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

2666 is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: Bolano won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended, in his self-interrogating way, as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what's possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world.... By writing across the grain of his doubts about what literature can do, how much it can discover or dare pronounce the names of our world's disasters, Bolano has proven it can do anything, and for an instant, at least, given a name to the unnamable.
Jonathan Lethem - New York Times Book Review

Last year's The Savage Detectives by the late Chilean-Mexican novelist Bolano (1953-2003) garnered extraordinary sales and critical plaudits for a complex novel in translation, and quickly became the object of a literary cult. This brilliant behemoth is grander in scope, ambition and sheer page count, and translator Wimmer has again done a masterful job. The novel is divided into five parts (Bolano originally imagined it being published as five books) and begins with the adventures and love affairs of a small group of scholars dedicated to the work of Benno von Archimboldi, a reclusive German novelist. They trace the writer to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (read: Juarez), but there the trail runs dry, and it isn't until the final section that readers learn about Benno and why he went to Santa Teresa. The heart of the novel comes in the three middle parts: in "The Part About Amalfitano," a professor from Spain moves to Santa Teresa with his beautiful daughter, Rosa, and begins to hear voices. "The Part About Fate," the novel's weakest section, concerns Quincy "Fate" Williams, a black American reporter who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a prizefight and ends up rescuing Rosa from her gun-toting ex-boyfriend. "The Part About the Crimes," the longest and most haunting section, operates on a number of levels: it is a tormented catalogue of women murdered and raped in Santa Teresa; a panorama of the power system that is either covering up for the real criminals with its implausible story that the crimes were all connected to a German national, or too incompetent to find them (or maybe both); and it is a collection of the stories of journalists, cops, murderers, vengeful husbands, prisoners and tourists, among others, presided over by an old woman seer. It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one.
Publishers Weekly

This sprawling, digressive, Jamesian "loose, baggy monster" reads like five independent but interrelated novels, connected by a common link to an actual series of mostly unresolved murders of female factory workers in the area of Ciudad Juárez (here called Santa Teresa), a topic also addressed in Margorie Agosín's Secrets in the Sand. The first part follows four literary critics who wind up in Mexico in pursuit of the obscure (and imaginary) German writer Benno von Archimboldi, a scenario that recalls Bolano's The Savage Detectives. The second and third parts, respectively, focus on Professor Almafitano and African American reporter Quincy Williams (also called Oscar Fate), whose attempts to expose the murders are thwarted. The fourth, and by far the longest, section consists mostly of detached accounts of the hundreds of murders; culled from newspaper and police reports, they offer a relentless onslaught of the gruesome details and become increasingly tedious. The last section returns to Archimboldi. Boasting Bolano's trademark devices—ambiguity, open endings, characters that assume different names, and an enigmatic title, along with splashes of humor—this posthumously published work is consistently masterful until the last half of the final part, which shows some haste. The book is rightly praised as Bolano's masterpiece, but owing to its unorthodox length it will likely find greater favor among critics than among general readers. In fact, before he died, the author asked that it be published in five parts over just as many years; it's a pity his relatives refused to honor his request.
Lawrence Olszewski - Library Journal

Life and art, death and transfiguration reverberate with protean intensity in the late (1953–2003) Chilean author's final work: a mystery and quest novel of unparalleled richness. Published posthumously in a single volume, despite its author's instruction that it appear as five distinct novels, it's a symphonic envisioning of moral and societal collapse, which begins with a mordantly amusing account ("The Part About the Critics") of the efforts of four literary scholars to discover the obscured personal history and unknown present whereabouts of German novelist Benno von Archimboldi, an itinerant recluse rumored to be a likely Nobel laureate. Their searches lead them to northern Mexico, in a desert area notorious for the unsolved murders of hundreds of Mexican women presumably seeking freedom by crossing the U.S. border. In the novel's second book, a Spanish academic (Amalfitano) now living in Mexico fears a similar fate threatens his beautiful daughter Rosa. It's followed by the story of a black American journalist whom Rosa encounters, in a subplot only imperfectly related to the main narrative. Then, in "The Part About the Crimes," the stories of the murdered women and various people in their lives (which echo much of the content of Bolano's other late mega-novel The Savage Detectives) lead to a police investigation that gradually focuses on the fugitive Archimboldi. Finally, "The Part About Archimboldi" introduces the figure of Hans Reiter, an artistically inclined young German growing up in Hitler's shadow, living what amounts to an allegorical representation of German culture in extremis, and experiencing transformations that will send him halfway around the world; bring him literary success, consuming love and intolerable loss; and culminate in a destiny best understood by Reiter's weary, similarly bereaved and burdened sister Lotte: "He's stopped existing." Bolano's gripping, increasingly astonishing fiction echoes the world-encompassing masterpieces of Stendhal, Mann, Grass, Pynchon and Garcia Marquez, in a consummate display of literary virtuosity powered by an emotional thrust that can rip your heart out. Unquestionably the finest novel of the present century—and we may be saying the same thing 92 years from now.
Kirkus Reviews

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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)

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Where Angels Fear to Tread 
E.M. Forster, 1905
160-200 pp. (varies by publisher)
 

Summary
"Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand! Look at this letter! The man who wrote it will marry her, or murder her, or do for her somehow. He's a bounder, but he's not an English bounder. He's mysterious and terrible. He's got a country behind him that's upset people from the beginning of the world."

When a young English widow takes off on the grand tour and along the way marries a penniless Italian, her in-laws are not amused. That the marriage should fail and poor Lilia die tragically are only to be expected. But that Lilia should have had a baby—and that the baby should be raised as an Italian! —are matters requiring immediate correction by Philip Herriton, his dour sister Harriet, and their well-meaning friend Miss Abbott.

In his first novel, E. M. Forster anticipated the themes of cultural collision and the sterility of the English middle class that he would develop in A Room with a View and A Passage to India.

Where Angels Fear to Tread is an accomplished, harrowing, and malevolently funny book, in which familiar notions of vice and virtue collapse underfoot and the best intentions go mortally awry. (Summary from Random House.)

The novel was adapted to film in 1991, starring Rupert Graves, Helena Bonham Carter, Giovanni Guidelli, Judy Davis, and Helen Mirren.

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Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1879
• Where—London, UK
• Death—June 7, 1970
• Where—Coventry, UK
• Education—B. A., (two: in classics and in history); M.A.,
   Cambridge


Edward Morgan Forster was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect." His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India (1924) brought him his greatest success.

Early years
Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, in a building that no longer exists. He was the only child of Alice Clara "Lily" (nee Whichelo) and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, an architect. His name was officially registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but at his baptism he was accidentally named Edward Morgan Forster. To distinguish him from his father, he was always called Morgan. His father died of tuberculosis in 1880, before Morgan's second birthday.

He inherited £8,000 (£659,300 as of 2013) from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died in 1887. The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended the notable public school Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy. The theatre at the school has been named in his honour.

At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society). Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey.

After leaving university, he travelled in continental Europe with his mother. In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by which time he had written all but one of his novels. In the First World War, as a conscientious objector, Forster volunteered for the International Red Cross, and served in Alexandria, Egypt.

Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this period. After returning to London from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

After A Passage to India
In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the Union of Ethical Societies. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937.

Forster was a closeted homosexual and lifelong bachelor. He developed a long-term, loving relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman. Forster included Buckingham and his wife May in his circle, which included J. R. Ackerley, a writer and literary editor of The Listener, the psychologist W. J. H. Sprott and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.

From 1925 until his mother's death at age 90 in 1945, Forster lived with her at West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving in 1946. His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.

Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1946 and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died of a stroke at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry on June 7, 1970. He was 91.

Novels
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. He never finished a seventh novel Arctic Summer.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). Philip Herriton's mission to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. Forster discussed that work ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted to film in 1991.

Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappealing Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire, which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started as early as 1901, before any of his others; its earliest versions are entitled "Lucy." The book explores the young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was adapted as a film in 1985 by the Merchant-Ivory team.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share many themes with his short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). Critics have observed that numerous characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in his Preface to its Everyman's Library Edition.

Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing.

Critical reception
In the United States, interest in, and appreciation for, Forster was spurred by Lionel Trilling's E. M. Forster: A Study, which began:

E. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something. (Trilling 1943).

Key themes
Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society.

His humanist attitude is expressed in the non-fictional essay "What I Believe." When Forster’s cousin, Philip Whichelo, donated a portrait of Forster to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GLHA), Jim Herrick, the founder, quoted Forster's words: "The humanist has four leading characteristics—curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race."

Two of Forster's best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make human connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works. Some critics have argued that a general shift from heterosexual to homosexual love can be observed through the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his homosexuality, while he explored similar issues in several volumes of short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.

Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for his attachment to mysticism. One example of his symbolism is the wych elm tree in Howards End. The characters of Mrs. Wilcox in that novel and Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past, and a striking ability to connect with people from beyond their own circles. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/25/2013.)

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Book Reviews 
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

The...contest over the possession of a child between the parent who survives and the relatives of a parent who is dead, is familiar and ordinary enough, but the setting and treatment of this motive are almost startlingly original.... It is a protest against the worship of conventionalities, and especially against the conventionalities of "refinement" and "respectability"; it takes the form of a sordid comedy culminating, unexpectedly and with a real dramatic force, in a grotesque tragedy.
Guardian (UK - 8/30/1905)

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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 Where Angels Fear to Tread:

1. At what is Forster taking aim in this book? To whom or what is his satire directed?

2. What kind of woman is Lilia Herriton? Why have her in-laws decided to send her to Italy—and why is Carolyn Abbot chosen as her companion (chaperone?), a woman more than 10 years Lilia's junior?

3. Talk about the quotation from the opening lines of Dante's Inferno, which Lilia includes in a letter back to England: "one does really feel in the heart of things, and off the beaten path." What does Lilia mean...and what does it portend?

4. Describe each of the Herritons—Mrs. Herriton, Harriet and Philip? How are they alike...and how do they differ? Why are they opposed to Lilia's marriage to Gino Carella?

5. Why does Gino marry Lilia? Is he honorable? Does he love her? Does Gino change by the end of the novel...or does your view of him change?

6. Philip is sent to Italy to try to stop the marriage. He says to Gino: She is English, you are Italian; she are accustomed to one thing, you to another." How does that dichotomy play itself out, over and over, in the novel?

7. Why does Carolyn Abbot take it upon herself to bring the Lilia and Gino's baby back to England? She becomes a spy in Italy because she suspects that the Herritons' desire to recover the baby is insincere. Is she correct?

8. What are Mrs. Herriton and Harriet primarily concerned about? Why do they want the baby? What right—legally or morally—do they have to the child?

9. Why is Philip attracted to Italy? What is it meant to suggest about him...and his commitment to English gentility?

10. What is the symbolic significance of Lucia de Lammermoor—why might Forster have selected that particular opera as part of the story? (You might want to do a little research.)

11.. Why do Philip and Carolyn soften toward Gino?

12. Carolyn puts the dilemma of the baby succinctly when she asks Philip...

Do you want the child to stop with his father, who loves him and will bring him up badly, or do you want him to come to Sawston, where no one loves him, but where he will be brought up well?

Is Carolyn's assessment of the situation correct—e.g., would Gino bring the baby up badly? Where do you think the solution lies?

13. What do you make of Philip's remark to Carolyn:

Miss Abbott, don’t worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them.... I never expect anything to happen now, and so I am never disappointed.... I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it.

14. Twice in the novel mirrors are mentioned in connection with Philip—once as a school boy, and again on the train returning to Sawston. What is the symbolic significance of Philip and the mirrors?

15. In what way is Philip at the center of the novel? Is he the story's hero? Or is Carolyn?

16. Philip says to Carolyn:

Society is invincible—to a certain degree. But your real life is your own, and nothing can touch it. There is no power on earth that can prevent your criticizing and despising mediocrity—nothing that can stop you retreating into splendour and beauty—into the thoughts and beliefs that make the real life—the real you.

Does Philip, himself, have a "real you"? Does he live up to his own pronouncements? Does Philip have a future as an independent, deliberate being?

17. Do Carolyn and Philip have a future together as a couple?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Darkest Child 
Dolores Phillips, 2004
SoHo Press, Inc.
462pp.
ISBN-13: 9781569473788


Summary
Rozelle Quinn is so fair-skinned that she can pass for white. Yet everyone in her small Georgia town knows. Rozelle's ten children (by ten different daddies) are mostly light, too. They sleep on the floor in her drafty, rickety three-room shack and live in fear of her moods and temper. But they are all vital to her. They occupy the only world she rules and controls. They multiply her power in an otherwise cruel and uncaring universe.

Rozelle favors her light-skinned kids, but insists that they all love and obey her unquestioningly. Tangy Mae, thirteen, is her brightest but darkest-complected child. Tangy wants desperately to continue with her education. Shockingly, the highest court in the land has just ruled that Negroes may go to school with whites. Her mother, however, has other plans.

Rozelle wants her daughter to work, cleaning houses for whites, like she does, and accompany her to the "Farmhouse," where Rozelle earns extra money bedding men. Tangy Mae, she's decided, is of age.

This is the story from an era when life's possibilities for an African-American were unimaginably different. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
Delores Phillips was born in Georgia. She is a graduate of Cleveland State University and works as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital in Cleveland. The Darkest Child is her first novel. (From the publisher.)

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Book Reviews
For readers who like their novels king-sized, filled with grand plot events and clearly identifiable villains and victims, Delores Phillips's debut novel, The Darkest Child, will not disappoint. This story of an African-American mother and her large family is loaded with killings, maimings and other sensational turns.... For all the strengths of the story itself, Tangy [the narrator] remains...capable of more insight than she ultimately displays. At critical junctures, she fails to see her world and its circumstances with enough sophistication and clarity to convince us that all is true and valid.... Tangy's naiveté is problematic in a novel that is otherwise lush with detail and captivating with its story of racial tension and family violence, a story that requires a clearer and more probing eye in order to portray its many complexities.
Lee Martin - Washington Post

Evil's regenerative powers and one girl's fierce resistance. . . . A book that deserves a wide audience.
Cleveland Plain Dealer

Phillips's searing debut reveals the poverty, injustices and cruelties that one black family suffers—some of this at the hands of its matriarch—in a 1958 backwater Georgia town. Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn loves her mother, Rozelle, but knows there's "something wrong" with her—which, as it soon becomes clear, is an extreme understatement. As the novel opens, Rozelle is getting ready to give birth to her 10th child (by a 10th father) and thinking about forcing the obedient Tangy Mae, who longs to stay in school, to take over her housecleaning job. Using a large cast of powerfully drawn characters, Phillips captures life in a town that serves as a microcosm of a world on the brink of change. There's Junior, the perpetual optimist, who wants to teach people to read and write so they can understand the injustices of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan; Hambone, a here today/gone tomorrow rabble-rouser whose anger against white men and their laws inflames those around him; and Miss Pearl, the only true friend to the Quinn family. At the dark heart of the story is Rozelle, the beautiful mixed-race head of the Quinn family whose erratic mood swings, heart-wrenching cruelty and deep emotional distress leave an indelible mark on all her children. Through all the violence and hardship breathes the remarkable spirit of Tangy Mae, who is wise beyond her years; forced to do unspeakable things by her mother and discriminated against by the town's whites, she manages to survive and to rescue a younger sister from the same fate.
Publishers Weekly

Phillips writes with a no-nonsense elegance.... As a vision of African-American life, The Darkest Child is one of the harshest novels to arrive in many years.... [Phillips] buttresses those harsh episodes with a depth of characterization worthy of Chekhov, pitch-perfect dialogue, and a profound knowledge of the segregated South in the ’50s.
New Leader

Delores Phillips' assured debut offers a unique vision of a black family in the Deep South. Fans of Beloved or The Color Purple will find resonance in this finely constructed novel, which pulls no punches in its portrayal of racism, a dysfunctional family and a child desperate to survive.
Quality Paperback Direct (QPD) Review

A grim tale, set in the dying days of segregation, about one young woman's struggle to escape her past, her mother, and her duties. Phillips writes vividly and certainly creates memorable characters—most of them, however, remembered for their nastiness, there being an absence of redeeming features. The blacks who live in Pakersfield, Georgia, are almost as nasty as the whites, who are all racist, vicious hypocrites. Both races father illegitimate children, and while the older blacks fear confrontation, the younger want to act immediately. The story, told by Tangy Mae, begins as her mother Rozelle gives birth to her tenth child, Judy. All the children have different fathers, Tangy Mae the darkest, while Rozelle herself is the product of a white man who raped her mother. Rozelle, who takes center stage, is a monster whose treatment of her children reads like a charge sheet. Which is the novel's fundamental weakness: Rozelle is beyond awful, disowned even by her mother, but the author offers no explanation for her cruelty. And as Tangy Mae, a bright student, struggles to stay in school, keep Rozelle happy, and care for her siblings, she records the horrors her mother inflicts on her children. She insists that all the money they earn, including that of her two grown up sons Sam and Harvey, be given to her; she forces daughters Tara and Mushy to work at a local whorehouse, and she beats them, burns them with cigarettes, insists they shoplift, and denies them proper education. While Rozelle becomes even more out of control, a young black activist is hanged, and Sam and his angry cohorts burn down white stores, with inevitable repercussions. The most lethal damage, though, is still to come at the hands of Rozelle. Good intentions, but overwrought.
Kirkus Reviews

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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 Darkest Child:

1. The place to start a discussion is with the obvious—Rozelle. What is wrong with her? Is she too horrible to be believable?

2. Why does Tangy Mae continue to love her mother after all the cruelty she and her siblings endure at her hand?

3. How would you describe Tangy Mae? What are her dreams...and to what degree does she have to compromise them to appease her mother? Would you describe Tangy Mae as wise beyond her years...or naive?

4. What effect does Tangy Mae's darker skin have on her standing in both black and white worlds? Is that prejudice different or the same today—again, within both white and black circles?

5. Describe the racial tensions and injustices as they existed in Parkersfield at the time of the story. How are the lives of the book's characters misshapen by years of oppression?

6. What are the generational differences regarding the hopes and grievances of Parkersfield's black community? How do the two generations want to confront the injustices?

7. Talk about the roles of Junior, Hambone and Miss Pearl.

8. Were you expecting the outcome of the book's final pages?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Kate Vaiden
Reynolds Price, 1986
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780684846941


Summary
0ne of the most feisty, spellbinding and engaging heroines in modern fiction captures the essence of her own life in this contemporary American odyssey born of red-clay land and small-town people. We meet Kate at a crucial moment in middle age when she begins to yearn to see the son she abandoned when she was seventeen. But if she decides to seek him, will he understand her?

Kate Vaiden is a penetrating psychological portrait of an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances, a story as joyous, tragic, comic and compelling as life itself. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—February 1, 1933
• Where—Macon, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., Duke University; Rhodes Scholar, Oxford
  University
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in North Carolina

Reynolds Price, novelist, poet, playwright and essayist, author of the bestseller Kate Vaiden and Roxanna Slade, is one of the most accomplished writers ever to come out of the South. He is an author rooted in its old life and ways; and this is his vivid, powerful memoir of his first twenty-one years growing up in North Carolina. Spanning the years from 1933 to 1954, Price accurately captures the spirit of a community recovering from the Depression, living through World War II and then facing the economic and social changes of the 1950s. In closely linked chapters focusing on individuals, Price describes with compassion and honesty the white and black men and women who shaped his youth. The cast includes his young, devoted parents; a loving aunt; his younger brother Bill; childhood friends and enemies and the teachers who fostered and encouraged his love of writing. (From the publisher.)

More
Reynolds Price is an American novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist and James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University. Apart from English literature, Price has had a lifelong interest in ancient languages and Biblical scholarship. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Price was born in Macon, North Carolina and, after attending public schools of his native state, went to Duke University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1955. Afterwards he went to Merton College, Oxford for three years as a Rhodes Scholar and wrote a book about life at Oxford, called 'The Source of Light'. After his return in 1958, he started teaching at Duke University, which he has been doing ever since. His first short stories were published in Duke's student literary periodical, Archive. Eudora Welty also helped Price get his first couple of books published; she sent one of his early stories, "Michael Egerton" to her own publisher, but Price's first book was not a collection of stories; it was a novel entitled A Long and Happy Life.

His other books include his memoir Clear Pictures, and his novels The Tongues of Angels, Blue Calhoun, Kate Vaiden, Roxanna Slade and The Great Circle. The recent The Good Priest's Son is an account of a 9/11 experience.

Price is a Southern writer. All his books are set in the South and more particularly in his native North Carolina. Price once replied when asked why he chose to remain in North Carolina: "It's the place about which I have perfect pitch." Price has cited Southern writer Eudora Welty as one of his early influences. He has also been noted for his sexually frank writing, and the ambiguous nature of his own sexuality, which has been of critical interest to scholars

He began teaching at Duke shortly after completing his Rhodes Scholarship in the late 1950s. For more than forty years he has taught a class on Milton, and former students include the writers Josephine Humphreys and Anne Tyler, along with the actress Annabeth Gish Chas Salmen.

Price is a favorite author of Bill Clinton, who invited him to dinner at the White House early in his first term.

Price wrote the lyrics to two songs by James Taylor: "Copperline" and "New Hymn."

Price has received numerous literary honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Faulkner Foundation Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Clear Pictures (1989). He is also a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Price's book, Feasting The Heart (2000), is a collection of controversial and personal essays, originally broadcast to great acclaim on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
Kate Vaiden, which teems with orphans and murderous and suicidal generations—all the expected passions of a Price book —is...a forgiving, immensely readable story, set mainly in the early 1940's, almost light in feeling (although its tale of early death and frustrated passions is hardly frivolous). But the voice of Mr. Price's heroine blows like fresh air across the page.... Kate, like most of Mr. Price's creations, has to struggle under a doom not of her making, but she describes and then contrives a hedged escape from it with wit and resolution. She is feisty and full of self-knowledge, ''a real middle-sized white woman that has kept on going with strong eyes and teeth for fifty-seven years.
Rosellen Brown - New York Times Book Review

At once tender and frightening, lyrical and dramatic, this novel is the product of a storyteller working at the full height of his artistic powers, recapitulating with a new ease the themes of memory and familial love that have informed his work from the beginning.... Though Kate's story is a violent one in the best Southern Gothic tradition — the novel numbers at least half a dozen untimely deaths, as well as several stabbings — Mr. Price orchestrates it so convincingly that each event comes to feel like an inevitable act, a product equally of fate and temperament and will.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Surely his finest work so far. A wise and wonderful story told by an artist at the peak of his powers...you will want to meet Kate Vaiden and get to know her. And in the end...you will want to stand up for Reynolds Price.
Chicago Tribune Book World

You won't hear many voices in your life that are as interesting as Kate Vaiden's.
USA Today

Price's new novel again is enhanced by a Southern setting, and his art as a writer transforms a rather cliched tale of an orphaned girl who never attains the capacity for love into a compelling story. From the vantage point of middle age, narrator Kate Vaiden looks back at her life, shattered at the age of 11 by the suicide-murder of her parents. She is raised by her loving aunt and uncle, who themselves have not been successful at parenting. Her cousin Swift is the serpent in Kate's future happiness. A true viper, he poisons the fond memory Kate has of her high school lover, a casualty in the first world war, and impels her to leave home. A succession of other emotional orphans become fellow wanderers through Kate's peripatetic existence. When she has a son out of wedlock, she lacks the maternal urge and abandons him to the same relatives who raised her. Thirty-five years later, she tries to discover his fate. Price's (The Source of Light) lyrical prose, blossoming with felicitous imagery and authentically grounded in the regional cadences of the characters' speech, holds the magic of a true raconteur. Though it tends toward melodrama and has some lapses in credibility, this is a touching, engrossing narrative by one of our most gifted writers.
Publishers Weekly

Kate Vaiden's story is set in Price's Macon, North Carolina, a small town where a young girl could walk alone safely because "There were killings and rapes but never by strangers, always family members.'' Kate gives an honest account of herself as a daughter, niece, young woman, and mother, inducing the reader to like her in spite of her flaws, which abound. The language is richhugging the recalcitrant black cook is like embracing "a tall thicket of polished broomsticks' 'but not ostentatious. Price has been labeled a "Southern writer," and he certainly is that, but it would be a shame if his audience were limited to those with an academic interest in Southern literature. He is a fine storyteller whose work may have its strongest appeal among Southerners, but librarians should make Kate Vaiden available to general readers everywhere. —Mary K. Prokop, CEL Regional Lib., Savannah, GA
Library Journal

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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)

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