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Suggestions: April 2006 Book of the Month

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mehastings

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Thread will close February 15.

A maximum of ten books will be put to the vote.

If more than 10 books are suggested, then books which have more than one nomination will take priority (books with three nominations get priority over books with two etc).

The remainder will be put forward in the order they are suggested (with only one book per member) until the 10 voting slots are filled.
 
'Copycat' by Gillian White

Synopsis
Dear God, how I wish I'd never met her...Sometimes I wished she was dead. Jennie and Martha became friends when Jennie moved in next door to Martha. At least, Jennie thought they were friends. Jennie admired everything about Martha - her house, her gorgeous husband, her bohemian clothes and exotic children's names. And Martha seemed to take to motherhood so effortlessly and confidently, while for Jennie it was all such a struggle. Martha tolerated Jennie, took her on holiday, helped her with the children - but all the time she was wondering how much longer she could stand living next door to her. As time went on, the roles seemed to reverse. As Jennie became more confident, more successful, Martha's life was falling apart. At times they seemed less like friends, more like sworn enemies. Their relationship became bitter, twisted - a relationship which only one of them could survive ...With insidious and unnerving accuracy, Gillian White once more shows us the horrors that can lurk within the most ordinary of families.
 
In fact, scrap my first nomination - or keep it in, as looking at the opening seems fine - but I'd like to nominate one of the runners up from last month: Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates.

Amazon said:
Originally published in 1961 to great critical acclaim, Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road subsequently fell into obscurity in the UK, only to be rediscovered in a new edition published in 2001. Its rejuvenation is due in large part to its continuing emotional and moral resonance for an early 21st-century readership. April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled or happy in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paid but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. However, as their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfilment are thrown into jeopardy. Yates's incisive, moving and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs now seem quaintly dated--the early evening cocktails, Frank's illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn't averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn all seem to belong to a different world--and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did 40 years ago. Like F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the poverty at the soul of many wealthy Americans and the exacting cost of chasing the American Dream.

Having just read Cold Spring Harbor by this author, I am left in no doubt he would be a worthy topic for discussion: his prose is clear and tinged with understandable sorrow.
 
I'll second Revolutionary Road. Some reviews from (UK) Amazon:

A good book that deserves to be rediscovered.

It is masterfully written - so amazingly well-crafted, in fact, that it is worth reading for its style alone.

A real surprise of a book - awesome. I cannot recommend this highly enough - what I can't understand is why it took so long for this book to come to our attention.

A powerful novel which speaks today of the compromises we have to make to survive in the modern world.

Please buy this book - it deserves to be so much more than a cult classic.
 
Port Mungo - Patrick MacGrath
amazon.de said:
Throughout their privileged but highly eccentric childhood Jack Rathbone has enjoyed the constant adoration of his sister Gin. When both attend art school in London, Jack plunges into a passionate affair with Vera Savage, a painter some years his senior, and they soon run away to New York. From a bruised and bereft distance Gin follows their southward progress to Miami, then Havana, and so to Port Mungo, a wilting swamp town on the steamy Gulf of Honduras. There Jack devotes himself to his art, and works with a fervour as intense as the restless, boozy waywardness to which Vera succumbs, which even the birth of two daughters cannot subdue. As the tension builds, a tragedy occurs that will tear apart not only their world but that of Jack's watchful sister, Gin.


The Known World - Edward P. Jones
amazon.de said:
Masterful, Pulitzer-prize winning literary epic about the painful and complex realities of slave life on a Southern plantation. An utterly original exploration of race, trust and the cruel truths of human nature, this is a landmark in modern American literature. Henry Townsend, a black farmer, boot maker, and former slave, becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave 'speculators' sell free black people into slavery, and rumours of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years. An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges from the past to the present, The Known World seamlessly weaves together the lives of the freed and the enslaved -- and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multi-dimensional world created by the institution of slavery.
 
A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton

A Map of the World is the riveting story of how a single mistake can forever change the lives of everyone involved--in ways that are beyond imagining.

This beautifully written story follows the form and function of all great literature: it assembles a gripping cast of sinners, sufferers and opportuniists, then gives them the settings and self-perception to hand or redeem themselves (Glamour)

Nowhere are the vagaries of the human condition brought to such stark and serious light as they are in Jane Hamilton's tale of a life in upheaval, A Map of the World. Alice Goodwin lives on a farm in Wisconsin with her husband and daughters and works part-time at the local school as a nurse. When a friend and neighbor leaves her two-year-old daughter in Alice's care, a moment's inattention leads to the child's death. This singularly tragic event triggers a series of other occurrences that will rock the tiny community where Alice lives and undermine everything Alice holds dear. A Map of the World is a story of trials -- legal and personal -- and the triumph of the human spirit over the worst of adversities.
 
:) I 2nd The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" by Jose Saramago..
Had that on my TBR Pile for ages

Really enjoyed 'Blindness"
 
My suggestion is I, Claudius by Robert Graves (synopsis taken from barnesandnoble.com)

Considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and the Mad Caligula to become emperor in 41 A.D. A masterpiece.
 
I will certainly second or third, or whatever I, Claudius plus Claudius the God its wonderful sequel. Unless you were counting it as all one Anamnesis?

Brava!! One of my all time favorites!
 
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Gilead_sm.jpg


Fans of Robinson's acclaimed debut Housekeeping (1981) will find that the long wait has been worth it. From the first page of her second novel, the voice of Rev. John Ames mesmerizes with his account of his life—and that of his father and grandfather. Ames is 77 years old in 1956, in failing health, with a much younger wife and six-year-old son; as a preacher in the small Iowa town where he spent his entire life, he has produced volumes and volumes of sermons and prayers, "[t]rying to say what was true." But it is in this mesmerizing account—in the form of a letter to his young son, who he imagines reading it when he is grown—that his meditations on creation and existence are fully illumined. Ames details the often harsh conditions of perishing Midwestern prairie towns, the Spanish influenza and two world wars. He relates the death of his first wife and child, and his long years alone attempting to live up to the legacy of his fiery grandfather, a man who saw visions of Christ and became a controversial figure in the Kansas abolitionist movement, and his own father's embittered pacifism. During the course of Ames's writing, he is confronted with one of his most difficult and long-simmering crises of personal resentment when John Ames Boughton (his namesake and son of his best friend) returns to his hometown, trailing with him the actions of a callous past and precarious future. In attempting to find a way to comprehend and forgive, Ames finds that he must face a final comprehension of self—as well as the worth of his life's reflections. Robinson's prose is beautiful, shimmering and precise; the revelations are subtle but never muted when they come, and the careful telling carries the breath of suspense. There is no simple redemption here; despite the meditations on faith, even readers with no religious inclinations will be captivated. Many writers try to capture life's universals of strength, struggle, joy and forgiveness—but Robinson truly succeeds in what is destined to become her second classic.
 
I'll second Gilead if a separate second is needed. I read it and enjoyed it. Very low key.
Peder
 
or whatever I, Claudius plus Claudius the God its wonderful sequel. Unless you were counting it as all one Anamnesis?

Oh no, I was just suggesting the first novel :). It was the lone book in my TBR pile so I figured a discusion would be the perfect way to make me sit down and read it.
 
Anamnesis said:
Oh no, I was just suggesting the first novel :). It was the lone book in my TBR pile so I figured a discusion would be the perfect way to make me sit down and read it.
Oh Shucks! I'll tell you, if they are read together it is not just twice as wonderful, its at least 20 times wonderful!
I've ordered the Robert Graves bio as well. :D
 
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