LETSBuzz Book Club 8 October 2000
This was Gill's favourite read this month. It is an affectionate account
of growing up in a Welsh colliery village at the turn of the 19th century. The hero is a member of a big family in a close-knit society. There is much hardship. The book covers miners' strikes, the role of the church and how the local people deal with law breaking.
Doreen mentioned that, according to recent newspaper articles, the author is not as genuine as was once believed.
Gill
Gill said this was quite good, but a bleak book. It is set in the Second
World War, in the suburbs of London. Everyone is alone, everyone lives within the rules of the boarding house where they live. The dialogue is well written but there is no humour.
Gill
(José Saramago is a Portuguese author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998)
This story is set in 1936 in Lisbon with a background of the struggle bet
ween fascism and the monarchists. There are rain-sodden streets and floods. Gill could not relate to the main character: he longs for an aristocratic woman but sleeps with the chambermaid. The dialogue is written in a strange style that makes it difficult to tell who is speaking to whom, or whether it is just one person's thoughts. The book describes what it is like to be in a country that is not very important.
Gill
Shortlisted for 1999 Booker prize, this was a good, old-fashioned romp and Andrew really enjoyed it. The premise is that the main character discovers an undiscovered painting by Peter Breughel.
It is well written, humorous, learned, and cleverly paced - hurtling to disaster at the end.
Highly recommended.
Andrew
Andrew thought this book was rubbish. There was no narrative thread, the
scenes jumped about and it was the sort of book that "gives modern novels a bad name". The characters were unpleasant, if not ghastly. The childhood bits set in England were better, but the American journey was boring.
Andrew
This is a first person, possibly autobiographical novel. It is something
like Tales of the City, but does not work so well. It contains references to readings on the radio - presumably of Tales of the City. It is emotionally over-sentimental and judgmental in the area of sexual politics. It has an interesting plot though you never really find out what you want to know. The plot twists upon itself and appears to be deliberately contradictory.
Andrew
This was definitely not as good as Gavin thought it was when he first rea
d it many years ago. Kerouac worships his freedom, personified in his friend. But the friend is a liar and a coward. Women would regard this as a sexist book. The language is very "jazzy" and dated - some is just plain nonsense.
Gavin
Much admiration was earned by Gavin for having read such a big (900-page)
book. Gavin had taken it on holiday and had enjoyed much of it, though he said that the first 400 pages were a bit tedious in places. He appreciated the "modern" aspects of it - the self-referential asides and the parody, and felt that some was "Garp-like". Don Quixote never understands anything properly and there is much humour. Gavin particularly liked
the invention of a lie in order to explain the truth. Recommended.
Gavin
The poet's subject matter is herself, her family and the people she knows
. The poems are almost like reading a cryptic crossword. But the language is fine and she is an accurate user of words. Gavin read one poem, which was appreciated by the group.
Gavin
The book is set in the early 1960s and concerns a girl called Meena (poss
ibly not very different from Meera?) who is not a "good" girl. It is about what it is like to be a little girl (11 years old), getting things slightly wrong, and being puzzled. Meera lives with her family in a village outside Wolverhampton. Her best friend is a monster called Anita, but Meena's parents cannot bring themselves to forbid the friendship.
Meera's cousins, who her parents would like her to befriend, are very well behaved, but they are "framed" for something they didn't do. There is a mystery about the house across the street, which is resolved at the end, but too neatly and not believably for Carolyn. The book kept Carolyn entertained, and the first three-quarters she really enjoyed.
Carolyn
Doreen couldn't get involved in this book: she found it dreary. The dialogue was very difficult to follow. It was often someone talking to himself, and she couldn't understand what anyone was talking about. Doreen didn't finish this book.
Doreen
It was the story of several women telling the same story from their own p
oint of view. It revolved around a man, a poet, in France. It was set by the sea and contained lots of metaphors arising from the sea and such things as legends of mermaids. Doreen didn't really see the point of the narrative, but the writing was sensuous, describing food, textures, the sun on your face, shapes, and colours in great detail.
Doreen
Doreen found previous books by this author too "solid", but really loved this one. It concerns the returning home to his wife and child of a soldier from Burma at the end of the second world war. He tries to fit in, but finds it very difficult and there are multiple misunderstandings. She got very involved with the lives of the characters and the decisions they had to make. It is a plain, undecorated, truthful style: it has a good ending - a beautiful book.
Doreen
This is an historical novel set in Denmark during the reign of Christian
IV. The hero is an English lutenist who joins the King of Denmark's orchestra. It is a super story, very entertaining, a love story with interesting contrasting themes - love and lust, music and silence, warmth and cold. Highly recommended.
Doreen
Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen
This follows on from the author's other (well-liked) Florida novels. The same characters appear, and also a new, younger, eco-warrior who punishes the baddies, who do things like drop litter. It is enjoyable, but really very similar to the other stories - bad people do bad things and end up getting their just desserts, usually an appropriate and comic death.
Doreen
This is an unpublished account of Gavin's walk around England four years
ago. Doreen was struck by the regular appearance of Pauline (Gavin's wife and support team) - "just like the sun coming out". It was an interesting read just because of knowing Gavin and some of the places he and Doreen had visited.
Doreen
This is a popular history book, often seen in railway stations and airpor
t shops. Rory found this very interesting. It was based on the Julian Work Calendar, a small book written at Canterbury about 1020AD. The calendar describes what needed to be done in the fields and woods each month of the year and it included small drawings of the main activities, which were reproduced in the book. There was a fair amount of scholarship evident, but the book was meant to be entertaining. It made many interesting observations and tried to put right several misconceptions commonly held about the period in English history.
Rory
Rory felt that this was a fairly straightforward story about lost people
finding themselves, even though the style was to jump backwards and forwards chronologically at each new chapter. The story concerned two people who "disappeared" for a while. Both were damaged by fame and fortune in the media. The man likens his travelling as a hobo to Kerouac, but it's really just a waste of time. Susan Colgate (Miss Wyoming) had been directed by her overbearing mother into competing in teen pageants, and then becoming a TV soap star, with little acting talent. The story had some technology, but was not too "geeky" - it was really about people and relationships. Rory felt that it would probably be made into a film as it had all the necessary ingredients.
Rory
The frames have gone all funny - click to make it good.