September Meeting
September 4th, 2010
For our book club meeting on Wed 8th September, we read a selection from this year’s Booker longlist with a view to nominating our own shortlist for the Booker prize. We’ll post our shortlist here and see how it differs from the actual one. Will The Slap make it? See what our group members think of the various books. If you have read any of the longlist, we’d love to read your comments on these books and your reaction to the official Booker shortlist which will be announced on Tues 7th September.
The books longlisted are The Long Song by Andrea Levy, The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut, The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore, Room by Emma Donoghue, Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey, C by Tom McCarthy, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, February by Lisa Moore, Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, Trespass by Rose Tremain, The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas and The Stars In The Bright Sky by Alan Warner.
Posted in Book Club
[...] September Meeting Interesting approach here, Company Of Books are dealing with a selection the Booker nominated titles. Read more… [...]
February by Lisa Moore
Chose this because of Canadian connection. A very self-assured book but essentially one idea. Something has happened in the past and must be revisited over and over again for the protagonist to move forward and for healing. Some beautiful observations on time and grief and the horrible ordinaryness of despair. Not unlike The Gathering in some respects. As is, all time is suspended from the first page and we go backwards and around many times in time so that we can ultimately go forward. Perhaps just not beautiful enough to be a winner but a contender for the short list.
In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut
A book in three parts which do not have to be related but which feel so autobiographical that they clearly are. Part one is stylistically the most spare and the most accomplished as it gives the least away. The next two parts have more plot and more detail and rather perversely the content seems more ordinary the more detail one gets. Definitely a case of less is more. If it had kept its early promise I would say yes for the list but the third section irritated me hugely. Still has plenty of insight into human nature and the silences that create chasms between people. Touch of “only connect”. (cf Howard’s End) inertia, inability to engage.
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
A book about a very angry group of people, living in an emmigrant culture, coming from a strong macho tradition who clearly feel totally emasculated. As a consequence, violence and rage lie just under the surface and it takes a very small trigger, the slap, to release the uglyness that lies beneath. Because of this, much of what is described is ugly too and this makes for an uncomfortable read at times. It is not a bad book but it is really popular fiction and as such I don’t think it is the type of book that ought to make the list.
Trespass for the short list. I have started The Finkler Question, it is amusing so at the moment it is a maybe!
C by Tom McCarthy
How to describe this book? In keeping with the minimalist title let me merely say ‘Big’. Not in the literal sense, but thematically. It was a peculiar reading experience. I chose it because it didn’t appeal, so in some ways I was already in the position of having to be won over. At times I became frustrated; one is led in minute detail through certain scenes, the reason for this not always being apparent. At times too I wondered why I was bothering to journey along with a character who didn’t particularly interest me to any great extent. But I persisted, and the reason I persisted was that I had an increasing feeling that I was missing a lot of what this book is about. It was making me feel inadequate. When I got to the end everything fell into place. Or rather, I should say, my suspicions were confirmed: I had missed a lot; I was inadequate. My first instinct was to go back and start again. And ironically, perhaps this is exactly what the author intends. To say more would be to risk ruining the experience for others. Suffice it to say that C might not be to all tastes, but it’s what so many books today are not: a piece of writing that demands that the reader work, and offers plentiful reward in return.
I have just read Eileen Battersby’s review of C in last Saturday’s Irish Times. (I’m old-fashioned like that; I prefer to read the book before the reviews.) Her article is entitled ‘Hard to C the Point’. While I can sympathise, as indicated above, with this response, it seems that for Eileen Battersby the point never did become clear. Her constant argument is that the book is not funny. Unless the author has somewhere stated that it was his intention to write a funny book, then I don’t understand why anyone would expect it to be such. Likewise, unless McCarthy actually is Beckett, Bolano or Pynchon there is no reason why anyone should be disappointed to find that he is none of them, whatever his marketing department might promise.
I could make my way through the article arguing point by point, but one example will suffice. ‘Before Serge sets off on his final escapade he visits home, where he notices that his mother has aged: “She looks depleted, like a silkworm that’s secreted all it can.” Perhaps McCarthy meant to write “excreted”. It doesn’t really matter . . .’ writes Battersby. But it does matter. If the author has chosen any of his words with care – and unlike Battersby, I imagine that he has – then the word ‘secreted’ is one of them.
This is a book for the head, not the heart. It’s a mind game of sorts (‘a tease of a narrative’, as Battersby – correctly this time – describes it). Not everyone’s bag no doubt, but certainly not a ‘slap-happy, unoriginal historical yarn’.
For a considered review of the book the following is interesting:
http://theasylum.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/tom-mccarthy-c/
C is a book about perspectives, about connections, about realities, about matter. Having read it I appreciate its cover even more!
Of the thirteen books longlisted, our club read eleven. The remit was to read whichever book appealed out of the longlist to our members, some of whom read up to four books, with the average being two each. The books omitted were Andrea Levy’s The Long Song and Alan Warner’s The Stars In The Bright Sky. It says something about the wide ranging appeal of the Booker longlist that our club read so many of the books. However, it was interesting that neither the Levy nor Warner book appealed. “I wasn’t drawn to reading about slappers in Spain” commented one member.
There was a lot of discussion concerning Room, C and In A Strange Room. But perhaps the most passionate debate was over The Slap and its inclusion in the longlist. What type of book makes the Booker longlist? Is it dependent on the author’s style, substance, location, gender and/or race? The Slap, it was agreed, sat more in the popular fiction category than literary fiction. However, one member championed it and was dismayed that it didn’t make the shortlist.
The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore and Trespass by Rose Tremain were given special mention for the quality of their writing and engaging narratives, however Skippy Dies slightly disappointed, one member describing it as “Dead Poets Society meets Ross O’Carroll Kelly”.
Our chosen shortlist for the Booker:
Trespass by Rose Tremain
A Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut
C by Tom McCarthy
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
Room by Emma Donoghue
We’ve decided as a group to investigate further In A Strange Room for our next meeting, and some members of the club have vowed to tackle C…
Room
Today when Dark went I started to read Room. I’m at page twenty, that’s smaller than my age but the same as my fingers and toes all together. The book has three hundred and sixty one pages and I’m asking Baby Jesus to please make them go away or if he can’t do that magic to make them go fast. A fly is buzz buzz buzzing around here while I’m writing this on Computer and I might use Room to make him go splat splat splat and then it could be fun.
Welcome to the discussion Salamander. I take it you’re not convinced by Room. Would you have shortlisted it for the Booker?
Booker is TV, not real.
In that vein then are any literary prizes “real” or are they all about money and selling product? Nice for the author sure, but industry is the ultimate winner.
OK, it’s kind of a quirky idea and I get the whole ‘it won’t be so gruelling if it’s told through the imprisoned child’s point of view’ thing, but it’s really irritating to read and I’m not sure I can be bothered to struggle on with it. Is it a fresh viewpoint or is it a gimmick? I’m sure Oprah will one day tell us all.
Maybe the industry is the ultimate winner, but I suppose you could say that about most things these days. I once heard someone describing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as “life changing”. (?!) Maybe for the end-user it doesn’t matter what the motivation behind the the product is if they feel they get something worthwhile out of it.
Hi peeps – we all obviously have nothing else to do on a rainy Saturday. At last a book that I got read. I thought it was brilliant and not at all irritating. It was gas to hear the writer saying on the radio that she rolled her own kid up in a carpet when she was writing that bit of the book. Maybe they’ll make a film, though I’m not sure how you could do that properly.
Someone mention the industry?
I know, but they seem to make everything into films or telly these days.
That’s entertainment! (Or was that a song…)
Went to see the Jennifer Johnston and John Banville events at the dlr Book Festival yesterday. Well, I say Jennifer Johnston. Eileen Battersby, who was interviewing her, was yet again bemoaning the exclusion of Skippy Dies from the Booker shortlist. It’s not there. Time to move on. However, back in the commercial world, sales of said volume have increased, in The Company Of Books at least, since her article on it appeared. Likewise, I imagine she has pretty much killed off sales of C. I find it alarming and depressing in equal measure that one voice can hold so much sway. What’s that line from Handel’s ‘Messiah’ – ‘O we, like sheep . . .’
Room
I have yet to start reading this. I’m not especially drawn to it, particularly since the word most customers have used in connection to it is ‘irritating’. There has also been mention of gaps in the internal logic of the piece. Two have assured me that it gets better after a hundred pages or so. One – a male – made a comment that I thought raised an interesting question. ‘I’m not a child person’, he said, ‘so I found it hard going’. The question is this (well, I have two questions actually):
1) Do you have to be a ‘child person’ to tolerate a 5-year-old voice for 300 pages?
2) Should you have to wait until a hundred pages into a prize-nominated book before it ‘picks up’?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by SCC English, TheCompanyofBooks. TheCompanyofBooks said: Two questions re. Room. Care to comment? http://bit.ly/cl0Q3Q [...]
1) Shouldn’t have to be.
2) No.
Did I say ‘Room’ was irritating? Apologies. That’s not entirely correct. It’s irritating, cynical and opportunistic. Oh, and coy. This kid knows the words ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ but seems unable to allude directly to his breastfeeding episodes. (Oops – was that meant to be a surprise? I don’t know when the direct shock of that was to be unleashed upon us as I haven’t managed to get beyond p.37.) Did I say that Oprah would eventually enlighten us as to the true worth of this book? Again apologies, that too may have been incorrect. The reference to the “red couch planet” on p.34 might point rather to Ellen. In any event, some chat show hostess will no doubt titter over the label with the author in due course. I suppose the publishers who forked out a million for this book are determined to get it back with huge interest, but why a bandwagon-hopping gimmick finds itself the favourite to win a prestigious literary award is beyond me. It almost makes me feel that ‘The Slap’ was hard done by not to get onto the short list. My answers to the two questions posed above by Anne are 1) Perhaps if the voice rang more true as a 5-year-old’s it would be easier to tolerate for a prolonged time, and 2) No book worth publication should take 100 pages to ‘pick up’.
Go, Salamander! I started reading it yesterday, and though I’ve progressed further than you have, I’m having to force myself. If it wasn’t for the fact that we’re selling the book and I like to know what I’m talking about, I wouldn’t carry on. The only thing I will say is that the opportunism you refer to (presumably the timing of the publication to coincide with the Booker circus, and the release of the Natasha Kampusch book) is more likely to be the publisher’s doing than the author’s.
Today I ended Room. I think Baby Jesus must be TV and not real because he didn’t make it go fast like I asked him to. It was all draggy and hundreds of hours and the same things were done and said over and over. Room says right , “Lots of world seems to be a repeat”.
I think the ladies and men who make the books into paper for money told the writer, her name is Emma like Ma but with a Em in front, not to let Room free until they saw a big truck going by that was called Bandwagon, and then to put Room on it to let it go free to anyone in Outside. And then it would jump off the truck and run up to some men and ladies and say please give me a big prize because I sound like a five years old person. (Except when I have to tell the adult talkings I can do it perfect because it was lucky that I played Parrot so much. Why I never learned to ask a question in a grammatically correct way if Parrot was so good?)
Tomorrow is Sunday and for Sundaytreat I’m going to read a book that has bigger ideas and more than one.
Just finished reading Room and I have to admit that I found it disappointing. It didn’t really pick up that much after 100 pages, and while I might not go as far as to say that it was jumping on a bandwagon, I certainly don’t think it lives up to the hype, which promises the most amazing reading experience since the invention of printing. It’s an interesting idea but I didn’t find myself particularly enlightened about either child psychology or any of the other potential issues arising. I say ‘potential’ deliberately. For me the book fails to grab several opportunities and seems content to sit back and rest on the (questionable) success of speaking in a 5-year-old voice for 300-odd pages. This, in fact, is the very reason it never develops beyond the initial premise. There are only so many avenues you can successfully explore when you use a 5-year-old as your guide. As such, it’s an ok book, not a book for all tastes, and certainly not great or amazing, or any of the superlatives flung at it by most reviewers. I wish Emma well, but I’m ultimately at a loss to know why this is on the shortlist for a distinguished award. My feeling is that it will win, precisely because it has got this far. It seems that this year, subject matter is sufficient to guarantee success in competition. Witness Nothing to Envy, which in spite of being poorly written won out against superior competition for the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, one can only assume because it dealt with a hitherto untapped subject. I’ll be interested to see how many of the people raving over Room will rush out to buy Natasha Kampusch’s real-life account of a similar situation. I suspect not many, lacking as that volume no doubt does the protective ‘cute factor’ of a 5-year-old narrator.
Room
By now you’re bound to have heard about Emma Donoghue’s latest offering, the Booker Prize 2010 shortlisted Room. The topical and controversial story is about a young boy, Jack, and his Ma, and their life in an eleven-by-eleven foot room that Jack has never left. Kept captive inside this room, Jack is under the impression that nothing exists outside of this small space, and that everything he sees on television, including trains, animals etc., is made-up. Then one day Ma admits that there is more to the world than their room.
Narrated by Jack all the way through, this book gives an impressive insight into the world of people you normally only hear about on the news. A five year old constantly telling the story, and not understanding things that as readers we instantly comprehend, is annoying at times- but as a whole Room tells a story most people will have never read before; giving the reader a clear perspective on how people who are kept captive in this way survive, and what can happen when they finally escape their prison. Reading about teaching Jack social manners that are normally ingrained in us from a very young age and about Ma’s struggle in a world she hasn’t been in for eight years are enlightening and sympathy inducing. Certainly, at 320 pages the book could use some editing, and the subject matter and narration won’t be to everyone’s taste but Room is definitely worth attempting to read, if only so you can boast you read it before it won the Booker Prize.
Thanks for the review, Beth. A customer confided to me this morning that “it was most disturbing book [she had] ever read”. It would seem that the child narrator for some adds a chill factor rather than a cute factor.
Just found this site – I will be a regular reader if not contributor. Love Salamander’s comments, made me laugh! I, however, did enjoy Room. While finding the five year old voice (and indeed aspects of the book) annoying at times, I did like him and felt that Emma Donoghue achieved exactly what she set out to write.
Hi Helen, welcome to our small but growing group. All contributions gratefully received. I was wondering what other aspects of the book you found annoying? I kept wanting to put the child in a corner and tell him to stop talking for a few minutes, which, of course, meant closing the book, which in turn meant prolonging the reading time . . .
What does Eileen Battersby say about “Room”?
In an ‘Irish Times’ article on 8 September Eileen Battersby said, “There is no doubt that Donoghue’s Room must emerge as a strong contender as one of two women on a shortlist of three historical novels. Room seethes with the fears, injustices and courage of victims who refuse to be beaten. It is inspiring.”
Though obviously not very.
Compare Declan Hughes, quoted in the same edition:
“Part childhood adventure story, part adult thriller, Room is above all the most vivid, radiant and beautiful expression of maternal love I have ever read. Emma Donoghue has stared into the abyss, honoured her sources and returned with the literary equivalent of a great Madonna and Child. This book will break your heart.”
The words ‘rampant’ and ‘hyperbole’ spring to mind.