The Blue Flower Penelope Fitzgerald

The writer

Penelope Fitzgerald, neé Knox,  was born in Lincoln, England in 1916, the daughter of Edmund Knox, later editor of the satirical magazine Punch, and Christina Hicks, one of the first women to study at Oxford, and she grew up in Hampstead, London.

Fitzgerald was educated at Wycombe Abbey and Somerville College at the University of Oxford where she graduated in 1938 with a Congratulatory First class degree (described by the New York Times as "a highly unusual honour in which the examining professors ask no questions about the candidate's written work but simply stand and applaud.")

Fitzgerald worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation during the 2^nd World War, and in 1942 she married the lawyer Desmond Fitzgerald, whom she had met at Oxford. He served with the Irish Guards in Libya and won the military cross for bravery, but he returned to civilian life an alcoholic.

In the early 1950s the Fitxgeralds co-edited a magazine called World Review, which published J.D.Salinger, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer and Alberto Moravia. However soon afterwards, Desmond was disbarred for "forging signatures on cheques that he cashed at the pub."

The end of his legal career led to a life of poverty for the Fitzgeralds; at times they were almost destitute and lived for months in a homeless shelter. They later lived for years in council housing (ie, public housing) and at times on a houseboat (which sank twice). During the 1960s, Fitzgerald taught at a drama school and at a private school. The couple had three children: two daughters, Tina and Maria, and a son, Valpy.

n 1975, at the age of 58, a year before Desmond´s death, Fitgerald began to publish biographies and over the next five years she published four novels, winning the Booker Prize for fiction in 1975 for the novel Offshore. (A film adaptation of her novel The Bookshop has been written and directed by Isabel Coixet.) In 1999 Fitzgerald was awarded Pen Award for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".

The Blue Flower

The novel is based on the life of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801) before he became famous as the poet, philosopher and mystic, Novalis. It covers the years from 1790 to 1797 when von Hardenberg was a student of history, philosophy and law at the universities of Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg. To the astonishment of everyone who knows him, at the age of 22 the intellectual and noble von Hardenberg becomes inexplicably and mystically drawn to the 12-year-old Sophie, a rather ordinary little girl. The couple become engaged a year later but never marry.

However this summary hardly does justice to the experience of The Blue Flower, which is more like being transported in time than reading a novel. Like all Fitzgerald´s books, The Blue Flower is short but packs the emotional punch or a far longer book and builds a world in concise, dense, subtle, exquisite prose that nevertheless never draws attention to itself. The writer Neel Mukherjee describes Fitzgerald’s books as ‘slim, fleet-footed, at once weightless, like air, and immense with the worlds they contain’.

The novel has been critically acclaimed and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997.



Questions to think about while reading



1. The blue flower of the novel's title is the subject of the first chapter of a story that von Hardenberg is writing. In it, a young man longs to see the blue flower that "lies incessantly at his heart, so that he can imagine and think about nothing else". What is the meaning of this blue flower?

2. The novel is based on real events and real people but is fictionalised. Does this make any difference to our reading of the novel?

3. How does Fitzgerald, from the opening line, take us so vividly into a world we do not know and make us feel at home there?

MIDNIGHT´S CHILDREN Salman Rushdie

THE GREAT GATSBY by F Scott Fitzgerald

Biographical Note

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in Minnesota to Irish and English ancestry and grew up with great educational opportunities. His intelliegence and literary abilities were recognised even while he was a child and he published his first short story at the age of 13. His parents were wealthy and upper middle class and sent him to prestigious Catholic preparatory (ie private) schools. He studied at Princeton, and it was during this time that he met the debutante and socialite Ginevra King who is considered to be his model for Daisy in The Great Gatsby. (Princeton was also where he first began the heavy drinking that led to a lifelong struggle with alcoholism.) Fitzgerald  dropped out of Princeton to join the army and, fearing he would be killed in the 1st World War without ever having published anything of note, he hastily wrote The Romantic Egotist. 

However, Fitgerald went on to marry another´´golden girl´´ Zelda Sayre. It was an intense, tumultuous relationship, constantly rocked by her mental instability, his alcoholism, their lavish and hedonistic lifestyle and financial problems which impinged on his ability to write what he wanted. In many ways they were the archetypal ´´beautiful and damned´´ and Fitzgerald´s novels reflect their own issues and experiences of youthful optimism and promise contrasted with later diappointment at harsh reality. Zelda was institutionalised for some kind of bipolar disorder, while Fitgerald became a Hollywood screenwrite or as he saw it ´´a hack´´. He died of a heart attack at only 44 leaving behind four completed novels, one unfinished novel and numerous short stories. Among them was the masterpiece The Great Gatsby, which is irresistable from its very first enigmatic opening lines:

'In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'

The Novel

The novel The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, an unassuming young man who moves to New York in the summer of 1922 to work in finance, renting a house on Long Island. The area is populated by the ´´new rich´´ as opposed to those with ´´old money´´ that is entrepreneurs, opportunists and bootleggers as opposed to aristocrats. Nick’s next-door neighbor is Gatsby, an interesting figure who throws decadent parties every weekend and whose origins and fortune are shrouded in mystery.

Nick however was educated at Yale and has social connections in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island home to the established upper class including his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom. They introduce him to Jordan Baker, a beautiful young cynic, who soon tells him that the Buchanan´s marriage is in trouble. Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, a married woman who lives in the valley of ashes, a gray industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City. At a vulgar, drunken party in the apartment that Tom keeps for the affair in New York, Myrtle begins to taunt Tom about Daisy, and he reacts violently by punching her in the face and breaking her nose.

Nick is eventually invited to one of Gatsby’s legendary parties and meets Gatsby himself. Through Jordan, Nick learns that Gatsby has been in love with Daisy since he met her in 1917 in Louisville and it later becomes clear that both Gatsby’s acquisition of wealth and his display of it are motivated by the wish to win over Daisy. Nick invites Daisy to have tea at his house, and brings Gatsby too. Gatsby and Daisy reestablish their connection and resume their romantic affair.

After a short time, Tom grows suspicious of his wife’s relationship with Gatsby and Gatsby himself. He confronts Gatsby publicly in a suite at the Plaza Hotel and announces to his wife that Gatsby is a criminal—his fortune comes from bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities. When the affair is made public and Daisy is asked to publicly declare her love for Gatsby and state that she has never really loved Tom, it becomes clear that she does not love Gatsby and never did. She elects to stay with Tom and Gatsby´s dream crumbles to dust. 

The consequences of their tragic drive back to Long Island demonstrate the real nature of all the characters, especially Gatsby´s and the Buchanans´. Nick reflects on the selfishness and moral decay of life among the wealthy on the East Coast. We see that those who come from´´old money´´ are not necessarily morally.

Just as Gatsby’s dream of Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and individualism has disintegrated into the mere pursuit of wealth. The first line echoes in our minds as we understand that the life of the narrator Nick has been forever marked by the ethical lessons implicit in the novel.

Questions to think about while or after reading:

1.    “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.” To what extent is the novel an exploration of platonic as opposed to romantic love?

            What is it that makes Jay Gatsby ´´the great Gatsby´´?  Does his greatness lie in his willingness to pursue the American dream to its logical end or in his capacity to risk all forlove?

        
      It has been said ´´there is no such thing as a perfect novel. But if there were The Great Gatsby would be it.´´ In your eyes what does constitute a perfect novel in terms of narrative, character, imagery and emotional power?

THE WHITE HOTEL D M THOMAS

THE WRITER

Donald Michael Thomas, known as DM Thomas, is a Cornish novelist, poet, and translator. He was born in 1935 in Redruth in Cornwall, the part of England he has described as “the sadly haunting, wrecked tin-mining area of West Cornwall, its symbol the square ugly granite harmony-filled Wesleyan chapel”. This suggests two of the crucial factors in his upbringing: his tin-mining ancestry, which is often explored in his poetry, and the Methodist values instilled in him by his parents. A third significant factor is Cornwall's separate status in England, isolated geographically on England's extreme south-west coast and in a strange position culturally, too—a Celtic region in England, which once had its own language.
Thomas attended Trewirgie Primary School and Redruth Grammar School before graduating with First Class Honours in English from New College, Oxford in 1959. He lived and worked in Australia and the United States before returning to his native Cornwall.
He published poetry and some prose in the British Science fiction magazine New Worlds from 1968 onwards and has published many novels. In the 1950s, at height of the Cold War, Thomas studied Russian during his National Service. He has retained a lifelong interest in Russian culture and literature. This culminated in a series of well-received translations of Russian poetry in the 1980s.
THE WHITE HOTEL
The White Hotel is the story of a woman undergoing psychoanalysis, which has proved very popular in continental Europe and the United States and remains D.M. Thomas's best known novel. When it was published in 1981, it was an almost immediate critical success, winning both the Cheltenham Prize and the Pen Silver Pen. American readers in particular found the Freudian tones of the novel attractive. Many of the themes of the novel, in particular its use of Freudian ideas to deal with the memory of the holocaust, reappear in a later novel by Thomas, Pictures at an Exhibition (1993).
The novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1981 coming a close second to the winner, Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children'. It provoked considerable controversy, as some of its passages are taken from Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar, a novel about the Holocaust. In general, however, Thomas's use of such "composite material" (material taken from other sources and imitations of other writers) is seen as more postmodern than plagiarist.
The book's first three movements consist of the erotic fantasies and case-history of a patient of Sigmund Freud, overlapping, expanding, and gradually turning into almost normal narrative. But then the story takes a different course with the convulsions of the century, and becomes a testament of the Holocaust, harrowing and chillingly authentic. Only at the end does the fantasy element return, pulling together the earlier themes into a kind of benediction.
The book begins with a long poem, full of erotic imagery and near-incoherent description. Following this is a prose version of the story that we learn is written by a young woman who is a semi-successful opera singer who goes to Sigmund Freud for analysis, suffering from acute psychosomatic pains in her left breast and her womb. Thomas lets the reader in on Freud's analysis, as well as his ambiguous feelings towards his patient. At several stages, Freud is ready to throw up his hands and tell her that he won't continue his treatment as he feels she is not forthcoming enough to make any real progress. He always relents, however, because he senses that "Lisa" (the opera singer's real name) has enough redeeming attributes to warrant his time.
As the novel progresses, the reader learns more and more about Lisa's past and the seminal childhood incident (occurring when she is 3-years-old and vacationing with her parents in Odessa) that estranged her from her mother, and more particularly, from her father. This provides the central motif of the novel as well as Lisa's Cassandra-like ability to see the future through her dreams and her imaginative powers.
The novel also makes use of epistolary form with postcards from the fictional hotel guests included as part of the narrative.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

The form of the novel is startlingly original. Is the novel written as a piece of classical music in movements that expand and deepen its central theme? Why did Thomas write the novel in the way he did?
What do you feel about the ending of the novel? Is it meant to represent a real place or an emotional state?
Is Anna a metaphor for the collective madness that overtook Europe? Is her story more than the story of one person?
For an interesting online review:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/236067/challenges_to_our_understandings_and.html?cat=4

ABDULRAZAK GURNAH PARADISE

THE WRITER

Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of East Africa. He went to Britain as a student in 1968 and now teaches Literature at the University of Kent. He is Associate Editor of the literary journal Wasafiri (meaning ´travellers´ in Kiswahili).

His first three novels, Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988) and Dottie (1990), document the immigrant experience in contemporary Britain from different perspectives. His fourth novel, Paradise (1994), is set in colonial East Africa during the First World War and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Admiring Silence (1996) tells the story of a young man who leaves Zanzibar and emigrates to England where he marries and becomes a teacher. A return visit to his native country 20 years later profoundly affects his attitude towards both himself and his marriage. By the Sea (2001), is narrated by Saleh Omar, an elderly asylum-seeker living in an English seaside town.

Abdulrazak Gurnah lives in Brighton, East Sussex. His most recent novel is Desertion (2005), shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize.
In 2007 he edited The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie.

PARADISE

Paradise is at once the story of an African boy's coming of age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of traditional African patterns by European colonialism.
At twelve, Yusuf, the protagonist of this twentieth-century odyssey, is sold by his father to repay a debt and thrown into the complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa - a fascinating world in which Muslim Black Africans, Christian missionaries, and Indians from the subcontinent coexist in a fragile, subtle social hierarchy. Through the eyes of Yusuf, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. Then, just as Yusuf begins to comprehend the choices required of him, he and everyone around him must adjust to the new reality of European colonialism.
In his talks, Gurnah has emphasized how two of his major books--Paradise and Admiring Silence were written after traveling. Traveling, according to Gurnah, unlocks a kind of knowledge different from other kinds of knowledge. In Paradise, in which Gurnah wrote the ending first and then finally finished ten years (and one other novel) later, he wanted to understand what had been lost on the Swahili coast through colonialism, and how his parents' generation might have experienced it. This becomes especially pertinent to Gurnah as a Zanzibari because of the kinds of connections the Zanzibar Revolution celebrated (inter-African). The discourse consigned Zanzibar’s ‘Indian Ocean’ history (its ‘outside’ history) to forgetfulness and shame.

Gurnah, on the other hand, wants neither to celebrate the Omani presence in Zanzibar nor to set it aside, but to see it through the historical framework in which it emerged: the Indian Ocean. What was it like to be young at the end of the nineteenth/beginning of the twentieth century in East Africa? It was to be part of an Indian Ocean world. Gurnah's novel Paradise is a vivid work of historical imagination which is remarkable not only for its intimate portrait of coastal culture but for the silences it acknowledges--the characters on the caravan trail in the interior speak openly about the barbarism of those they encounter. The main character is a slave of a coastal merchant, and Gurnah writes about slavery on the coast with great subtlety.

Gurnah´s characters do not offer open resistance to their circumstances but are realistically shown negotiating with power in order to survive. Gurnah writes quietly, showing rather than telling, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about power and powerlessness, responsibility and blame.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

According to a website dedicated to African writers, ¨scholars of Kiswahili debate whether a novel like Paradise is properly an English or a Swahili novel, and this is high praise in its own way, because it shows the degree to which Gurnah is able to use English with the rhythm of Swahili, to transform English into something suiting the picture he is trying to paint.¨ Has Gurnah created his own language?
Gurna shows us child abandonment and exploitation and other consequences of poverty and exploitation. However he doesn´t try to persuade us of anything and his style is neutral. Is the novel all the more moving for its understatement? Or does the reader need to know who is responsible?

CATCHER IN THE RYE J.D. SALINGER

THE WRITER

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York, in 1919. His mother, Marie (née Jillich), was an Irish Catholic. His father, Sol Salinger was a Lithuanian Jew. Salinger's mother had changed her name to Miriam and passed as Jewish.
Salinger attended public schools on the West Side of Manhattan, then in 1932, the family moved to Park Avenue and was enrolled at a private school in Manhattan. There he was the manager of the fencing team, wrote for the school newspaper, and acted in some drama productions, showing ¨an innate talent for drama", though his father opposed the idea of J.D. becoming an actor When he was kicked out for bad grades, his parents enrolled him into Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1936. At Valley Forge, Salinger began writing stories and was the literary editor of the class yearbook. He started his freshman year at New York University in 1936 but soon dropped out. The same thing happened at Orsinus College. In 1939, Salinger attended a Columbia evening writing class by an editor of Story magazine. Burnett published several of stories Salinger wrote at the end of the course and went on to become his mentor.
The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to the The New Yorker, all of which were rejected. In December 1941, however, it finally accepted "Slight Rebellion off Madison", a Manhattan-set story about a disaffected teenager (Holden Caulfield) with "pre-war jitters" but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour rendered the story unpublishable and did not appear in the magazine until 1946.
He saw active combat after being drafted, after the Americans joined World War 11 and was also assigned to a counter intelligence division, where he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He later entered a newly liberated concentration camp and remained emotionally affected by the experience his whole life.
He also continued to submit stories to The New Yorker with no success until in 1948 he submitted ¨A perfect Day for Bananafish¨ which was immediately accepted: he went on to publish exclusively in The New Yorker.
By the late 1940s, Salinger had become an avid follower of Zen Buddism and in the early fifties an adherent of Ramakrishna's Hinduism, which advocated celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, and detachment from human responsibilities such as family.
In 1953, Nine Stories spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller list.[80] Already tightening his grip on publicity, though, Salinger refused to allow publishers of the collection to depict his characters in dust jacket illustrations, lest readers form preconceived notions of them.
As the notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye grew, Salinger gradually withdrew from public view. In 1953, he moved from New York to Cornish, New Hampshire and married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student. They had two children, Margaret and Matthew. After their marriage, J.D. and Claire were initiated into the path of Kriya Yoga.
Salinger also convinced Claire to drop out of college and live with him, only four months shy of graduation, a demand he would repeat in subsequent relationships with young women. Because of their isolated location and Salinger's proclivities, they hardly saw other people for long stretches of time. Claire was also frustrated by Salinger's ever-changing religious whims and their isolation from other people.
Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961, and Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963. On the dust jacket of Franny and Zooey, Salinger wrote, in reference to his interest in privacy: "It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years. He continued to publish stories related to the fictional Glass family and became a virtual recluse.
According to their daughter Margaret´s memoir, Salinger had isolated Claire from friends and relatives and made her"a virtual prisoner." Claire finally separated from him in September 1966; their divorce was finalized the following year. In 1972, at the age of 53, Salinger had a year-long relationship with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard, already an experienced writer for Seventeen
Upon learning in 1986 that the British writer, Ian Hamilton, intended to publish In Search of J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life (1935–65), a biography including letters Salinger had written to other authors and friends, Salinger sued to stop the book's publication. Paradoxically many of his private affairs then became public in the form of court transcripts.
In 1995, the Iranian director, Dariush Mehrjuir, released the film Pari, an unauthorized and loose adaptation of Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Though the film could be distributed legally in Iran since the country has no official copyright relations with the United States, Salinger had his lawyers block a planned screening of the film. Mehrjui called Salinger's action "bewildering," explaining that he saw his film as "a kind of cultural exchange."

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It deals with complex issues of identity, sexuality, belonging, connection, and the highs and lows of adolescence..
The majority of the novel takes place in December 1949. It begins with Holden Caulfield sharing encounters he has had with students and faculty of Pencey Prep in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. After being expelled from the college for poor grades, and an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up in the middle of the night and takes a train to New York. Not wanting to return to his family and instead checks into the dilapidated Edmont Hotel. There, he spends an evening dancing with three tourist girls and has a clumsy encounter with a young prostitute around his age named Sunny; after he tells her he just wants to talk, she becomes annoyed with him and leaves. However, he still pays her for her time. She demands more money than was originally agreed upon and when Holden refuses to pay he is beaten by her pimp, Maurice (despite her suggestion that he simply threaten the money out of Holden and leave).
Holden spends a total of three days in the city, characterized largely by drunkenness and loneliness. Eventually, he sneaks into his parents' apartment while they are away, to visit his younger sister, Phoebe, who is nearly the only person with whom he seems to be able to communicate. Phoebe views Holden as a hero, and she is naively unaware that Holden's view of her is virtually identical. Holden shares a fantasy he has been thinking about (based on a mishearing of Robert Burns' poem Comin' Through the Rye): he pictures himself as the sole guardian of numerous children running and playing in a huge rye field on the edge of a cliff. His job is to catch the children if they wander close to the brink; to be a "catcher in the rye".
point of view of its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, following his exact thought process (a writing style known as stream of consciousness). There is flow in the seemingly disjointed ideas and episodes; for example, as Holden sits in a chair in his dorm, minor events such as picking up a book or looking at a table, unfold into discussions about experiences. Critical reviews agree that the novel accurately reflected the teenage colloquial speech of the time.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

To what extent does Holden change or develop throughout the book? Is it true, as some critics have maintained, that Holden is the same person after that he was before?
Is the book for teenagers or does it have an adult audience?
Why has the book been one of the most taught and most ´challenged´ in North American schools?

WIDE SARGASSO SEA JEAN RHYS

WIDE SARGASSO SEA JEAN RHYS

THE WRITER

Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1890. Her mother, Minna Williams, was a third-generation Dominican Creole of Scottish ancestry and her father, William Rees Williams, a Welsh doctor.
Rhys was educated at a convent school and moved to England when she was 16 to live with an aunt. She attended a school for girls where she was mocked because of her accent and outsider status and spent two terms at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London in 1909. The instructors at RADA despaired of Rhys´ strong West Indian accent and advised her father to take her away. However, she refused to return to the Caribbean, as her parents wished, and survived as a chorus girl, adopting the names Vivienne, Emma or Ella Gray.
After her father died in 1910, Rhys drifted into the demimonde and eventually became the mistress of a wealthy, unmarried stockbroker. He broke off their affair after two years, though he continued to be an occasional source of financial help. Distraught both by the end of the affair and by the experience of a near-fatal abortion, Rhys began writing an account which later became the basis of her novel Voyage in the Dark.
In 1919 Rhys married the French-Dutch journalist, spy and songwriter Willem Johan Marie (Jean) Lenglet and lived in London, Paris and Vienna. In 1924 she met English writer Ford Madox Ford, who praised her "singular instinct for form" and encouraged and supported her to write. At that time her husband was in jail, leaving her virtually destitute. Rhys moved in with Ford and began an affair with him. Rhys finally divorced her husband in 1933 and later married an editor, Leslie Tilden-Smith and moved to Devon, England.
Voyage in the Dark was published in 1934, and Good Morning, Midnight, in 1939.
In the 1940s, Rhys ´disappeared´ and was widely believed to have died. In the 1960s she was traced to a small village in Devon, and found to be living in great penury with her third husband, and writing what would later become her most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea.
In a brief interview shortly before her death, Rhys questioned whether any novelist, not least herself, could ever be happy for any length of time. She said that: "If I could choose I would rather be happy than write ... If I could live my life all over again, and choose ... ¨
Rhys died in Exeter, England on May 14, 1979 before completing her autobiography. In 1979, the incomplete text appeared posthumously under the title Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.
WIDE SARGASSO SEA
The novel can be read as an ironic prequel to Charlotte Brönte´s classic 1847 novel Jane Eyre, recounting the story of the first Mrs. Rochester, Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, a white Creole heiress. Rhys takes the disparaged minor character and makes her the protagonist, telling a story that stands alone but which also works as a reframing of Jane Eyre.
The opening of the novel is set a short while after the 1834 emancipation of the slaves in Jamaica. The protagonist Antoinette conveys the story of her life from childhood to her arranged marriage to an unnamed Englishman. As the novel and their relationship develops, Antoinette, whom he renames Bertha, descends into madness.
The novel is split into three parts. Part One takes place in Coulibri, Jamaica and is narrated by Antoinette. She describes her childhood experiences such as her mother's mental instability and her learning disabled brother's tragic death, which foreshadow later developments in the novel.
Part Two alternates between the points of view of her husband and of Antoinette following their marriage and is set in Granbois, Dominica.
The shortest part, Part Three, is once again from the perspective of Antoinette, now known as Bertha, as she lives in the Rochester mansion, which she calls the "Great House".
Wide Sargasso Sea is usually taught as a postmodern and postcolonial response to Jane Eyre. Rhys uses multiple voices (Antoinette's, her husband's and Grace Poole's) to tell the story.

QUESTIONS TO ASK WHILE READING

How does Antoinette Cosway become Bertha, the madwoman in the attic?
How does the novel deal with postcolonial themes of displacement, exile and discrimination? Who or what does ´Bertha´ represent?
Rhys demonstrates that we all have different realities, depending on viewpoint and experience. Are there are other minor characters in fiction who you would like to see given a voice?

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER CARSON MC CULLERS

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER CARSON MC CULLERS

THE WRITER

Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. Her mother was the granddaughter of a plantation owner and a war hero on the Confederate side of the Civil War. Her father was a watchmaker and jeweller who gave her a typewriter for her 15th birthday. At this time, McCullers also contracted rheumatic fever and began to suffer from strokes.
In September 1934, McCullers left home, planning to study piano at Juilliard in New York but she lost the money set aside for her tuition. Instead she worked in menial jobs and studied creative writing with Texas writer, Dorothy Scarborough, at night classes at Columbia University and with Sylvia Chatfield Bates at New York University She decided to become a writer and published an autobiographical piece, Wunderkind, in Story magazine in 1936. It depicted a musical prodigy's failure and adolescent insecurity and also appears in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe collection.
From 1935 to 1937 she divided her time, as her studies and health dictated, between Columbus and New York and in September 1937 she married an ex-soldier and aspiring writer, Reeves McCullers. They moved to South Carolina, where she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. (The title, suggested by McCullers's editor, was taken from Fiona MacLeod´s poem "The Lonely Hunter.")
Altogether she published eight books. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Member of the Wedding (1946), are the best-known. The novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) also depicts loneliness and the pain of unrequited love.
McCullers and Reeves separated in 1940 and divorced in 1941 and she moved back to New York. In Brooklyn, she became a member of the art commune February House. Among her friends were the poet W.H. Auden, writers Paul and Jane Bowles, the composer Benjamin Britten and the burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Lee.
Her close friends during the post war years in Paris included Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. In 1945, McCullers remarried Reeves but this time the marriage ended in his suicide in Paris in 1947. By the following year, McCullers´ left side was entirely paralyzed by continuing strokes, although she continued to write.
She died in New York in 1967, after a brain haemorrhage, and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. Her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, was published in 1999.

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

Written in Charlotte, North Carolina, in houses on Central Avenue and East Boulevard, the novel centres on a deaf-mute man named John Singer who lives in a mill-town in Georgia during the Depression.
The struggles of four of John Singer's acquaintances make up the majority of the narrative: Mick Kelly, an adolescent tomboy who loves music and dreams of buying a piano; Jake Blount, a labour agitator; Biff Brannon, the observant owner of a diner; and Dr. Benedict Copeland, an idealistic and broken African- American doctor at odds with his family.
At the novel's core is the silent and mysterious Singer. Not only does Singer suffer from an often-misunderstood affliction, his demeanour and place in the social fabric of this intimate Georgia town speak of humanity itself. He is pensive, dignified, compassionate and caring and becomes the confidant of other people´s lost dreams.

Each of McCullers' characters grapples with something—adolescence, rage, insecurity, depression, prejudice or poverty –and the whole society is suffering from the upheavals of the 1930s. Through them, McCullers brings us face-to-face with our moral isolation. She reminds us that no matter how many people we are surrounded by, we are ultimately alone in our heart of hearts.
The book enjoyed a meteoric rise to the top of the bestseller lists in 1940 and was the first in a string of works by McCullers to give voice to the rejected, forgotten, mistreated and oppressed.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was filmed in 1968 with Alan Arkin in the lead role.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

"This book is literature. Because it is literature, when one puts it down it is not with a feeling of emptiness and despair (which an outline of the plot might suggest), but with a feeling of having been nourished by the truth.¨ May Sarton. Do you agree that the truths the book explores are nourishing? Or are they depressing?
The characters all struggle with a sense of isolation. How does McCullers depict loneliness in the book?
The book was viewed as anti-fascist when it came out. Do you see it as a political book, a religious book or neither?

EMMA JANE AUSTEN

THE WRITER

Jane Austen was born on December 16th, 1775, to the Reverend GeorgeAusten of the Steventon rectory and Cassandra Austen of the Leigh family. The seven Austen children grew up in an environment of open learning, creativity and dialogue in a close-knit family.
In 1783, Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to a boarding school for their formal education which included foreign languages (mainly French), music and dancing. Returning home, the rest of Austen´s education consisted of what her father and brothers could teach her and her own reading from the extensive vicarage library.
By 1787 Austen was writing collections consisting of stories and poems and by 1789, she had written the dark, satirical comedy Love and Freindship (sic), and began to take her writing seriously. She experimented with playwriting but abandoned this for Susan, a novel told in the epistolary format. By 1796 she had completed the work entitled Elinor and Marianne (later to become Sense and Sensibility).
In December of 1795, Austen met and fell in love with Tom Lefroy, a student studying in London to be a barrister. However his family intervened, viewing any possible engagement as impractical and sent Tom away.
Austen went on to write First Impression, the work we now know as Pride & Prejudice. The first draft was completed sometime in 1799 and Jane returned to work on Elinor and Marianne. She then began serious work on Susan, the work that would go on to become Northanger Abbey.
At the end of 1800 Austen's father George retired from the clergy, meaning the family had to move to Bath. Two years later, Austen accepted a proposal of marriage from a wealthy childhood friend, only to retract it the following day, realising that there was no real feeling on her side.
Sometime after the death of Austen´s father and a period of insecurity, the Austen women moved in with brother Frank who later offered them up a cottage on a nearby estate. Chawton Cottage allowed Austen to return to productive work. Her brother Henry, a banker, doubled as Jane's literary agent and approached London publisher Thomas Egerton with the manuscript for Sense & Sensibility which was published in 1811 to good reviews. Egerton then took the manuscript of Pride & Prejudice and published this second work for public consumption in January of 1813 to critical and public acclaim.
Mansfield Park quickly followed and Austen moved to a more well known London publisher, John Murray. Under Murray's watch, Emma, a second edition of Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published. Emma had great critical success.
At this time, the banking venture pursued by brother Henry failed, and along with it, the fortunes of brothers Edward, James and Frank. This left the Austen women - and family for that matter - in a precarious financial position. Jane continued writing, even more dedicated to complete a working first draft of Persuasion.
In the beginning of 1817 Austen was suffering from an unknown complaint, by April, she was confined to her bed and in July she died in Winchester. Henry worked to have his sister buried at the Winchester Cathedral.
Henry and Cassandra worked at getting Northanger Abbey and Persuasion published through Murray as a set collection. Within this work, however, Henry published a memoir of Austen herself, who until then had been nameless to the world.

EMMA

Emma is a novel about the dangers of misconstrued romance and of meddling in others´ personal lives. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Regency England; she also creates a lively 'comedy of manners´ among her characters.
Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like." In the very first sentence she introduces the title character as "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich."
Although convinced that she herself will never marry, and having no experience of love affairs, Emma Woodhouse, the twenty-year-old heroine, imagines herself qualified to determine the feelings of others. After self-declared success at matchmaking between her governess and Mr. Weston, a village widower, Emma takes it upon herself to find a good match for her beautiful new friend, Harriet Smith. Though Harriet’s parentage is unknown, Emma is convinced that Harriet deserves to be a gentleman’s wife and sets her friend’s sights on Mr. Elton, the village vicar. Meanwhile, Emma persuades Harriet to reject the proposal of Robert Martin, a well-to-do farmer for whom Harriet clearly has feelings.
Although soon proved hopelessly wrong, Emma continues to meddle – and continues to get things wrong, mistaking admiration for love and flirtation for serious intentions. Not only is she blind to an intrigue at the heart of the novel, she is unaware of the feelings of even the most straightforward and transparent characters. Most of all she is unaware of her own romantic feelings, until piqued by jealousy.
Throughout the novel Mr. Knightly, her brother in law and family friend, shows the insight into others´ feelings, motives and actions that Emma lacks and acts as a moral point of reference, urging discretion, empathy and moderation.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

Emma has been filmed and staged in many versions, such as the film Clueless and this year´s Aisha, a version set in the stylish upper class part of modern Delhi, produced by Slumdog Millionaire star Anil Kapoor. Are the love story and the class system in Emma timeless and universal?
To what extent do the protagonists need the jealousy provoked by other possible suitors to recognise they are in love with each other? Is it true that jealousy is a symptom of love?
How do you see the moral progress of the heroine?

HIS ILLEGAL SELF PETER CAREY

THE WRITER

Peter Carey was born in Victoria, Australia in 1943. His parents ran a General Motors car dealership. He attended a local State School from 1948 to 1953 and later boarded at Geelong Grammar School between 1954 and 1960. In 1961, Carey began a science degree at Monash University in Melbourne, but soon lost interest and in 1962 he began to work in advertising. He worked at various Melbourne advertising agencies between 1962 and 1967, where he met writers who introduced him to recent European and American fiction. Carey married his first wife, Leigh Weetman in 1964.
During this time, he read widely, particularly the works of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and William Faulkner, and began writing himself in 1964. By 1968, he had written novels entitled Contacts, The Futility Machine and Wog, as well as a short story collection. Several of these manuscripts were accepted by a publisher, but later rejected.
In the 60s, Carey travelled through the Middle East and Europe and settled for a while in London before returning to Sydney where he then wrote and published a number of short stories in magazines and newspapers such as Meanjin and Nation Review. Most of these were published in The Fat Man In History (1974). In 1974, he and Weetman divorced and he moved to Balmain in Sydney to work for Grey's Advertising Agency.
In 1976, Carey moved to Queensland and joined an 'alternative community' in Yandina, north of Brisbane. He would write for three weeks, then spend the fourth week working in Sydney. It was during this time that he wrote most of the stories collected in War Crimes, as well as Bliss, his first published novel. During the 1970s and 1980s, he lived with the painter, Margot Hutcheson.
In 1981, he moved to Bellingen in northern New South Wales. He married theatre director Alison Summers in 1985, and moved to New York in 1990/1991 with his wife and his son to teach creative writing at New York University (NYU). Carey and Alison Summers have since divorced and Carey now lives with the British-born publisher Frances Coady.
He has been awarded three honorary degrees and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Australian Academy of Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

HIS ILLEGAL SELF


His Illegal Self is set in the radical underground of late-sixties and early-seventies agitation with characters who find themselves politically trapped. In 1972, seven-year-old Che Selkirk, the son of radical parents he has never met, lives in isolated privilege with his well-to-do grandmother. Denied access to television and the news, he picks up scraps of information about his outlaw mother and father from a teenage neighbor who assures Che that his parents will come and "break you out of here."

When a young woman who calls herself Dial walks into Che's apartment one afternoon, he believes his mother has finally come back for him. Permitted to take the boy for an hour, she follows increasingly obscure commands from his mother, Susan, and “the Movement,” and ends up first in Philadelphia and then in California. Within two hours, Dial and Che are on the run as Che's kidnapping hits the news. Unexpected trouble strikes, and soon the boy and Dial, who doesn't know whether or, if so, how, to tell Che that she is only a messenger who was supposed to escort him to meet his mother, land in a hippie commune in the Australian outback.
Carey brilliantly combines vital colloquial language (frequently Australian vernacular), and poetic formality and uses free indirect style, or the bending of third-person narrative around the viewpoint of the character who is being described, to create the compelling voice of a child fugitive.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING
The novel has met with mixed reviews. Is it true that the narrative sags in the middle?
Carey specialises in oddball characters and those on the wrong side of the law or society in general. How does he make us identify with them so strongly?
What do you make of the voice of the central character?

What are you reading?

I´m making my way through Story - its tongue-twister subtitle is (I´ll just catch my breath) Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting - and it´s a fascinating read. If you´re interested in knowing why some films break your heart and others leave you cold - or even worse fidgeting until there´s a moment when you can decently leave the cinema - this book is for you.

Speaking of bailing out before the ship has even left the harbour, I didn´t get very far with All That Follows by Jim Grace, usually such an inventive and rewarding writer. Life´s too short, and certainly the summer is too short, to spend time with a sad jazz musician past his prime, bringing breakfast in bed to his disagreeable wife. ¨ Each day provides a further chance to love his wife and make love to his saxophone.¨ Jim! What were you thinking?

Likewise, David Mitchell´s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet left me (or I left it) underwhelmed. The friend who lent it to me admitted that he only really liked finding out all about the Dutch East Indies Company in Japan in 1799 and Mitchell has certainly done his homework. But that´s the problem. The endless exposition, every line stuffed with facts and learning, the writer´s research in fact, soon becomes distracting and tiresome. I much prefer the lighter touch and the inventiveness of Ghostwritten.

So I turn instead, time and time again, to Iconostasis of Anonymous Saints by the poet Yannis Ritsos which seems to me nothing short of astounding. Short titled pieces, full of observation, detail, reflection and imagination, make up a novel or a memoir or an autobiography. But as in the case of Colette or Fernando Pessoa, the Ariostos who observes and narrates both is and is not Ritsos. Ritsos/Ariostos blends the mundane and the sublime with perfect pitch and inspires this reader with a sense of wonder that outlasts the reading. The only thing I can even slightly compare this book to is Clarice Lispector´s Chronicles. After reading one of these pieces, which range from less than a page to three pages, I see with fresh vision, stepping out onto the street with a new awareness of the complexity of living, the constant balancing between the internal, thoughts and feelings, and the external, noticing a spent pale pink balloon nudging a car wheel, the exact wounded tone of a neighbour´s exclamation. In paying such close attention to his own life and the lives of those around him ( ¨Beyond their ordinary use, all objects have their secrets and their private lives: chairs, beds, glasses, knives and forks, sheets, towels, toothbrushes, combs.¨) Ritsos teaches us to pay attention to our own, moment by moment.

I see with delight that there are two more volumes to this series, but then, crestfallen, the words ´´ still to appear in English.´´ But quickly turning to the publication dates to check the first printing of this edition, I see 1996, what joy! There´s every chance that the subsequent volumes are now available.

I leave you with these lines from One Evening:

¨I peek through the opening between two houses. High up there, a tiny star is coughing, all shrivelled up next to a cloud. I think of the children, who weren´t given their favourite toy from the Christmas tree. Why so much repentance in the air, prior to the sin?¨¨

Happy reading and have a great Summer!

Summer reading...

Summer Books
Just what is a summer book, anyway? Does it have to be a big, fat, juicy page turner to earn the right to be packed away in the luggage (or downloaded on the e-reader) and taken along on vacation? We put that question to several book reviewers. After all, they make make their living reading books, so what do they take with them when they go on a road trip, fly overseas, or hunker down in the country?
John Freeman, editor of the literary magazine Granta, thinks our collective idea of summer reading may be too narrow. He likes to read all kinds of things when the weather gets warm. Big novels are great on the beach, but later, when sitting on the porch or settling down for the night, he'll pull out a more slender volume: essays perhaps, or even poetry. Salon book reviewer Laura Miller also reads essays in the summer, but she really loves a novel that carries her away to a far off place where she can get lost, even when she's not on vacation. And Slate reviewer Troy Patterson, who says he's more of a hammock reader than a beach reader, likes the extra time summer allows to linger over a book, reveling in the language as well as the plot. So here are a few of the books these three reviewers say will make for some good "summer reading" this year.
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Recommended By Laura Miller

Under Heaven
By Guy Gavriel Kay, hardcover, 592 pages, Roc Hardcover, list price: $26.95
Miller calls this epic adventure story "completely transporting." It is set in an imaginary country based on China during the Tang Dynasty, complete with a culture full of poetry, art and plenty of palace intrigue. The hero, a general's son, is given a gift of 250 perfect horses by a foreign princess. It's a gift with consequences as he gets caught up in the schemes of the emperor's favorite concubine, a legendary and cunning beauty. Miller says the book combines the best of historical and fantasy novels to create a great read where "you don't know what could happen next." (Read about Kay's hero, the soldier-slash-poet Tai, as he prepares for a new day — which he will spend burying casualties of war.)

The Good Son: A Novel
By Michael Gruber, hardcover, 400 pages, Henry Holt and Co., list price: $26
No summer reading list would be complete without an international thriller that takes you to exotic places. And this one, says Miller, combines a great plot with such wonderful writing that you don't feel like you "just ate a bag of potato chips" when you are finished. It's a smart thriller about a U.S. special forces solider raised in Pakistan whose mother gets kidnapped by militants in Afghanistan. He devises a way to trick the Army into rescuing her while she desperately bargains with her captors for the lives of her fellow hostages. Miller says the novel has lots of action and suspense but is also thought-provoking in its examination of the differences between modern Western culture and a tribal way of life. (Read the book's mysterious opening, in which our narrator is awakened in the middle of the night by a call from his mother — who, despite being under a fatwa, is about to jet off to Pakistan.)
Also recommended: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman. "A hilarious collection" of essays and travel stories about people who obsess about Russian novels. Miller says even if you can't get through a Russian novel, you'll find something to laugh about in this book.
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Recommended By John Freeman

Parrot And Olivier In America
By Peter Carey, hardcover, 400 pages, Knopf, list price: $26.95
This historical novel is based on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, famous for his 19th century study of American society, "Democracy in America." In Carey's fictional account, Olivier, the character based on de Tocqueville, comes to America with his companion, Parrot, a young English printer who has been in and out of prison. The story is told in both voices, and because they come from such different backgrounds they have very different impressions of America and its young democracy. As the two hit the road, argue and fall in love, they develop something of a "bro-mance." And though the novel is sophisticated and beautifully written, Freeman says it is also a page turner and quite simply "one of the best novels I've read in the last few years." (Read Olivier's witheringly arch description of his childhood home and his beloved, maddening, long-suffering mother.)

The Best Of It: New And Selected Poems
By Kay Ryan, hardcover, 288 pages, Grove Press, list price: $24
Summer, says Freeman, is not just about page turners. He argues that novels are like the "big meal," whereas smaller books of poems or essays are more like palate cleansers. For those moments when you're looking for a book that you can pick up or put down when you want, he recommends this book of poetry by the nation's poet laureate, Kay Ryan. Freeman says Ryan has a "well-carpentered, deeply intelligent, plain-spoken American voice" that harks back to Robert Frost. (Read three wistful, poignant poems by Ryan about the passage of time, and the "dreamy wading feeling" of relief.)
Also recommended: For another "palate cleanser," Freeman recommends film director John Waters' book of essays, Role Models, which he says is very funny, sometimes dirty and "sort of like an intellectual autobiography through collage."
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Recommended By Troy Patterson

Hitch-22: A Memoir
By Christopher Hitchens, hardcover, 448 pages, Twelve Books, list price: $26.99
Hitchens, the acerbic pundit known for blistering attacks on his political and philosophical foes, shows a softer side in this memoir that Patterson says is more like "a great raconteur telling stories about his own life." Here, Patterson says, Hitchens is in "armchair," not "lectern," mode, and perhaps the best stories in the the book involve his longtime friends such as Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. In fact, Patterson says the book emerges as something of a tribute to friendship itself. (Here, Hitchens describes his mother, Yvonne. He writes, "It makes a great difference to have had, in early life, a passionate lady in one's own corner.")

The Pregnant Widow
By Martin Amis, hardcover, 384 pages, Knopf, list price: $26.95
Perhaps it's not surprising that Patterson would also like this novel by Hitchens' pal Martin Amis. Patterson calls Amis "the best living English-language prose stylist" and says he returns to form after some disappointing books in recent years. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of 20-year-old Keith Nearing, who is spending the summer of 1970 in Italy with two girls. An English major, Nearing is immersed in reading about old-fashioned notions like virtue just as as the sexual revolution of the '70s is getting under way. In the end, it proves to be "an erotically decisive summer" for Keith. (Four days into his summer in Italy, Keith describes the experience like "living in a painting ... with its cadmium reds, its cobalt sapphires, its strontian yellows." In this excerpt, he strolls through the streets, flanked by two young beauties, Lily and Scheherazade.)
Also recommended: Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney by Marion Meade. Though the publicity material describes this as a story of star-crossed lovers, Patterson says it is really "two life stories with a love story at the end," and each of the life stories is interesting in its own right.